Where Social CRM comes into play

Let’s face it.  While offering great service – and multiple delivery channels – is a foundation of customer loyalty, a company still has to gather intelligence about its activities in order to analyze its business and create its business strategy.

CRM solutions provide the starting point for companies to collect and analyze process-oriented information.  The thing is, though, the social media world is conversational so traditional CRM solutions may not meet the needs of service delivered through social channels.

Social CRM (or SCRM) solutions incorporate the conversational demands of social media with monitor and interconnecting tools.  Examples of conversational demands include:

• Wikis,
• Online discussions/forums,
• Blogs, and
• Social networks.

Additionally, examples of monitoringing and interconnecting tools include:

• Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud monitoring tools,
• Enhanced web monitoring solutions like those offered by a provider like Radian 6.
• Brand monitoring services,
• Cloud computing and
• APIs.

 

Summary

Customers are taking charge of the way they communicate with their vendors.  They still want “traditional” methods like phone, email, chat and self-service knowledge bases.  However, they also are demanding social media avenues of engagement.

The companies who understand that and take action to incorporate social media into their delivery channels will score higher wins than the companies that stick solely with tradition. 

Paul Greenberg captures it nicely:

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 SCRM business strategy needs to be built around collaboration and customer engagement, not traditional operational customer management.

Companies still need CRM solutions and should not make any apologies for it nor for finding cost-effective ways of providing their services. 

Incorporating Social CRM solutions allow companies to continue to gather, store and analyze information about their process-oriented business activities.  The social aspects of the solution then allow them to manage the conversational, monitoring, and interconnectivity demands as well.

Posted via email from Yellow Door Media