What are the top reasons for integrating CRM with social media?

CRM can be defined as managing an organization's interactions with customers, partners, sales prospects, and other similar parties via sales, marketing, and customer service activities.

CRM technology can bring certain benefits to an organization:
- A consolidated platform under which the above business activities can be organized and automated
- Better data quality
- Global collaboration and visibility

Social media can also provide some benefits...
- Relatively inexpensive ways to reach a large audience
- Hold conversations and discussions with individual customers (for customer service, crowdsource ideas, or to gather insights)
...however with social media alone, it's difficult to track effectiveness and impact of social media campaigns and efforts.

Bringing social and CRM together, offers:
- Better tracking and measurement of social media efforts and how they impact business
- A wealth of data from social networks that, when integrated with CRM technology, lets teams access valuable info easily and take action quickly
- Since social channels are popular and ubiquitous, customers and prospects use them to learn and talk about products and services. Integrating social with CRM allows teams to be right there with customers and prospects
- Social media channels let sales, marketing, and customer service teams reach more people with less effort
- Conversations are the basis of social media. By integrating social channels with CRM, an organization can raise its awareness of these conversations (good and bad), be participatory and proactive in conversations, and have influence into how the conversation proceeds
- Integrating social internally to an organization supports increased adoption and engagement of CRM technology, real-time global coordination, and better targeted distribution of product and corporate information

Conversations by a brand or company which lead to prospective sale; increase in revenue or customer satisfaction must be documented. Social Media channels are the digital communications of the internet age and must be collected and qualified within organizations CRM. I have furnished a few reasons below on why is it so important to store and measure this data.

(a) Measure customer satisfaction/brand reception: Social conversations are the most unadulterated opinion a consumer has about a brand or a product. We all check reviews and ask suggestions in SM channels @Facebook, Twitter, Forums etc. Measuring customer data from Social Media channels for brand reception is like getting a satisfaction survey done without asking for one. If your satisfaction survey is linked to CRM, there is no reason why the Social Media data should not be.

(b) Digital Impressions/Earned Media: Traditional conversations are one-to-one but the digital conversations are one-to-many. On an average a resolution/ online comment or a social engagement from a top brand is viewed more than 500 times. Likes, Re tweets, Views etc. provided by most of the Social Media channels allow you to measure the earned media value if documented through your CRM.

(c) Measure increase in sales: An effective customer engagement has a direct and positive impact on brand sentiment, which drives sales for customers, both current and prospective.

(d)Measure Dollar Value of Engagements: Traditional contact center communications which are phone call based involve a cost like cost per call, per contact based, per minute, service based etc. Digital conversations are much cheaper and if done efficiently lead to lowering of costs incurred in contact centers. Identifying issues resolved through social media channels through CRM allows brands to measure the dollar figures associated with social channel engagements.

(e)Measure lead to sale: Top brands get tons of product inquiries through their social media channels (e.g. ford, dell, AT&T) regarding products, offerings, plans etc. Integrating these leads with CRM system allows tracking from product sale to support.

Sean said it... adding "social whatever" to "CRM" does not make Social CRM.

CRM is internally focused process, Social CRM is externally focused customer engagement around unstructured conversation. As customers and company representatives interact there is a gradual hardening of the conversation data as structure is layered on, which then provides the opportunity to onboard it to a customer record or case/incident/issue.

Social media constitutes signals the market is sending you and channels for engagement. While critical enablers it is important to recognize that these are enablers of a larger strategy, not the strategy itself.

The conventional sales process, first automated about 25 years ago, was find the contact, then do something to communicate. Social media turns this upside down: you're already communicating with someone, and now you're storing and/or looking for more information about him in your database.

Well, studies have shown that branding is the number priority of businesses using social media. It goes without saying that the overall customer experience could make or break your branding efforts ( especially online where one angry customer can trash a brand reputation in no time!)
That's why; incorporating CRM (which's all about enhancing customer's experience) into social media is no longer a "recommended" practice; It's a must!

You can view Social CRM as a strategic refresh internally of CRM, both in perspective and technology archictectures. The first wave of CRM went from rolodexes and phones to automation via Client Server, then Web Architectures - still with the focus on internal automation. As "Consumerization of IT" continues, the current legacy stack of CRM is decaying, still retaining the inward focus channel based organizational silos vs. multi-channel and cross unit.

No true customer centricity was ever truly achieved in large enterprise CRM as a result. The customer's increasing control over Sales, Service, and Marketing both exposes these gaps and creates the driver for change. There was a reason why companies dropped rolodexes in the first iteration for CRM solutions, but it was driven by internal automation needs, not external customer engagement needs. The new social drivers and modern integration architectures available today holds the promise of getting CRM right this time around.

Final point - Social Media does not = Social CRM.

Cheers,

Sean

Sean said it... adding "social whatever" to "CRM" does not make Social CRM.

CRM is internally focused process, Social CRM is externally focused customer engagement around unstructured conversation. As customers and company representatives interact there is a gradual hardening of the conversation data as structure is layered on, which then provides the opportunity to onboard it to a customer record or case/incident/issue.

Social media constitutes signals the market is sending you and channels for engagement. While critical enablers it is important to recognize that these are enablers of a larger strategy, not the strategy itself.

Think about it this way. Your customer who you've been marketing to for 3 years, who finally purchased your product last month, and who repeatedly called your customer service department last week (all information which should be captured in your CRM systems) - is now complaining on Facebook and Twitter to his/her friends and acquaintances about how lousy your service is, and how they will never do business with your company again (Social).

Do you need 'integration'? Of course you do.

It's that simple.

CRM is an eighties idea to replicate the business card file in software. It was designed around the idea that the buying process began with contacting a sales person to find out what was available.

That doesn't happen anymore. Now the sales process begins in the cloud, with an idea you've read about on the net, or heard from someone on social media.

That leads to a search and further social media activity as you seek to understand the concept and its relevance and opportunity for your particular application.

Then it leads to an internal process as you share the idea with colleagues, advisors etc. to decide whether there is a company benefit, how you make it happen and what human factors you need to take account of. Alongside this is a financial discussion as to cost and benefit.

By the end of this you have a costed project, with a shortlist of vendors, a budget, timeline, need and implementation plan. When that is agreed, then you go to the vendor you think most likely to make it happen.

Only then do you allow your details to go into their CRM.

So social is now core to the buying process. Within social media is the data CRM was originally designed to track and manage.

So social is core to your future prospecting efforts. Buyer intelligence is thus vital if you are to influence buyers processes.

Whether you need CRM or something different is more in question. Social CRM may be a Meatball Sundae.