Social CRM: What’s the Hype?

Social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have shifted how individuals interact and communicate with each other. A simple Facebook post or a Twitter tweet can quickly reach a large group of people half a world away. To put some perspective on ‘large group’, according to Facebook, it alone has 250 million active users…and that number is growing. Quite an interconnected audience…which includes customers and potential customers. Those people all carry opinions, likes, dislikes, experiences and they have the capability to propagate those thoughts via an incredibly efficient channel to a wide audience.

Enter CRM. What use would a CRM system have for a social platform? The following two statements, I think, capture a decent holistic definition of that use:

“…a strategy and applications approach to harness the power of online branded customer communities, broader social networks, and traditional CRM systems. By bringing customers into your processes, your business can effectively multiply resources and reach by 100 times, 1000 times, and more. Your customers and advocates become your competitive advantage.” (Lithium – social CRM vendor)

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“Social CRM captures both the tools AND the processes around the tools to leverage crowdsourcing customer ideas, apply the wisdom of crowds to those ideas, create a public customer ecosystem, take the customer experience and communication to the time, place and method the customer prefers, increase customer intimacy and empowerment”. Michael Fauscette

A simpler way to look at it…a picture can be worth a thousand words:

It is interesting to note that a good portion of the social benefits (viral marketing | real time interactions about product(s) / service(s)) are derived not from the CRM systems and processes themselves, but rather from the social technologies and their users voluntary behavior.

How about a tangible example? The following demonstrates how Salesforce.com’s customer service functionality and Twitter interface to provide a real time customer service experience:

 

Some reading I have done regarding social CRM lends itself to the thinking that companies are treating the integration with social platforms as a fad. Specifically, they are reacting to the social platform hype by jumping on the social bandwagon and leveraging a social platform while not adopting the technology to the companies business processes. Sound familiar? As mentioned in earlier posts, thought / process / training need to be wrapped around a technology (regardless of the technology source / channel) in order for it to provide value to an organization. Technology is the enabler – not the answer. Thus, don’t fall for the hype. Have a plan for harnessing the social wave. Be clear on how to manage the ad hoc / unstructured nature of the social experience with the structured / process driven nature of your CRM system.

I close this post with a statement from Paul Greenberg (noted CRM author / speaker / blogger) that pertains to how social CRM should be perceived within an organization:

“The lesson for business, in terms of Social CRM, is that we are now at a point that the customers' expectations are so great and their demands so empowered that our social CRM business strategy needs to be built around collaboration and customer engagement, not traditional operational customer management.”