On the applications of social crm - introduction

So what is social crm? Essentially Social CRM is using social media, such as facebook, twitter and wikipedia to start conversations with customers, or join conversations that have been started by your customers. Social CRM has also been called CRM 2.0. CRM 2.0 is defined as:

CRM 2.0 is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.

on the crm 2.0 wiki

The keywords in the above definition are collaborative conversation, mutually benificial value and in a trusted & transparant business environment.

So Social CRM is not a replacement of traditional crm, but a new way of communicating with customers, through new media, and allows companies to join in conversations that customers have started about your company or your products / services. I've read through numerous blogpost and articles describing that Social CRM is a hype and that Social CRM will never replace existing CRM or Customer Experience Management processes. Of course it won't and it's not intended to replace them, it's just a new way of communicating. Mike Schneider posted the following insights on Social CRM on his blog:

The fact is that there are applications for Social Media across the enterprise. Look. Social (essentially) means communication. Media is a medium of conveyance. So Social Media is a fancy name for a communication tool. The organization needs to communicate in order to succeed. Your team or functional area does not need to be the Superfriends of Social Media, locking down the technology at the Halls of Social Media Justice. It is one thing to be a trail blazer and another to construct a fortress around the perimeter of a trail to ensure that no one else can even see the trail.

His comment also highlights that your company's social media efforts need not be driven from either a special department within your customer services department, or by the IT guys because they know all about social media. I think that incorporating social media as a communication tool for marketing, sales or service should become an integral part of your CRM strategy, if you are in the Business 2 consumer market.

In the coming weeks I hope to be able to devote some time to post on the different elements of social CRM or CRM 2.0: the collaborative conversation, mutually benificial value and trust & transparancy.

On social CRM II

One of my former colleagues at Deloitte, Fabio Cipriani, the author of the blog cooperativo, shared a presentation on slideshare about Social CRM, how it extends CRM 1.0 and what the potential benifits are. Definitely worth taking a look at.

Social CRM

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing strategy)

On the first steps of Social CRM

Traditional CRM is about gathering data and knowing all about your customer. Gaining insight into your customer and his or her behavior traditionally allows a company to better respond to it's customer needs, provide better quality service and generally leads to market succes. Over the last 10 years companies have invested in CRM systems for Sales, Marketing and Service and gather quite a lot of data on their customers and customer behavior. Much of this data has been put to good use, it is a lot easier to get high value services from the companies you do business with and companies or government insitutions are able to adapt quickly to the changing needs of their customers / consituents. 

Our behavior as consumers is changing however. They way we interact with companies, make decisions on which products to purchase has changed significantly since the late '90s. The usage of internet has risen dramatically, using social networking sites like facebook and myspace have become part of our daily routine and do we even remember how we used to find information before Google? When I recently bought a new LCD flat panel HD TV I did most of my research online (but I still bought it at a brick and mortar store). This changed behavior provides companies new possibilities to interact with (potential) customers. The number of possible touchpoints has greatly increased, if a company is able to capitalise on the wealth of opportunities today's Web 2.0 environment offers. 

Image courtesy of Brent Leary (http://www.brentleary.com)

Not only are consumers searching for information about your company or your products or services online, web 2.0, communities, blogs and other tools offer companies a wealth of information on your consumers as well. As the graph above indicates social media users believe that companies should engage the customer in a conversation on Social Media sites.  The challenge however is to use social media in a non intrusive way. No one wants to be 'friended' by a company on facebook, I however would like to have the opportunity to contact companies for service regarding their product online, possibly through branded communities. I would also applaud VRM like applications that would allow me to inform all the companies that I do business with of an address change online (perhaps through something as simple as Plaxo). Social Media also offers the possibility to research your clients and determine how to best serve or contact them. Using Social Media for CRM is far from mature, Oracle has started offering plugins for popular social media tools in it's Siebel CRM application and others are sure to follow. We are on the verge of a new development in CRM and we'll see loads of tools popping up that will allow companies and consumers alike to engage in mutually benificial conversations with each other. The future holds a lot of promise, let's see what will happen in 2009.