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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2012 Oseme Group
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