“Social CRM compliments an organisation’s investments in CRM by capturing the true, authentic and unstructured voice of the customer, enabling them to be customer-driven and not simply pay lip service to customer-centricity.”*
This post is an addendum to the Social CRM Guidebook and looks particularly at Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and communications.
Sales
Sales spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for meetings, profiling customers and gathering internal support for a sales campaign. Social CRM can help in a couple of areas:
- Social Sales Profiling – tools like LinkedIn can help a sales team target a company and the key target executives. This data can be imported into the Sales Force Automation (SFA) to expand on the transactional data. Salesforce.com has extended the model and can utilise both Jigsaw and Dun & Bradstreet through its Data.com products.
- Sales Prospecting – some powerful analytical tools within CRM systems can now help identify new sales prospects by looking at transactional and social data.
Marketing
Marketing has too many tools and new toys to play with and Social CRM is another. We’ll cover the customer service proposition below and focus on Social Lead Generation here:
- Social Lead Generation – the basic idea is that participating in online discussions, blogging, contributing and sharing you can establish credibility, start conversations and create leads. This when done well means getting as close to 1:1 marketing as we have ever been. Getting it wrong means that we broadcast/blast out our latest sales messages and never really get the close and tight relationships we want. Badly used, our Facebook, twitter or LinkedIn messages can be as impolite as a call centre call in the middle of dinner – and just a substitute channel.
Customer Service
Customer Service need not be just a cost to be managed, it can be used to create sales prospects and leads if done well:
- Social Service – larger companies such as phone companies and banks have started to deliver service outside their branch networks and call centres by ‘managing’ a social queue. Some small companies that are customer centric may also build out a service offering in this way. This is usually done via direct communications with support staff or by creating on-line ’self-help’ communities. Unfortunately, many companies are still to step on the first rung of the ladder.
Communications & Communities
Possibly because we can’t handle a 100 emails/day and still contribute to the business we see a change in way people communicate and is powered by Social CRM initiatives:
- Communities – communities can help customers to help themselves and others. SAP’s software developer network is one of the largest with nearly 2 million members who can participate. One way to utilise communities is to use them as a platform for innovation such as Australia’s Commonwealth Bank IdeaBank powered by Salesforece.com’s Ideas platform.
- Communications – all the new tools that are used in building communities and on consumer social platforms has exposed the chasm between personal tools and the ones rolled out by corporate IT. A new breed of internal crowd-source tools like Yammer and Salesforce Chatter lead are helping drive new ways to leverage the knowledge on the people in your business.
Thoughts? What do you agree with and where do you disagree?
* from The Customer Revolution Blog.
