Social media is all the rage, and not just with the kids--we use these
networks to share information and, increasingly, to conduct business. We’ve
seen the statistics on the staggering growth of social networks, most
notably Twitter and Facebook. We are now beginning to realise the potential
when used correctly by businesses.
The most interesting aspect of social media isn’t the individual social
networks, but the evolving ecosystem engendered by their openness. This
results in unprecedented creativity for network integration, application
development, and content management for businesses. This is where customer
relationship management joins the story.
CRM has always promised the vision of managing customer interactions at the
right time, in the right place, and in the right style to maximise customer
value to the company. The tipping point of social media gives us the perfect
opportunity to revolutionize CRM and build true customer relationship
programs. Social media offers four of game-changing extensions to existing
CRM capabilities for the creation of truly unified customer experiences.
1. Listening
Customers are talking about your company, your products, and your
competitors. The information waiting to be harvested from social media
conversations is invaluable. Social media monitoring isn’t just about public
relations or periodic brand audits; it is about listening to what your
customers want. Listening to social media is an active process that
generates insights that should inform all of your activities: direct
marketing campaigns, Web site management, search marketing, offers and
promotions, call center scripts, and competitive intelligence.
2. Responding
Once you are listening, it will be abundantly clear that your customers are
using social media at this very moment. Buying behavior, or lack thereof,
will be the ultimate outcome of these sentiments, but by then it’s too late.
Social media gives CRM practitioners the ability to participate in these
conversations in real time and talk directly to the most engaged and active
customers and prospects. This involves using social networks for customer
service: proactively reaching out to customers who are having problems. It
means identifying and mediating potential problems before they explode in
the public consciousness or in the media. Finally, it means engaging with
influencers and the networks where customers are active to be a participant
in the story of your brand online.
3. Consolidated Customer and Prospect Profiles
The first two ways CRM intersects with social media is as a participant,
but now it’s time to starting using this information to address individual
customers and prospects to directly generate more business. The CRM system
already knows each customer’s promotional and transactional history, and
social media provides another facet of information about each individual. It
provides information on which social networks customers use, what they are
saying about you, what needs they have expressed, and what the sentiment of
their activities is. This expanded customer profile supports the development
of a more productive customer experience across all contact points. In B2B
CRM situations, it provides critical color for sales reps as they manage
customers through the sales cycle.
4. Self-Managed CRM
If enterprises can successfully engage Social Media as a component of their
CRM strategy, then customers and prospects should expect to self-manage
their participation in CRM in the future. These efforts have already started
as many organisations offer self-service portals and websites, but it is
going deeper as customer service reorganises into genuine communities where
the enterprise and customers collaborate. These activities will span
existing public social networks as well as enterprise-sponsored communities
where customers and partners opt in to participate.
These four capabilities are major changes to the CRM playbook. In the long
term, these will become seamless as social media becomes fully integrated in
CRM processes, data management, and execution at customer touch points. But
despite this inevitability and feelings of pressure to get on the social
media bandwagon, organisations need to carefully consider their approach to
bringing social media into the mix and determine what is appropriate based
on their own industry, CRM goals, and organisational maturity. Social Media
is a component of CRM that is still evolving--as are consumers’
expectations. Everyone is learning together on this journey; this is a
golden opportunity to make CRM everything it was intended to be.
Joe Stanhope
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