Social CRM

What is Social CRM?

Question: CRM and Social Media can be used together to create Social CRM?

Businesses could be forgiven for treating the idea of "social CRM" with a certain amount of scepticism. It's sometimes hard to distinguish the hype around social media from the genuine value it can bring. But social CRM isn't a gimmick, and it doesn't ask businesses to "forget everything they know" or "reinvent a business".

Social CRM simply adds a social dimension to the way businesses think about their customers and the relationships with them.

Social CRM opens up a channel of communication that wasn't previously trackable, measurable, plannable or improvable. Adding the critical social media channel to an existing CRM system, combines everything already known about each customer, prospect and lead with new information about their social media activity. And when a customer chooses to contact a business via Twitter or Facebook, the conversation can be tracked and managed in as much detail as there would be for a telephone or email enquiry. This enables businesses to act faster, respond better and anticipate customers' needs.

Why does Social CRM matter?

Where is the audience?

It’s a familiar story: the marketing department is diligently creating and publishing tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos and more – all carefully crafted to make the most of each channel and designed to encourage sharing, retweeting and customer engagement. But the audience doesn’t come.

Meanwhile, customers are elsewhere on Facebook and Twitter, having conversations about a business – discussing, recommending or complaining about it and even trying desperately to talk them. But they’re not getting the answers they want.

As Craig Davis, of J Walter Thompson said "We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in."

What can be used to bridge the gap?

That’s where social CRM comes in. A customer relationship management platform that integrates social media gives access to the same level of insight associated with more traditional channels, plus the ability to use social tools for communicating internally. Social media communications can be monitored, tracked and benchmarked using familiar tools, dashboards and metrics.

With social CRM the customer can be placed right at the heart of an organisation by allowing them to use their preferred communication channel. Businesses can engage and respond to customers individually and in the way they choose, without compromising the ability to track and manage communications on a global scale. Thus providing, both a broad overview of a brand’s reach and a granular, detailed view of each customer interaction.

Customer service, marketing and sales all benefit from a more dynamic, complete picture of each individual customer, and can make use of social tools to communicate between themselves. Leading to a fall in the cost of delighting customers. Customers will see an organisation that listens to what they want and responds in a way that suits them, across multiple channels. Everybody wins.

Customer service that puts customers first

Customers come first

There’s no big secret to customer service on social media – rather, it’s an opportunity to get the basics right and provide excellent responses to customers in the way they choose. Telecoms provider BT says 40% of its customer feedback originates on Twitter, and its story is far from unique.

By tracking social interactions with customers using the same sophisticated tools used for other touchpoints, faster, more complete resolutions to customer service cases can be delivered from across a business – and that means happier customers.

But it’s not just about reacting. Using monitoring and tracking tools, social CRM can help identify and reward brand advocates and influencers, encouraging them to spread the word still further.

Click on the icons below to discover how two key business areas can benefit from using Social CRM:

Customer care

Customer care teams can use social CRM to:

Deliver customer support via the social media networks that customers are using;
Interact and engage with customers in real time;
Talk to each other so that customers get the best help;
Monitor social media for complaints and resolve issues quickly;
Find and reward brand advocates and customers who help others.

Social marketing tools

The combined promise of reduced cost and increased effectiveness is a heady one for any marketer. And while social CRM has a valuable role to play in customer services and sales, it can also revolutionise marketing effort. It can change understanding of brand reach and perception, while giving access to a raft of new information about customer behaviour and opinions. Social CRM can help deliver:

Greater exposure in the places where audiences spend their time;
Increased engagement and deeper relationships with customers;
Increased web traffic and conversions and higher search rankings;
High-quality inbound leads that turn into revenue faster;
More efficient marketing budgets with higher returns;
Faster marketing campaigns with better targeting.

Social CRM metrics: the big three

Alongside the benefits outlined above, most social media platforms will have their own versions of three key areas of measurement:

Traffic conversions from social media

Simple to measure and well understood
Beware of chasing traffic and overlooking conversion rates
Use conversion rates to target the best-performing platforms

Fans and followers

Remember that not all followers are active
Use social CRM to segment audience into follower types

Participation and sharing

Details vary from platform to platform
An effective measure of customer engagement
Often undervalued

A final thought

Some, like Facebook, will even provide their own analytics, and a social CRM system should integrate this data to show all business information in one place.

As Ian Lurie, President of Portent, said “Companies over-value followership and under-value participation. Yes, you can go out and buy 1000 followers. But if they all ignore you from that point on, they're worthless.”

Building the Business Case

Making the business case for social CRM

One of the strongest elements of the business case for social CRM is the integration of business functions it allows, with sales, marketing and customer support all able to cooperate in an infrastructure based on the individual customer. But each discipline can also expect to see its own benefits.

Click on the puzzle pieces below to discover more:

Sales – revenue and loyalty benefits

Sales teams can expect to see an improvement in retained and referred business, as customers become recommenders and advocates; and that leads to increased revenue. In a survey of Salesforce customers, 55% reported increased customer loyalty and 54% increased sales revenues.

Marketing – increased reach and visibility, lower costs

Marketers can use social CRM to increase reach and cut costs, while improving customer tracking and measurement. In a recent Social Media Examiner survey, 89% of respondents said social media increased their brand’s exposure, while nearly half reported that spending just 6 hours a week on social media activity reduced overall marketing costs.

Customer service – a virtuous circle of lower costs and higher satisfaction

By tracking and managing customer contacts across channels and business functions, customer service teams can deliver dramatically better service. 79% of Salesforce customers reported improved customer service, and 63% increased customer retention – demonstrating that social CRM delivers real commercial benefits.

Putting it into practice

Watch the video below to see how Burberry have used social CRM to improve their relationships with customers.

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