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What is Social CRM and why it is important
"Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media for building trust and brand loyalty."
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Research has shown strong evidence that Social Media Engagement correlates to Financial Performance
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Engagement is more than just setting up a blog or Facebook profile and letting viewers post comments,
Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship
For its part, Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper and more engaging community-based relationship with your customers, instead of the traditional approach of managing them, in a very Cluetrain Manifesto way. Part online community, part crowdsourcing, part customer service, Social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance.
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Customers must be able to create an identity and perceive other customers, as well as individual workers, and be able to interact with both types of parties in a Social CRM environment.
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Social CRM Strategies for Sales
"VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”
VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”
Much of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. (And no, I’m not going to dive into the even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to sales). That’s up to each organization to decide – but unless sales and marketing are on the same page, there’s going to be trouble.
Clearly, the sales team is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like lead nurturing communities with lead scoring can help identify the buying interest before the sales team contacts the lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from marketing to sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold."
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Providing a social business process that facilitates the questioning and sharing of answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM for customer service come into play for this application. After all, you’re trying to efficiently share the expertise of your best subject matter experts – just as in customer service.
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Imagine a living social “RFP answering” community. What if you took every question that came with an RFP and put it into your online community as a question (along with the answer) and the ability for others to ask more deeply about the question, or even to answer and discuss?
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Would You Manage CRM with a Wiki?
"In the recent Gartner Social Software Hype Cycle, analyst Anthony Bradley introduced a new category, Activity-Specific Social Applications:
“As social software implementations mature, application patterns are evolving, and the software industry is responding with activity-centric social application offerings rather than with generic social software capability suites. Delivering a targeted social solution with a general purpose social tool (such as wikis and blogs) can involve significant development, configuration, and templating effort.”"
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Bradley has identified the next opportunity in enterprise social social software. Integrating the valuable characteristics of social software into the in-the-flow activities that make up our days.
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On Social CRM Options
"The discussion around Social CRM is entering a phase whereby we are trying to move away from turning around in circles about semantics, towards a more practical and pragmatic approach that businesses can identify with so as to consider implementing it. I won’t deal with CRM Vendors here, as Social CRM can be seen as an extension to CRM. As a primer on SCRM I suggest you look at Bill Band’s article on Customer Think. The main idea that we all do agree upon is that we need to become customer-centric in order to respond to their changing needs and expectations, and this may have some major ramifications on the way we organise our businesses."
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We have settled on the idea that we cannot manage what is being said about us (as long there is any Buzz we should be happy, right?). What we do need to do is understand what is being said and for which reasons
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Community and conversation is all - if the consumers trust the community, they will extend the trust to the brand
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Why Social CRM will never be built
Social CRM is not software. Remember, CRM, and therefore Social CRM, is an approach that takes into account people and processes and leverages software to accomplish outcomes. The people and the processes come first. Software, while critical to success, is always secondary.
Vendors that claim they deliver Social CRM are wrong. They are delivering software solutions, generally Social Support Community software, that is a core component of a Social CRM strategy.
Social CRM is a strategy. Building off of my last point. Software cannot build strategy. I know, one day machines will take over e world and I will be proven wrong. :-) Until that day comes I am right, it takes people to build a strategy that achieves corporate goals.
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Your Social CRM strategy must make use of tools that end-users (execs, sales, support, etc..) will use, not because they are forced to, because they add value to their lives.
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Your software must support the varied stages and workflows for all of your processes. When the software forces you to adjust processes due to it’s limitations, you have already lost.
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Social Support: Are Companies Teaching Customers To Yell At Their Friends?
Three Opportunities For Companies To Evolve Customer Support
This isn’t just about rise of social tools, in fact, customers have had bad experiences before. The difference? Their voices were just limited to those they could tell in physical proximity. Rather than think of this as a threat, companies should see this as three distinct opportunities:
What Social CRM means for the IT Department
Though the theme of today’s meeting is “Is Social CRM for Real?”, I suspect that many of the people at today’s meeting will actually be thinking “What exactly is Social CRM and what does it mean to me?” Of course this question has been asked and answered in a number of blog posts by various members of the SCRM community, but the perspective of the IT department has been largely ignored. So in preparation for today’s meeting I thought I’d take a pass at trying to explain what Social CRM means from an IT department perspective.
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From a business systems point of view, becoming a socially-driven business requires that you re-think and re-engineer your business systems and processes in order to take advantage of Web-based social tools, technologies, and concepts.
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With Enterprise 2.0 tools the asset being leveraged is employees. With Social CRM the asset being leveraged is the customer.
