Social CRM is a central concept that businesses need to understand deeply and integrate fully, in order to serve the social customer.
Who Is the Social Customer?
- The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook, favoring what her network has curated and surfaced as important information.
- The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts her social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
- The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in her social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets her needs at that particular moment.
- The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where she hangs out, listening to her feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
- The social customer expects you to listen and engage with her, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when she needs you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or she will either move on to a competitor, or tell her friends about her bad experiences.
- Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, she expects everyone she talks to from your company to have the same background on her issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.
Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn her trust.
What is Social CRM?
Paul Greenberg, and author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”
Another great definition was put forward by Michael Fauschette: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, we developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:
- Listen to customer conversations
- Analyze those conversations
- Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
- Act on those customer conversations
Jacob Morgan of Chess Media has developed this pretty comprehensive diagram that I like to refer to:
As mentioned above, I don’t necessarily agree that Social CRM is the best name for this kind of process because CRM has typically enabled one-way conversations with customers, with a disproportionate focus on technology. The name CRM stands for “customer relationship management,” which is a misnomer because the company no longer controls or manages the relationship –- the customer does.
In one of my favorite quotes about Social CRM, Mitch Lieberman states that “Social CRM is about bringing “me” [the social customer] into the ecosystem… It is not about the technology, it is about the people, process and cultural shifts necessary to support and grow a business.” This is a very important notion to understand in order to avoid coming down with a case of “analysis paralysis.” We all have a tendency to over complicate things, and while SCRM is a big concept that takes a lot of savvy and planning to get right, it’s really very simple at its core. Companies that successfully execute on the Social CRM process share the following characteristics:
— Social engagement must be enterprise-wide. To achieve this goal, you need to “socialize” the organization. The larger and more entrenched your organization is in traditional ways of handling customer interactions (inbound or outbound), the more difficult this task will be.
How do you socialize the organization? Through proper training, alignment of objectives (the quintessential question of “what’s in it for me?”), and providing leadership and mentoring. Marketers within your organization need to understand that a brand is no longer what you tell your customers it is –- it is now what they say it is. Make sure the salespeople know how to use Twitter to build relationships without spamming their networks. Empower customer service to help, and product teams to gather and act on feedback.
Overall, the toughest task of “socialization” is conveying the notion that the more the brand lets go of its desire to control the message, the more they will be able to shape it collaboratively with its customers. This is where a social media director/manager becomes a crucial hire, because she will provide direction for the entire organization.
— To truly provide a “mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment,” per Paul Greenberg, the organization must be irrevocably oriented towards transparency and customer service. Why are companies like Zappos so successful, while others’ attempts at helping on Twitter resemble a “me too” strategy? Because transparency, taking risks, and providing a “no-matter-what-it-takes” kind of service are part of their corporate DNA.
If you don’t have the guts to truly commit to transparency and service, and if you don’t empower your people to act on behalf of the company (which will inevitably lead to some unintentional mistakes), you won’t get very far. You must embrace experimentation, take smart risks, and “fail fast.”
— I can’t stress enough the importance of putting the right processes in place to truly listen and engage. Because the sheer volume of social media conversations is staggering, you need a plan to triage, prioritize and activate the right people in the organization to engage properly. After you socialize the organization, take the time to figure out who the right internal resources are in at least these areas of the organization: Customer service, PR, marketing, sales, and product feedback.
Develop a process by which a social media message gets routed to one of the above groups and activate the right resources for an immediate response. There must also be a robust crowdsourcing component, which will empower customers to provide direct product feedback, and the organization to ensure that the feedback is heard and acted upon (UserVoice is a terrific platform for this).
The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.
At the end of the day, you must ask yourself if the steps above help you enrich the two-way relationship between the social customer and your social business.
Use the Right Tools
Even though Social CRM is mostly about people and processes, you do need the right tools to help you achieve the following:
- A 360 degree view of the customer must include not only the relevant interactions between your company and the customer across the networks where they originated, but also internal data from your own CRM system. This data must be rich and actionable, and the system must also retain all these interactions as part of the customer record. This is a win for the customer because she gets a personalized experience and never has to tell her story to three different reps, and a win for the company which now becomes more efficient.
- The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.
- Sophisticated workflow tools will ensure that information created by the 360 degree view of the customer is accessible to everyone in the organization in the same way, creating a context for each interaction and enabling the rich, intimate relationship with the social customer. Each person involved with the customer record receives a set of prioritized tasks and reminders. The ability to engage right from the app creates a virtual paper trail of the conversation.
