Social CRM

Social CRM – What is it good for? Part 1.

December 5, 2011 By leighton Leave a Comment

“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. Its called Part 1 as we focus mainly on B2B here – B2C will be covered in Part 2.

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.

Filed Under: CRM News and Views Tagged With: SCRM, Social CRM

CRM Basics

January 7, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term for a variety of software solutions which aim to help a business:

learn more about customer needs and how they behave
develop stronger relationships with customers
to acquire more customers and to sell more to current customers
enhancing relationship with and retaining of customers

When buying a CRM system, there is usually a particular business problem that is being addressed – such as marketing, sales or customer service. The CRM system is designed to enhance and automate the business processes around customer relationships.

Download the free CRM checklist here and clarify the reasons you need CRM to ensure you find a successful solution.

Things to consider in a CRM solution

In addition there are other considerations such as what systems need to exchange data with the CRM system or whether the system is on-site or off-site. Other things that are important in selection a new system include the size of your business, whether the business is large or small, whether it will be used by a large number of people or a discrete group. You can consider buying an all encompassing solution called a suite or you can buy standalone systems to carry out specific functions. In the main small to medium businesses should consider suites whereas large businesses will consider suites and standalone solutions.

To find out more, based on your needs, you’ll find more information by following links below or via the tabs and menus above or by downloading our free CRM checklist.

Areas of CRM solutions

Marketing

CRM management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.

Sales
Functionality for sales planning and forecasting and the management of territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.

Service
More effectively manage service orders, contracts, complaints and returns, warranties, resource planning, e-service, and service analytics. Functionality to support call centres, field service, and e-service provides flexible delivery options.

Partner channel management
Improve processes for partner recruitment and management, communications, channel marketing and forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.

Call Centre

With CRM, a company can maximise customer loyalty, cut costs and boost revenue by transforming interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service. Effectively handle activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, human resources, IT support, and interaction center management.

Web channel enablement
Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with a fully integrated Web channel, including support for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics.

Analytics
CRM analytics are designed to provide you information as well as data from your CRM system. Analytics add-ons fall into a variety of types such as Business Intelligence, Reporting, Dashboards and Data Mining.

However, the key behind all these is the need to aggregate data in your CRM system to provide management information. This helps marketing people to design, target and run a marketing campaign, or helps a sales manager review his opportunity pipeline.

Mobile
CRM systems can extend their capability out to smartphones or notebooks with a communications capability. These are usually tailored for mobile ‘field’ staff such as sales people or technicians. They are designed to provide the core application functionality on a small screen. Typical applications are that a sales person can place an order or check product availability; a technician can run diagnostic checks or order spare parts.

Social CRM

Social CRM consists of tools that look into the social networking environment to understand how they affect your business, its reputation and what customers are saying about you. Products like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo are all tools that people connect, converse and communicate through. In the main they may talk about your business but that is not reflected in your customer systems. Social CRM tries to address this by extending traditional CRM platforms to capture this information. There are also a new breed of Social CRM platforms that focus only on capturing these elements and aggregating them.

Discover what basic features every CRM solution needs to help your business perform today!