Much has been written about social customer relationship management (SCRM), but what exactly is it? First and foremost, social CRM is still very much about CRM, which remains a strong business strategy to keep a company profitable with customer satisfaction and loyalty strategies. A good CRM solution will collate data to provide a holistic view of each customer, in real time.
That’s the traditional definition and companies continue to use CRM solutions to influence repeat business and up-sell to a more lucrative end result.
But given the social context of any business or marketing plan, can CRM really fall behind when it comes to digital engagement? Typically, the customer was not part of the CRM structure, except to look-up the relevant information needed. And that very often was accessed with minimal customer interaction. Today, the customer needs to be and wants to be involved and that’s when social CRM steps in.
Twitter and Facebook have already revealed themselves as excellent marketing and branding tools; so it seems like a natural progression that companies would dive right in and begin creating successful CRM applications around social media.
A few of them – Jive software, Oracle (Oracle Social CRM Applications), Pivotal Social CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com with Chatter – have successfully proven that it’s possible to build a CRM around social media habits. These tools comprise of a wide spectrum of easy to use options including activity feeds, micro-blogging, and conversations, all designed to let executives and employees share customer and industry information in real time.
So what’s the key defining difference between a social media channel and a SCRM?
Social media is great for building brand awareness and even for developing a certain customer interaction. There are plenty of examples of how it’s worked as a sales strategy. Social CRM however takes it one level further and actually allows a complete view of the customer – because it puts all of the important conversations in one place – who he is, what his purchasing habits are, what he cares about, or where he shops. And customers can find resources, connect with a company, and collaborate on answers.
A social CRM solution would also ideally allow executives to follow opportunities and use the information for better decision making.
With social media developing in leaps and bounds, the core question that arises is how much data should I collect and how can that be integrated into a social CRM solution without losing sight of the fact the customer remains centric to all actions?
As businesses’ continue to evolve in a social setting, there’s no doubt that social CRM will play a more well defined role in determining how customer service and eventually how company sales play out to the advantage of both the business and its customers.
