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Social CRM Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for developing a social CRM strategy?
Please list, in detail, 3 tips that you would like to share with the Focus community on developing a social CRM strategy. High quality contributions will be included in an upcoming Focus report on Social CRM, and will receive significant promotion on the Focus network.
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6 Answers
Craig,
How about 5+5? I couldn't keep it to just 3.
There are some fundamentals at work regardless of the social element. It's important to recognize these fundamentals as the underlying framework for your strategy, and as Mike pointed out, not to view Social CRM as detached from the rest of organizational or customer strategy.
Social CRM: The 5 Fundamentals
(1) Understand who your customers are, what they value, who they interact with. Segmentation plays a key role here.
(2) Find out how they interact and set a plan to engage with them in the context of their preferred communication channel(s)
(3) Focus on communicating with them in a way that is relevant and helpful in assisting them to achieve their goals
(4) Present and/or create / co-create new products or services that help them accomplish (or do better) the jobs they are trying to do
(5) And finally, deepen the value of your relationship over time by repeating the cycle over and over again
These are the fundamentals of business and the core of a customer focused strategy. Nothing with the term Social in front of it changes any of this.
However, here are 5 ways your organization can leverage social technologies to accomplish the 5 fundamentals:
Social CRM: 5 Opportunities to capitalize on now
(1) Use Social Analytics and Social Network Analysis to better understand your customers and prospects (aggregate Demographic, Psychographic, and Socialgraphic data)
(2) Use Listening and Monitoring Tools to extend reach beyond where and how you’ve been able to listen and engage before (Add social as an additional interaction channel)
(3) Capitalize on first mover advantage by communicating in new and/or more relevant ways with your customers (align your business with emergent social technology and culture, and beat your competitors to the party)
(4) Utilize Internal Collaboration (Enterprise 2.0) and/or Community Platforms to streamline communications and/or product and service development functions
(5) Increase engagement with existing customers on new channels in a way for the world to watch and observe (Be everywhere your customers are – and enable them to share what they love (or don’t love) about you to their network(s)
1. Understand the business outcome your are trying to achieve
2. Determine how you will measure the outcome
3. Associate a value with that outcome
It's the same process you would use for the development of any strategy. We don't do CRM or Social CRM just because it's cool. And Social CRM certainly doesn't stand alone as a "strategy". If it is not incorporated into an outside-in, cross-functional process, it's worthless. In other words, don't let the PR or social media department try to drive your business.
1) Know your product; without knowing the product you are communicating about, promoting and attempting to sell it will be tough to capture the attention of potential and existing customers. What are the USPs? What direction is the product development heading in? What are the most used features currently?
2) Know your audience; what data have you already got about any existing customer base and what audience are you looking to target with any CRM activity?
3) Understand Social; this could be the channels, the tactical processes or anything in between. If you are creating a "social CRM strategy" then understanding what is at your disposal and how you can utilise it is a key part of the strategy development.
Cheers
The first tip is to try to understand what social CRM is and what it can do for your company. Yes, i know, no one wants to start (again) defining social, SCRM, etc, but if you think that SCRM means creating a Twitter account and a Facebook page, you need to go back to the drawing board. Also, are you going to use social media for sales, customer support, both?
Which brings me to tip number 2: plan before you do anything. If you start using social media, but then realize you don't have time for it, drop it for a couple of months, restart later, etc, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Make sure you follow the plan and re-design it every couple of months (depending on what you learn by putting it into practice).
My third tip is: be consistent. You don't need to send hundreds or tweets a day, nor follow or like thousands of people using all kind of tools that promise to make a social star out of you, but find a rhythm that's reasonable for you, that your audience is comfortable with and stick with it. Same for the content you publish - keep it relevant and succinct.
As you surely know already, all these need to be aligned with your sales strategy and your internal business processes. The best strategy will not give much results if there is no buy-in from your own people (if they decide not to contribute, they need at least to understand what's going on and why).
My three tips are really a reminder that you will need to include three key stakeholders in order for any social CRM strategy to be successful:
1. Marketing (and PR) - Social marketing teams should serve the audience in social CRM. their responsibility is to build community experiences and encourage productive conversations that achieve brand objectives. These communities can be built in Facebook and other social platforms or in the broader blogosphere and social media universe.
2. Customer Service / Consumer Relations - If marketing teams foster conversation, then customer service and consumer relations actually represent the brand voice in those conversations. Ignore CS/CR as an important stakeholder at your peril. There will be critical customer care issues that arise in social CRM and they will have the knowledge and compliance expertise to respond.
3. Product (or merchandising for retailers) - Product and merchandising teams are the ones who have the most to learn from Social CRM. Social channels will provide much more rapid and rich feedback from customers than any other listening channel. One of Social CRM's biggest value props is for R&D.
4. Sales (honorable mention) - For a B2B business, sales is the fourth critical stakeholder.
1) Define Objectives and Metrics, align with existing KPIs
2) Understand your customer's expectations and issues
3) Start small, plan scalability, pick the right platform
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