If you’ve logged on to the Internet in the past few months, you are aware that social networking and social customer relationship management (CRM) technology is evolving—and rapidly. Companies are challenged with integrating these new developments into their current infrastructure, to remain abreast of new modes and rules of communication. Some of the use cases involve valuable, yet practical methods for employing social CRM.
Service and Support
Customers desire to have their concerns addressed immediately. An upset customer who has to wait 24 hours for a response may become very angry, especially if the response is not acceptable. Therefore, businesses must strive to provide efficient and personable service. Excellent service will lead to invaluable peer-to-peer advertisement.
Sales
Businesses may utilize services such as Hoovers, LinkedIn, and others to generate sales leads and build a solid customer network. Salespeople must maintain positive contacts with each person, within the network to ensure that requests made for introductions within the industry will be granted. Additionally, sales team members can utilize CRM applications to capture clients’ information, order requests, and log other conversations in order to improve interpersonal relations with customers. This information will also improve response times to clients’ requests.
Marketing
Social CRM applications may be employed in marketing as well. Information gathered from social marketing campaigns can be collected and analyzed by social CRM applications. This information assists businesses in determining if a particular marketing campaign is generating leads or converting to sales. Customizable CRM applications allow the salesperson or business owner to assess how the client was introduced to the company. Armed with this information, business owners can determine the most effective means of marketing. Business owners avoid wasting marketing dollars on campaigns that are not generating results. CRM consultants may assist business owners with developing a social CRM application that captures this particular type of information.
Collaboration
Social networking tools and social CRM also provide platforms where individuals may collaborate and share ideas and thoughts. LinkedIn and Twitter both lend themselves to sharing information, ideas, contacts and other pertinent information that may be useful in the business arena.
Innovation
Businesses must constantly seek new trends in application development and social networking. Using cloud computing to create innovative, tailored applications streamlines costs and provides the most efficient service to customers. Installation and maintenance costs are drastically reduced with the introduction of web-based CRM applications, and using social media in conjunction with CRM apps can help a company provides better service, handles more interactions, and does so with fewer agents. All of these, of course, increase revenue and lower costs.
Customer Experience
In order to provide each customer with VIP treatment, adequate social CRM applications must be deployed. Each customer service agent must be able to retrieve information about the client, his or her account, and previous conversations in order to provide seamless, responsive customer service. This can only be accomplished if effective social CRM applications are in place. Current CRM applications, integrated with Twitter and other social media platforms, can help customer service agents keep a personal log of each interaction, as well as metrics about the broader picture of the customer base. This allows each customer service agent, as well as each salesperson, to provide the client with VIP service each time.
Examples of Practical Social CRM Applications
Allowing customers or clients to interact with your brand through social networks can not only provide them with fast, efficient resolution of their unique problems—which is huge improvement over making them search through your FAQs or forums to find the answer they need, or worse, having them send an email that gets queued up for days before a response is issued—but it also gives the company a continually updated, real-time snapshot of how customers are using your product, and the troubles they are encountering.
Practical ApplicationTake Century Wines, a large liquor store located in a mid-size city. Recently one of their customers sent a tweet asking if they had a specific wine in stock. Although the liquor store did not carry that wine, they replied that they could check with their distributor. Other customers who followed Century Wines on Twitter also sent messages to the effect that they, too, would drink that wine if it were carried. Any guesses what Century Wines did next? Not only did their involvement with social media enable them to leverage more business, but it also gave them insight into customers’ habits.
A social CRM application can keep track of requests like this—from Twitter, email, telephone, in-store visits, Facebook or other avenues—and aggregate them with sales figures to determine which products sell, and which don’t. And what could be more useful than that?
