HP Enterprise Services is continuing its crusade to bring the contact center into the social enterprise with the launch of a new offering that aims to revamp a enterprise contact centers with a focus on helping agents communicate with customers in the bold new world of social media.

The new HP Transformation Services – Customer Engagement Management (CEM) services portfolio – incidentally, a name only a product manager could love – involves a team of HP social media specialists “parachuting” to a customer site, says Dennis DeGregor, Worldwide CRM Executive for HP.

Where most contact centers are “product-centric,” says DeGregor, with customers having the burden of going to the company and the siloed product support team.

But with HP’s help, DeGregor says, the contact center can take a more “customer-centric” viewpoint that lets agents use Facebook, Twitter e-mail, or whatever else to engage with customers on their own terms, bringing more customer satisfaction, faster time-to-support, more add-on service sales and overall happier users. DeGregor boasts that it’s bringing 21st century customer support to very 20th century facilities, namely the call center.

And what really sets this apart, DeGregor says, is that the team of crack HP social media commandoes work hard to create an integrated technology offering that combines HP’s technology portfolio with third-party CRM and other tools (including Apache Hadoop), offering what he says is a truly best-of-breed social media solution that goes beyond vendor boundaries to give exactly what is needed.

On an interesting side note, a major part of that HP technology portfolio is the heavy push for Autonomy and Vertica, the former of which, recently-installed HP CEO Meg Whitman has been trying to place in the spotlight and make a keystone of the venerable tech titan’s enterprise strategy.

HP Enterprise Services already offered social media outsourcing and analytics services, helping separate the wheat from the chaff in the social space. But with this solution, HP is actually helping build a social media practice within the enterprises own four walls – an important step as the Social Enterprise continues to take root.