I’ve had some time to stew over the developments that Web based CRM platform, Salesforce, has made with regard to introducing the ServiceCloud to solve real life problems. Rather, the problems that are posted on Twitter. Is this hype or are there powerful uses of melding Social Media and CRM together?
For ages, CRM has been the way of applying technology and customer segmentation strategies. Now — more than ever — CRM is evolving away from dry marketing lists into managing dynamic, live data. That is, CRM is finally catching up to customer demand and not just the marketers’.
Social Media in a few ways has threatened the current paces of CRM. Not in the ways of customer segmentation, instead; the ways customers engage with companies. Consumers use social media in ways that CRM neglects them. This is completely understandable — people need individualized help and not machines to listen.
(Remember that huge wave of support to offshore every line of service about five years ago? Well, it’s starting to bite back in the form of customer attrition. I suspect this is why there’s a strong desire to connect Social Media and CRM together.)
SalesForce and nearly all modern business professionals, tend to agree that customers are interacting in their personalized social circles and away from companies’ own self-service portals. This is an important concept to acknowledge; SalesForce only reinforced it by building a platform for their customers in their SaaS offering, ServiceCloud.
It appears Twitter has found their revenue stream (likely, licensed API access), one must retort with “Now, what?” From where I stand on the matter, it appears that SalesForce is tapping into the back-end of Twitter to be able to build conversation trends, buzz-tracking and even sentiment scoring. All these features deserve an applause and every company ought to be monitoring their brands as such. The ‘cloud’ also provides value by connecting support cases, feedback and even conversation tracking together, however there is something lost in translation. Personality.
Not many people associate CRM with “personality,” unless you consider the CRM Playaz podcast by Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary. Outside of this lighthearted podcast on the news and snark in CRM, customer service and marketing industries; CRM is a relatively stagnant topic. Conversely, social media isn’t frequently associated with “ROI,” but definitely registers highly on the excitement, buzz and feedback scales. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to be on the homepage of Digg? …Unless it’s about leaked customer service manuals.) For bad service, there’s nothing that CRM or Social Media can do for you except exposing bad practices.
So, this is where I’m going with my assessment — social CRM is very interesting, young and still difficult to measure. Data and quality of the interpretation is the core of having it work well for you.
Social CRM is useful to track trends from an enterprise perspective but realistically, the data is already there. You don’t need to plug it into a CRM application in order to listen or take action with customers.
Frank Eliason, pictured above, who manages the @ComcastCares Twitter account.
Let’s take for instance the holiest of Twitter examples, Comcast. Frank Eliason with @ComcastCares hasn’t needed CRM integration since their team first started listening to Twitter since April 2008 — instead, he just built a rock solid team of customer support professionals to reach out to upset customers and who are committed to delivering great service to those who needed it. Only recently, they have been “…working with [SalesForce], but aren’t using it yet,” said Frank in a direct message on Twitter. His team also uses a powerful social media brand monitoring service, Radian6, to turn poor experiences around, no matter where their customers are.
Another aspect to consider with Social CRM integration is the privacy and security of customers. A host of additional security, consumer-minded safety and privacy practices need to developed in order to meet the balance of regulatory guidelines and consumer expectations. Should customers share the last four of their SSN over Twitter? Should they even need to if it’s because of an error of the Company? These questions are better reserved for Chief Privacy Officers and consumer activists to debate. But again, where does CRM and social media fit into the picture? That remains to be seen, but it’s a valley that is soon filling with enterprise players … ones who are heavily regulated to protect consumer privacy. Social engineering is on the rise since pre-texting is inherently difficult to detect, so why not carry out this easy-to-prey phishing attack against unsuspecting support representatives?
Please don’t get me wrong; this data is incredibly useful and interesting. It’s only been in the past few years that companies can see this freely into their customer’s unadulterated minds. I contend that this privilege must be respected and cared for as if it was a million dollar focus group. Monitoring the sentiment and feedback of your business should be in qualified hands. You don’t win a battle through social media if you’re not listening and adapting your policies and practices from the internal memos all the way out to the marketing your prospects and customers interact with.
The bottom line is that brand monitoring is becoming more important as consumers take their experiences, good and bad, to the Web and not to their local media. CRM has also become very important so companies can narrow their marketing to smaller, personalized segments of their customers and prospects. Personally, I see these as two distinct operations in a business, but I see why someone would marry them together. Data is pretty cool, especially when it can be tied to sales, prospects and even competitive intelligence.
You heard my thoughts and opinions on Social CRM. I’m interested in what you’re thinking. Is Social CRM too impersonal, or is it the right combination to deliver better service to customers?
Posted In: Technology
