18 Uses for Social CRM
Last week Altimeter published a framework for Social CRM, providing 18 uses for what they call ‘the new rules of relationship management.’
One of the authors of this report, Jeremiah Owyang, writes in his blog post on the report that there are three main problems for companies:
1. “For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up.”
2. “Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social.”
3. “Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed.”
We know these problems all too well. They are problems with integration, the bottle neck of so many Social campaigns. Developing a strategy (or even looking at this document and getting some understanding) is not enough for successful use of Social Media. Which is why John Bell, MD of Ogilvy 360° Digital Influence, writes in his post on the subject, “I don’t think you can call a new solution ‘Social CRM’ until you are connecting new social data sources to the sales data of your customers. CRM is about operationalization and efficiency.”
This framework is certainly useful for clarifying where Social Communications will fit into an organisation, but if we combine Jeremiah’s points with John’s, most businesses will face the same issues:
How do I go about integrating this into my organisation?
If the company is a large one, then we are talking about having not just 10 or 20 staff members using Social Media, but hundreds. This requires a deep level of company integration which is not a fast process, and is still so new that it requires expert solutions.
If the organisation is smaller, it faces the issue of cost and time. Yes, they can see how they can be useful to their customers through the above means, but now they must determine which they can afford and whether or not it’s drain on their precious time resources will yield the return that they need.
Our Synergy Integration program is a 90 or 180 day approach to integrating Social CRM like the model above. We only focus on installing the main components that will provide the greatest value for your organisation and your end users.