Oct 6, 2010
Social CRM – First Step
For years we all have witnessed the evolution of social networks for personal interactions to transform into business interactions. Traditional business marketing strategies are in a phase of accepting these new changes yet falling behind by eons when it comes to accepting social media as a game changer. My personal belief is that Future businesses will grow through medium of community sharing via Technical innovation combined with information flow among the social ecosystem. For those with a foresight, they know that social revolution is here to stay and it requires changes in business approach and its support techniques such as CRM.
So where to begin from. A great probability is your company is already in social space doing some tits and bits here and there and a CRM Strategy. But what most of such forays fail to survive a great length of time, and looses the sheen, since they fail to bring these two wheels roll in tandem as one service.
The Social CRM should be treated as a part of whole CRM Strategy. Many of the times, while concentrating on the social facet, the CRM is kept in the back drop as a standard tool. Following should help you to lay ground rules to move in this direction.
1. SWOT: First step should be analyzing your current or potential CRM service. We all know, not each and every CRM serves all the purposes and they are always a part of the organization whole strategy to manage customers. So acknowledge the strength of the CRM wrt to Social media.
2. Flexibility: Count in the factors such as flexibility to accomodate ever changing demands, business processes, long term need of the customer adaption.
3. Robustness: Social media differs from Traditional customer interaction. Where as traditional media are one way driven, social is 360 degree interaction b/w customer and the organization. The CRM should be robust enough to support these interactions real time else, it will be a discontinued customer experience if CRM can not leverage this.
4. Integration: Users can search on linkedin, leave feedback on facebook, point on twitter and the CRM focussing the data and source, can allow to respond back seamlessly from the CRM without having to go to individual source which might be tedious and unproductive at large volumes.
5. Ease of Use: Multiple Account handling is a topping on the cake when it comes to manage customers across the networks via many to many interactions.
If your CRM miss on any of these, you need to address these issues before taking a step forward in going with Social CRM.
In our coming articles, We will continue to focus on the holistic approach of picturing out the comprehensive social CRM solution to harness the vast potential of socialCRM for your organization.
