How we interact with our customers has changed a great deal over the last century and a half and is morphing even more rapidly than ever before.

Once upon a time, if your customers had an issue with your products or services, they would hop on their horse and gallop to the local store and speak to someone face to face. This very personal interaction would encourage the business to work closely with the customer to resolve the issue or face the possibility of that person telling the whole town how bad the store is.

Then along came the telephone and businesses had to establish call centers to stay connected to their patrons. The customers now had a choice - visit a physical location for help or just pick up the phone from the comfort of their own home. While this new era of options was a positive development overall, it gave some companies the option to hide from their customers behind a menu system and switchboard. They no longer had to look a customer in the eye and tell them that they couldn’t help them with their issue. However, the customer still had the option to tell their friends about their bad experience so the risk to the business of not assisting their customers was still relatively high. The only difference is that those conversations would happen one-to-one in person or during a phone chat so the risk of a lot of people finding out about poor service was relatively low.

In the 1990s, with the advent of email, companies had to make decisions if and how to address this new communications channel. Some were very proactive, and provided customer support for incoming emails almost immediately. Others decided to keep things status quo and did not include an email address on their websites until they were forced to. The reality was that customers were interested in communicating with companies this way and if one didn’t have the option, customers could easily take their business elsewhere. It is now expected that businesses will not only include an email address prominently on their websites, but that they will actually answer messages sent to them within a reasonable amount of time.

Which brings us to the world we currently live in, one where 12M people Tweet 27.3 million times every day and there are 350M unique users on Facebook. On these sites, customers are talking every day with their expansive friend bases about their experiences with products and services.

There really is nowhere for companies to hide anymore since customers are also sharing information directly with firms that have established a presence on social media sites. Just like when email became common and companies realized they needed to devote resources to that channel (just like they do with their stores and call centers), social media requires the same attention. Customers are going to be talking about you (positive and negative), whether you are on these sites or not, so it works to your advantage to engage in the conversation.

People are used to communicating on a daily basis using these sites so you can either be part of the discussion or allow them to control the messages about you. While social networks can be a double edged sword (sometimes you get great feedback, other times you are skewered), it allows you to engage with customers where they live their online lives and helps you affect their experience and opinions about your brand.

You can often turn bad experiences into great anecdotes (see our previous entry on AT&T and the Success Story behind the Power of the Tweet) that are then shared across someone’s network just by listening and responding in a timely fashion.

Would you consider not having a toll-free number or email address for customers to contact you today when they have issues? Consider having support for social media channels in this same bucket - your competitors are communicating with current and potential customers on social networks and you will likely be viewed as behind the times if you are not an active supporter.

It’s definitely time to answer this call… tweet… status update… post… blog comment… review… note… and discussion - if you don’t, someone else will.

Tom Williams is VP, Client Services with KARMA Media Labs.