Introducing the social customer
We the customer have now evolved, we were never stupid, businesses just kept us that way. Social media powered by technology has enabled us to break free and provided us with a voice.
Previously businesses only managed the post-purchase relationship that was used largely for loyalty: to grow value of existing relationships (be that through spend or uptrading) or to reduce defection. Although designed to help drive conversion through the entire marketing cycle, It wasn’t as efficient to use pre-purchase in converting more leads to customers. In short, it had limited application to what was a largely linear process.
We have invested in ways not to engage with customers but keep the communication channels open through providing customer support centres, direct mail and e-mail newsletters.
Now that customers have access to social tools they are no longer just consumers they are also producers and can create video, blogs, use Twitter and connect with one another forming tribes.
Social shopping has brought immense change in how people short list, research and engage with products and services. We now have insight into what triggers and influences consideration and purchase actions and grow greater loyalty and value from it.
It’s not just purchase decisions that people are turning to digital for – they are increasingly turning to it when they have a customer service issue or complaint. If they cannot find the answer on your site they will turn to Google to seek out the problem and Twitter to bash the hell out of a company.
An example of the power of the social customer is Karl Havard’s experience with Aviva. In June 2009 Karl received a renewal notification for his motor insurance policy. Although Aleksandr the meerkat is very charming, Karl decided that for the sake of a few pounds he would stick with Aviva as he couldn’t be bothered with the hassle and all he needed to do was update his direct debit details - as Aleksandr would say ’simples’. So you would have thought!!
In Karl’s case to make a simple change to his direct debit bank details he was presented with a Mission Impossible. He found himself talking to voice recognition technology that had a hearing impediment; a call centre with people offering awkward silences and you have to check whether or not they are still there; 30 minutes plus of horrendous library hold music; and an online portal that presents him with “run time server errors” and when it did work….sent him back to the call centre. What is more interesting is that at this time Aviva’s marketing communications consisted of an ATL A-List celebrities focussed on individual care and attention!
So what did Karl do? Well he wrote a letter to the CEO of Aviva explaining the problem. That was not all, being digitally savvy he decided to share his bad experience by seeding this issue on his blog and embedded a copy of his letter within his post using slideshare for all to see. He also decided to tweet about this too and share his experience within customer service forums such as Plebble, customer communities and money saving expert. The result was that the letter on slideshare was picked up by Aviva and posted internally within their intranet, this then resulted in the issue being picked up by Sales and Marketing Director who personally contacted Karl to resolve the issue. The CEO of Aviva UK wrote a personal letter to Karl addressing the issue and many employees responded to his Twitter feed and blog post with comments to apologise. Furthermore the real damage is evident through searching ‘aviva customer service’ in google which now displays negative results that influence the contextual picture of the brand.
To respond to each customer as Aviva has done is definitely not cost effective. So how can we reduce cost, churn, develop new leads, maintain existing relationships using social media brand outposts and activities that may/may not be already in place?
This is where social CRM now can also play an important role…
Introducing social CRM
By definition, social CRM is understood as the integration of social media and CRM systems.
CRM in the social age becomes advantageous across the whole of marketing activity. It benefits from conversations prospective customers have through platforms and provides opportunities for authentic conversations.
CRM in the social age means building relationships much earlier in the traditional marketing cycle based on real-time value exchange with individuals and communities, converting more prospects to leads, more leads to customers.
It is vital to understand that social CRM should not exist as a silo but should be an integral part of social business.
If you want to be social you need to start with your customers and their conversations - simple.
I use Lithium as a great example of technology used to simplify this process by:
- Turning customers into problem solvers
- Sourcing new innovations and ideas from customers
- Generating word-of-mouth referrals from customers and generate support
I’ll provide you with some examples:
Promote - customers talking together about the products they want to buy on your site/community. The more enthusiastic customers are about your products and services the more you will sell. Reviews and recommendations are an example of this, and you can look to create a customer network around service.
Innovate - Intel connect this is a recent example. Apparently there are 15 billion devices connected to the internet of which Intel have a large share so they are looking for ways to best increase. This use of ideation is very similar to Starbucks and Dell Idea Storm but with Intel and they are looking to pay out for great ideas to get customers exchanging ideas on their behalf. If you’ve read Wikinomics, Don Tapscott provides more depth to the subject of crowd sourcing and co-creation.
Support - the most common use for social CRM. With traditional CRM it is very much focussed on internal processes. With social CRM it is focussed on external and social dynamics for example understanding user behaviour and why they would support users amongst the community for free.
Introducing the social business
Begin by building a vibrant customer community and then leverage the community to generate leads and ultimately transactions.
First step is to start off with social search engine optimisation looking for people based on what they search for, and social media monitoring to understand where to find people talking.
Look at Social SEO within the community as the more content you have within the community you need to ensure that it can easily be found through search.
Make sure that you build communities that dont exist in silos but that they can all collaborate and talk with one another.
Again great customer service starts with search. Your search within your site/community must return all results federated so that they do not have to search in multiple places.
With regard to management information, in practise you can monitor from a customer service point of view those problems asked, problems answered by existing content, resolved by community and resolved by agent. As the community evolves you should solve more problems with existing content thus increasing the return on investment.
To measure success of community you use metrics such as page views, posts, registrations, searches, new threads, accepted solutions, user sessions. Improvements can be made based on content, interaction, traffic, members and responsiveness.
The main question for marketers at the moment is how do I connect social web technologies to my own CRM? As social sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Communities scale in terms of positive network effects you cannot expect to have your employees watching this all this time.
You can use tools such as Lithium (I promise I’m not being paid by Lithium). They have technology that allows you to take a tweet and set it up as a thread within your own community to continue the conversation.
This technology taps into social behaviour aswWhen people use Twitter they want it to become a social response. A twitter user may not think that anyone is listening to their complaint, enquiry but instead they are alerted that their tweet is now visible and being listened to by a whole community so they should receive a response to their tweet.
You can then take that conversation which may be discussing purchasing a product or service and integrate it into your CRM system such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
In summary you need to integrate your social media strategy to your CRM strategy to become a social business. You can listen, leverage brand outposts, engage, create conversation, manage reputations and build social media community through the use of technologies and then link this to your CRM strategy.
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