Today’s marketplace is witnessing radical changes in customer behaviour, business models and power equation between stakeholders. The Social Consumer wants the organizations to listen and respond promptly and provide satisfactory service treatment irrespective of the medium.
Companies are expected to provide a unified next-gen customer experience that seamlessly integrates all customer touch points and channels.Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. SCRM moves CRM from relationship to involvement. “The Curious case of Social CRM” The word ‘Nike’ appeared approx.
30,000 times on twitter in last week. ‘Toyota’ and ‘Ford’ each had 18000+ and 64000+ mentions on twitter respectively, in last 7 days. * 78% of tweets mentioned about ‘TCS’ had a positive sentiment.A few negative and rest neutral. As a marketer, what can you infer from it? Do you feel the need to listen and understand to what these tweets are? These can be appreciations, complaints, anger or may-be a wish to buy your products/services or may-be a positive or a negative review of yours.
Can you take relevant actions based on this information? ‘Your brand is not what you say but what they say’! This dictum clearly indicates a shift in the world order of branding that was earlier defined only by the sellers. Not anymore! Today the ‘they’- consumers, play a much bigger role in making a brand distinct or defunct.As the world shrinks technologically and our informational ecology expands through social media channels, every consumer has become a source of information and his/her information serves as a resource for another consumer in need of that valuable information. Social customer relationship management (SCRM) is a phrase used to describe the addition of a social element in traditional CRM processes. Brands talk to customers, collaborate with them to solve business problems. They empower customers through different ways and thus maintain more close relationship with the customers.
They engage customers for converting a compliant into a delight, a bad experience into a good one, finding prospects, sell / up sell/cross sell, maintain relations and reputation turn customers into advocates for CRM through new way. Social CRM vs. Traditional CRM Social CRM builds upon traditional CRM by leveraging a social element that enables a business to connect customer conversations and relationships from social networking sites. The connection points are typically blogs, social networking sites and comments of users about the products.
Traditional CRM has the motive to increase sales.They typically collect customer records and data from sales and purchase and try to analyse this information to maintain profitable customer relationship. Social CRM differs in the way to maintain customer relationship through engaging with customers at various touch points. One area where traditional CRM systems fall short is their inability to incorporate social network data about customers.
This is important because consumers frequently ask product-related questions, and share with friends and followers their product purchase intent, as well as their personal experience using products.This is where social CRM tools play a key role. They enable merchants to stay connected to customers using social channels, which can lead to increased sales and more satisfied customers. PR now has a very active role in social CRM (in fact, PR typically owns budgetary control and authority of social initiatives ahead of every other department).
In most organizations, PR departments manage the social presence of brands and handle the customer engagement. Why Social CRM is importantThe new Social Consumer behaves differently than earlier and is more careful about the brand engagement and brand image on social platforms. * Consumer Information and learns about breaking news through sites like twitter and Facebook * Learns about new products through social channels and networks * Is wise to unsolicited promotions and trusts only relevant information * Desires a conversation with the brand rather than one-way ad messages * Expects brands to be active in the same social media sites he/she hangs out in. Wants brands to engage and respond quickly As per the latest survey done by soshable.
com, when deciding to engage with brands via social media, users look for following things.This clearly shows what level of engagement is required with the consumers on social platform to build effective long term relationship. Applying the principles of social media to customer service allows tangible benefits to be obtained both by the organization and by its respondents in terms of * Stronger capacity to intercept and put to good use feedback for the improvement of the product/service available in any channel, including online ones * Cutting of support costs and improvement of satisfaction level allowing customer communities to share bottom-up solutions freely?Increase in speed of responding to customer requests and in the level of trust in the brand through a transparent exposure of the employees to the outside world. Reinforcement of the relationship between the organization and the consumer from the point of view of word of mouth, loyalty and bottom-up promotion.
Creation of retention opportunities, acquisition of new customers and cross-selling/upselling directly from the action of customer service operators. Social CRM Strategy for Businesses. Listen to your customers. Conduct studies to better understand what you customers want. You have to be present where the conversations are going on about your brand. Typical points are blogs, social networking sites and comments of users about the products on e-commerce websites.
Understand. The motive behind why customers purchase from you or your competitors needs to be understood. That gives you the key to unlocking continued success and enables you to continue to serve customers and stay on top of trends and innovation while allowing you to provide excellent service.If the music industry had realized long ago that the core motivation of its consumers was not to buy a silver disc, but to listen to music, the industry might have better evolved and sustained the digital revolution the way that Apple did with the iPod. Engage.
Embrace the idea that consumers are seeking information through various channels and engage with them; provide the information your customers are looking for at the right place and time. This might be in the form of blogs, product data, and how-to videos. Find engaging content on which your company is an authority and your customers will rely on you for that information, which will keep you in the minds of the consumers and they will share your information with others. To give a specific example, consider that Nokia is looking at launching a smart phone in a particular market similar to that of what Samsung launched a quarter ago.Social media conversations tracking through mining would be able to track all conversations related to the Samsung’s product - features that the consumers felt would have added value to their purchase and filter the negative attributes. This would act as input to Nokia, which in turn would add all the bells and whistles to the existing model before releasing it in the market.
Nokia precisely gets to offer what the customer wants and it is very likely that this product would be a winner. Popular Social CRM tools These days there are many Social CRM tools available in the market that make use of advanced technology to listen and understand the conversations of the consumers in real time basis and give detailed reports. 1. Batchbook by Batchblue – This is a great resource for smaller companies and helps them create strong customer relationships.It monitors the social web and tracks conversations and sentiment. Batchbook integrates directly with social media, so it lets you instantly post to Facebook and Twitter, even retweet or reply.
The tool also pulls in RSS feeds from blogs and connects to several mail services and applications. 2. Nible – This tool also helps organizations build stronger relationships with their customers through social and interactive sources. It centralizes points of contact and communication by merging information from Google, IMPA, Skype, and social channels together in one place. 3. OmniSocial by Mzinga – Software that accesses the 15,000+ communities that Mzinga supports worldwide.
OmniSocial is an enterprise class SaaS based software suite that allows companies to create, manage, and track social channels with knowledge and also incorporates sharing experiences. 4. Yammer – Connects employees, partners, and customers together through social networks and other collaboration channels. Conclusion Effectively taking advantage of social media channels to derive meaningful customer relationships requires new way of thinking from the organization’s perspective.
. It is imperative for enterprises to communicate, interact, transact, and serve customers across varied channels ranging from stores, call centres, web, social networks, mobiles, field service, kiosks, to interactive TV.
