by John Benson

Created on: November 27, 2009

Google Wave offers businesses the opportunity to radically rethink how company's and organisations have traditionally worked, and how they have approached customers and customer service.

While Google wave is generally thought of as a real time social networking tool; a way to chat with friends, share pictures and create new communities around conversations (creating waves), it also has some incredible implications for businesses.

The 'real time' nature of Wave, and its social focus, means that it is a tool with the potential to transform the relationship between businesses and their customers, as well as how businesses work internally. How we communicate with colleagues and work in our day to day lives could see a shift as great as the advent of the email.

What follows are some exemplary cases of how Google Wave might be employed within businesses, and demonstrating the possibilities it has for changing how businesses work and their relationships to us, the consumer.

Customer Service:

We are all, at one time or another, a customer with a large company or brand. It is also likely that at some point we will have a complaint or be unsatisfied about service, a product, or have a general complaint or customer service issue we wish to raise. Now imagine being able to communicate with that company in real time, join others that have a similar complaint, and invite a friend you know that had the same problem.

Google Wave can allow business to transform the way they deal with customer satisfaction and resolving customer complaints. At first glance it may appear contrary to the company's interests to use Google wave for this process, but the level of customer satisfaction and possible customer retention could be huge. Furthermore, using support 'robots' could mean that actual staff time and resources are kept to a minimum.

The robot, or actual company staff, can collect data from the Wave, access previous data from other Wave conversations and build up a deep and useful picture about the company's products and customers.

2. Project Collaboration:

Being able to have easy, streamlined and cohesive conversations is an essential part of project collaboration. If colleagues are distributed geographically, i.e. in different buildings, departments or even countries, the ability to communicate in real time, and incorporating images and documents could make these projects more successful and productive.

Google Wave's ability to play back conversations also allows new colleagues

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