(c) Can Stock PhotoThe research I conducted for a big consumer packaged goods company a couple years ago as part of the development of an all-employee social media training project produced some revealing data. A sizable majority of employees said they had been contacted via social media by a friend, family member or acquaintance with a question about the company. (Many employees list their employer in their profile, after all.) Nervous about crafting an original response, they preferred to share a link with the authoritative company position on the issue, but more often than not, they couldn’t find it.

This was especially true for lower-level staff, who often would not respond rather than risk saying the wrong thing.

If the inability to find the right answer plagues employees answering questions from their own social network, how much is the situation affecting employees who deal with customers and their questions on a routine basis? From the guy who hands you your burger and fries to the teller who helps you through a money transaction, there are countless numbers of employees who interact with the public, and they are often the target of the vast array of questions customers might have.

If they don’t have quick access to the answer, though, it’s more than an opportunity lost. It’s another nail in the coffin of customer dissatisfaction.

How bad is the situation? Nine out of 10 of these workers say they’d like to deliver the experience a customer wants, but they can’t. According to Yoshi Sasaki, general manager of Ricoh Company’s Business Services Center, ““In many cases, customer-facing employees are simply too preoccupied trying to find the right information and hampered by working with outdated systems to deliver a personalized, human-to-human experience.” That’s the result of a survey Ricoh commissioned from Forrester Consulting, which found that “gaps in supporting document processes waste time that could be spent personalizing the customer experience—a failure that imposes a significant opportunity cost on business.”

The report (which you can download here) blames the outdated technology available to employees, technology that’s generally inferior to what the customer is using. In other words, employees who can use social software to find the answer—the same kinds of software the customer is using—have an easier time responding quickly to those queries. These tools “make customer-facing workers more efficient and free up more time for them to provide the missing personalized service.” It’s also the point the McKinsey Global Institute made in its 2012 study that found productivity improves 20-25% when workers have access to social software: It takes them less time to find answers to questions and solutions to problems.

At the company where we developed social media training, the research results led the organization to contract with a library sciences professional to create a one-stop shop for answers to questions. The intranet web page is categorized by issue, with links to the authoritative statements of record, so regardless of what an associate is asked, she can find the official answer. (An aside: This is why I prefer customized training to off-the-shelf resources. We incorporated information about the new answer tool into the training, which ultimately had the effect of increasing the number of employees answering the questions their friends and family were asking.)

While a page with links is great for an employee answering a friend’s question on Facebook, it’s inadequate for someone working in customer service or product support, where thousands of questions zero in on nuances of every product and service. Ultimately, though, as we move into an era in which every employee is responsible for answering customer questions, quick and easy access to the best, most current answers will become a requirement.

For companies shrugging off the investment in these resources, continuing to make it hard for employees to get answers to customers is just asking the customer to do take their business elsewhere.