By M. Isi Eromosele

On the Social Web, where the customer is now becoming an integral part of the sales process, CRM is being adapted to support this new role of the customer.

This new role of the customer, based in relationships and shared activities that play out on the Social Web, can be effectively understood and managed by borrowing some of the ideas and practices of traditional CRM and then weaving into them the essential social concepts of shared outcomes, influencer and expert identification and general treatment of the marketplace as a social community.

On the Social Web, participants form relationships for specific purposes: fun, discovery or other uses of collective knowledge to better accomplish their own goals. In the context of social business, the motivations include becoming smarter about a product or service as a customer.

The changing nature of the overall relationship between a business and its customers can be understood by following the conversations between the participants and the relationships between them. This conversation flows from the design of the products and services and their delivery into the marketplace to the conversations that form about them on the Social Web.

This provides a highly valuable window of insight into what your customers or stakeholders are really thinking, and what they are likely to do next. Social CRM, as it is being defined now, gives you a potential competitive advantage in both strategic planning and tactical response with regard to what is happening.

New Customer Influence

A potential customer reading a review is actually looking at the net result of a business process through the eyes of someone with an identifiable motive or point of view. If that motive or point of view can be understood, you can sort out the real business impact of the review (if any) and then apply this knowledge to your business and adjust as necessary your own business processes that are creating the experiences that drove that review.

In other words, knowing who is talking about you (and not just what they are saying) is fundamental to understanding and then optimizing your processes to produce the conversations you want and addressing and correcting the processes that drive the conversations you’d rather not see.

Social CRM is the emerging discipline that does just this. The social component draws on the interactions between people on relationship management and on the study of the life cycle of that relationship and its various trigger points.

More traditional customer relationship management (CRM) has to do with customers and the prior transactions between your customers and your business. What was purchased, what was sent back under warranty, which services were renewed or upgraded and by whom - all of the interactions and the data around customer transactions are captured in the systems that power the typical CRM installation.

Taken together, it’s an incredible source of sales insight based directly on past behaviors. CRM is a core best practice in most leading businesses and organizations as a result.

Social CRM is conceptually similar - data driven and operating on a feedback loop, but is extended across your entire business and wraps the entire customer experience, including external influencers.

An understanding of the present role of the customer in your business, along with the role of influencers and a resulting ability to connect with them just as with customers is what makes Social CRM so potentially powerful.

Social CRM is an approach to business that formally recognizes the role of the customer and external influencers as a key to understanding and managing conversations around the brand, product or service.

If the reference to conversations seems to narrow the definition, consider this: The conversation in the contemporary business context is nothing short of a holistic, digital artifact that captures and conveys the sum total of what your firm or organization has delivered. Marketing interactions are conversations.

Traditional CRM manages a customer relationship in a passive sense from the customer’s point of view. The attributes defining the relationship are all based on past transactional data - purchases, calls and other past-tense events. From the customer’s point of view, the events have happened and are done: there is no ongoing role for the individual as a customer.

By comparison, Social CRM invites the customer into your business or organization through the future-oriented process of collaboration. It recognizes what has happened, just as traditional CRM does, but then takes the added step of inviting the customer into the processes that govern what is about to happen or may potentially happen or should never happen again.

This kind of forward-looking collaboration involves the entire set of stakeholders in the business, including its employees, partners and suppliers. It is a whole-business, future-oriented process and it is core to an overall methodology and strategy that is designed and implemented to delight customers.

The product or service experience creates a conversation, one that is often directed or intended for a specific audience and which often exposes or suggests an opportunity for innovation. This is the new role of the customer, expressed through its impact via the traditional CRM process, integrated now with a social component.

The Social Interpretation

Just as you are able to track your communication with an existing customer through the relationship life cycle, you can track customers and other influencers through that same relationship as they create content and converse on the Social Web. This can be very enlightening and is really useful when pulled into the product design process.

Social CRM helps you understand and apply the significant points in the conversations happening around you. It helps you tie this information into your business, where you can use it to build relationships with influential customers and with influential bloggers, critics and others who follow your firm or track your business or industry.

You can apply this same discipline internally too and connect customers and external influencers to your employees to the Customer Service Manager, to brand managers and to others.

Once connected in this way, your customers and employees can bond further, moving toward collaboration. It’s collaboration that drives customer centric product and service innovation and collaboration that leads to the highest forms of engagement with your customers.

Social CRM tracks specific profiles and contacts so it can be synched with existing customer data sets. You can begin to track what the people who matter to you, your current and prior customers are saying about your product or service or about your brand, firm or organization in the context of actual purchases and experiences.

You can use this same process to bring other influencers, bloggers, for example who may not be customers into the Social CRM pool as well. All of this adds up to information you can use to drive change and innovation.

Social CRM fits into an organization’s intelligence and relationship management program and it ties the response-driven foundation of traditional CRM to the Social Web’s customer-driven engagement process.

Social CRM literally ties your business into the influence path that is guiding the development of your markets by connecting you with the conversation makers.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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