Social CRM - the next big thing?

In April 2009, Jeremiah Owyang and Forrester released their latest report, ‘Future of the Social Web‘, which illustrates how social networks and marketers will have to change their strategies going forward.

The report suggests that within approximately two years, social networks will be more powerful than corporate websites and CRM systems – this can be further defined as the ‘era of social commerce’. One significant finding that marketers should make sense of and start planning for is Social CRM.

What exactly is Social CRM?

The traditional CRM system assists an organisation by bringing together data from all areas of an organisation, giving a 360-degree view of a customer for marketing and sales to make informed decisions on cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. At the same time, this data can be used to shape marketing strategies and corporate communications.

Social CRM, on the other hand, is your existing CRM that has the ability to leverage the social web and automate the conversation process. The social CRM can be used by marketing and sales teams to listen to conversations, craft appropriate messages, join in immediately with customer conversation and offer them value in terms of information and solutions.

Social CRM has the ability to:

• Convert content to conversations therefore humanising a company so that customers regard the organisation as a trusted peer.
• Extend conversations into collaborative experiences, putting the customer at the core of a company’s strategy.
• Transform these experiences into meaningful relationships based upon real customer engagement.

When thinking in terms of ROI for setting up this system, the value is in developing relationships and long term loyalty that serve your business over time.   Social CRM will help generate marketing intelligence, providing the marketing department with insight that will assist your company to source better leads and reduce customer support costs through self-helping communities.

Adopting the Social CRM mindset

To begin with, marketers should dedicate time to working with brand advocates, involving them in shaping the product and communications. This is how social CRM is supposed to work; through the integration of customer social networks.

You should find that your existing customers belong to social networks and openly add more information to their profile than what you have in your traditional CRM system. Therefore you should think creatively of ways to integrate your customer’s networks into your current CRM.

If you think about it, a customer’s LinkedIn profile probably has more information than your CRM system would ever accommodate. A LinkedIn profile for example, would feature education, awards, associated groups customers identify with, furthermore their personal/company blog and Twitter feed can be fed into their profile. Most important is that you have sight of their entire business social network, including colleagues, suppliers and partners.

Now is the time to give some thought on how to connect social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter to your existing CRM and look to share information in a two-way manner. At the same time, it is important to be mindful that your customers should be able to control what information is shared with you, as social media best practice is all about giving customer control over the dialogue.

Going forward

Marketers need to understand that social networks and communities will influence CRM; resulting in corporate sites and marketing communications being able to recognise social relationships and customers preferences and deliver customised experiences to them in real-time. We are still some distance from this scenario; however companies such as Appiro and Salesforce are already leading the way in Social CRM.

Earlier this year, Appiro developed a Facebook application that can easily be rebranded by marketers for campaign activity. This application can be distributed at the same time sharing information, recommending information to peers, and used for other purposes such as recruiting, word of mouth, and other typical social network activities. As the information is shared, it can then be passed to a landing page where users can submit information in a web form that is stored on Salesforce.

Social CRM is both exciting and daunting, but by taking tiny steps to understand social media, and experimenting through integrating social tools into your CRM system now, then testing and improving, you will be very well prepared.

Tagged as: facebook, LinkedIn, Social CRM, Social Media, social networks, Twitter