Can you tell me stories about integrating social tools & traditional CRM?

Paul, One of the more powerful applications of social CRM is using LinkedIn (and other tools like Twitter for that matter) to identify prospects and customers that competitors are working with. This is a manual sales tactic used to generate new names for sales people to call on. Works like this:

1. Develop list of competitor sales people and locate their profiles in LinkedIn.
2. Look for names of prospects in "viewers of this profile also viewed" under these profiles.
3. Import prospect names into CRM application.

While it makes sense that salespeople will connect with their customers and prospects on social networking sites, the tactic does come with a significant risk that competitors will scrape those connections.

Hi Paul
We use Microsoft Dynamics CRM and have integration with Twitter and Facebook baked into our implementation. We post tweets through Dynamics CRM - record responses and have graphs that over all trend through the inbuilt graphs in the Social Media accelerator in Dynamics CRM.

We've found this to be very useful as we can tweet ahead of time especially when we are publishing press releases and want to time the release. The trending gives us visibility as to how each tweet or news item went. Hope this helps!

We have integrated InsideView with our CRM system (NetSuite) and the sales reps rave about it because it allows for them to easily identify key company organization changes, new connections, and other key activities all within our instance of NetSuite.

Rob

We have integrated social media into contact-centre solutions viz., Genesys (AlcaLu), where tweets/posts from various media is published, directed for further action to various Customer Service Execs.

Since I can’t speak to this from my organization’s perspective I’ll weave an anecdotal yarn based on clients I’ve worked with who are pursuing social CRM and impacting the traditional CRM framework, especially on the customer support front.

As background for those still becoming accustomed to the social CRM concept, the blending of these two CRM worlds is possible today because many of the major social channels (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn) supply published APIs that allow customers to get at the content posted within said site. Leveraging this open access to social chit chat all starts with an organization’s strategy for dealing with social CRM. Organizationally it needs to be clear that there’s a process to monitor, manage and respond to the content that exists within social sites. Typically an organization that does this well has identified resources who’s specific job (or specific task among many) is to monitor these social channels.

Today’s top-tier CRM solutions provide built in mechanisms to leverage these APIs so that designated internal support users can create searches (ad hoc and systematic) that troll the social sites for specific content based on phrases, terms, words, etc. If a match is made on the query parameters then information is typically retrieved and brought into the traditional CRM system in a specified queue, or flagged appropriately, so that it can be dealt with accordingly.

Not to belittle the process from here, but once a ticket/incident/case is brought into the traditional CRM, a ticket is a ticket is a ticket. Bad tickets can be responded to so that the issue is dealt with and closed out appropriately following existing support channels. And good tickets can be responded to proactively or however you’ve defined the process for supporting or rewarding your promoters. Some APIs even allow for direct posting back to the social site so that it’s obvious your organization is active and participating in the social ecosystem. And depending on the site, some may require more of a manual process to reach out to the customer.

The above explains a tightly integrated traditional to social CRM model. It’s also important to remember that the general social CRM strategy should support building out an online presence for your organization within the major social channels, such as having a Facebook page or Twitter account. This provides one place for your support team to review and manage customer comments rather than relying on technology to parse through the broader content spectrum. Regardless of the technology, the best social CRM tools are those strategies that have a defined process – understand what you’re trying to achieve and how to best fit that into your existing CRM approach.

Not an expert in this field but check out com-centrics they are good at this sought of thing