How Social CRM Improves the Customer Service Lifecycle

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Oct 19, 2010

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Even as social media and collaboration capabilities have become widely available in our private lives through tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Box.net, Twitter, Digg and so on, corporations have been somewhat slower to make these capabilities available to their employees. It would even be fair to say that while social media and collaboration capabilities are almost fully emerged for the average U.S. citizen, for the average U.S. corporate citizen these capabilities are still in the early stages of emergence.

But social media and collaboration tools for the enterprise are not emerging across all corporate functions at the same rate. One of the most rapidly emerging areas is social customer relationship management, or social CRM.

What is social CRM?

We’ve likely all witnessed the following on Facebook or Twitter: a disgruntled customer of a bank, for example, vents their frustration about poor customer service or bank error in their status update, something like, “#AcmeBank stuck me w 2 $35 ovrdrft chrgs 4 same chk – aghhhh!!! | #worstbankever #fail #fact”.

But what you may not realize is the sheer volume of customer feedback generated through social channels: simply search for the name of any big corporation on Twitter and you’ll quickly see the magnitude of this avenue of customer communication.

What you’ll probably also notice is that the communication is overwhelmingly one-way, from customer to business, with very little outbound communication from the affected businesses that directly addresses the growing volume of customer feedback (primarily negative) rushing at them through social channels. This is where social CRM can help.

Social CRM is the capability for an enterprise to manage the social media and collaboration driven aspects of the customer relationship. It includes a wide range of activities that will depend for the most part on the social media and collaboration footprint of the organization. But in general, the following are typical areas of concern for social CRM:

Networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc. — comments/postings by customers or about the organization (or both) on corporate sites as well as on sites not owned by the organization
Twitter — tweets mentioning the organization
Corporate blogs and discussion forums — comments on blog posts and discussion forums
Non-corporate blogs and discussion forums — postings and comments that mention the organization on blogs and discussion forums not owned by the organization

Social CRM, then, enables an organization to monitor these channels for communication relevant to the operation of its business (e.g., complaints, praise, suggestions, IP leaks) and take action accordingly (e.g., address the complaint, give thanks for the praise, pass suggestions into product development process, prosecute IP leaks).

Social CRM and the Customer Service Lifecycle

Now that we have a better idea of what social CRM is all about in general, let’s take a look at a tangible example of how an organization might inject social CRM capabilities into their business processes: the customer service lifecycle.

Figure 1 is an overview of how social CRM can extend established customer service processes into the social media space to provide enhanced customer service (in this example, it’s a retail bank, but the process would be the same for any industry). Let’s walk through the example in a bit more detail to see exactly how it might work.

Figure 2: Inbound Twitter Complaint

Figure 2 shows the first step in the social CRM enabled customer service process: a customer posts a negative comment about ACME Bank (in this case, to Twitter).