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The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” you should think about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept to help visualize this process—we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:
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Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented opportunity to hear what’s being said—both within your own customer community and throughout the broader Web through social monitoring tools
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Getting the word out is always high on the marketing agenda—Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing this. Word-of-mouth begins with your customers. It is important to make sure your marketing is delivering the right words to the right mouths;
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Introducing Our Seminal Series On Social CRM
Is Social CRM a true paradigm shift or just another channel like email, chat, KB, kiosks, and the like? If it’s just another channel, we can continue business as usual by simply adopting Social CRM without any major change in our strategy for engagement. However, if it’s a paradigm shift, we need to reevaluate our overall strategy. Understanding this distinction is critical in laying our plans to deal with the new social breed of customer.
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This is the era of the Social Web and all things 2.0. This is an era in which the very dynamics of the relationship between customers and their vendors have changed radically. Finally, the customer really is always right. Worse (from the vendor's perspective), that customer is now equipped with a mighty megaphone with which to tell everyone who is interested in hearing what they like or dislike about their customer experience. That's right, not just about the products, but about their whole experience:
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Finally, as Paul Greenberg has so eloquently put it, Social CRM is “the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”
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Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone
Salesforce launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?
Salesforce’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks a pre-determined way to identify the profiles of Twitter profiles and primary keys within the CRM database. Secondly, the system doesn’t provide a default setting to prioritize the influence (such as more followers) vs a profile with few followers –limiting the ability for brands to prioritize their support offerings.
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Despite Salesforce’s technical announcement, this doesn’t mean success for their customers. Technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change –key requirements that Salesforce is not equipped to provide.
Time to Put a Stake in the Ground on Social CRM
First, there seems to be a consensus on the definition already. We all agree on its general characteristics. We see it as the use of social and traditional CRM tools and processes to support a strategy of customer engagement. Or some permutation of that.
Second, there's too much other work on Social CRM to do. Its time to start figuring out and documenting the business models, policies, practices, processes, social characteristics, applications, and the methodologies that we need to actually carry it out. There is some great work going on in those Social CRM areas already with folks like Graham Hill, Denis Pombriant, Thomas Vander Wal, Brent Leary, Prem Kumar, Chris Carfi, Bill Band, Natalie Petouhoff, Mike Fauscette, Michael Maoz and Ray Wang, among others (please forgive me if I didn't mention you. There are many others). But we need to create a repository for all this work - and an institution that can represent it agnostically. Right now, the body of practice out there is all over the place. Even with this, the work on Social CRM's "how" needs a dramatic escalation now.
So, I'm providing one last aggregate look at what I see Social CRM to be. When the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light comes out, you'll see a lot of the what and how in that nearly 800 pages. This is the condensed - black hole condensed - version of that.
I hope that I'm reflecting the consensus. If not, I'm sure the discussion will go on. But as far as I go, I'm interested in the more substantive discussions on what we actually have to do - not how it differs from traditional CRM nor what we're talking about when it comes to "social" and whether or not we are going to call it CRM 2.0 or social CRM.
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What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM.
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SCRM differs from Enterprise 2.0 though is integrally related to it. Enterprise 2.0 is organized around increasing the productivity of the workforce in all that it does utilizing new collaborative tools to do so. It uses those tools to aggregate and organize information and systems. However, though different, Enterprise 2.0 is integrally related because part of that improvement in productivity increases the effectiveness of employee-customer interactions.
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Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn
The vague terms “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Social CRM” express a collaboration-centric view of business and work relationships that de-emphasizes traditional command and control boundaries in favor of engaging community.
Inside the enterprise, this philosophy promises the opportunity for workers to pool and share knowledge in exciting new ways, using technologies such as blogs and wikis. Similarly, Web-based software such as YouTube and Twitter let consumers band together, sometimes quite unexpectedly, to form massive, ad hoc influence groups.
These changes hold profound implications for the expression of IT-related problems, which become something quite different from the project-related failure we’ve come to know and love (or hate).
The Social C.R.M Iceberg
Greg Oxton from the Consortium for Service Innovation (CSI) shared with me a model for understanding how engaged enterprises really are:
* 1% of customer conversations are assimilated as organizational knowledge
* 9% of customer conversations touch the organization, but no learning occurs
* 90% of customer conversations never touch the organization
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But before you leap into reinventing your processes for transformative value, step back. You can't collaborate with your customers before you learn to collaborate with your employees. In the spectrum of risk taking, its best to deploy from the inside-out.
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Fundamentally, they only way we can find information is with each other, and with each other it can be knowledge. Search returns relevant results. Relevancy is good, it saves time. But it differs from answers. Information has no value until it informs a decision, and when it does, you can measure its value. Answers can come from your own judgment upon information, which is only truly possible with information in social context, but you should at least leverage the judgment of others.
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Humanizing the Employee, then the Customer
My CEO often says you can't collaborate with your customers until learn to collaborate within your company. This is where I think the humanizing begins. Without the right people, process/practice and technology within the edge of your organization, your edge will be jagged when building trust with customers.
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