Using Social CRM to Engage With Your Customers

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 22, 2010

One of the biggest buzz words floating around organizations today is Social CRM. You don't have to look very hard to find an article that discusses what it is and how it differs from traditional CRM. But once you know what it is, what exactly can you do with it?

CRM

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a combination of processes and tools used by organizations to manage their interactions with customers and potential customers. One of the goals of CRM is to maintain and improve customer relationships. Another is to determine target customers for new marketing campaigns, which should help to develop qualified sales leads for the sales team.

There's typically a database involved that contains information about a customer, including the different interactions the organization has had with them from sales, to support, to marketing activities. It can also include interactions a customer has had with an organization's website such as filling out a form for a brochure.

There are any number of CRM systems available today including Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SiebelCRM, Microsoft Dynamics and SugarCRM.

vs Social CRM

While CRM is not going anywhere, there's rapidly becoming a new way for organizations to keep track of, and communicate with their customers and potential prospects. It's called Social CRM and as most will tell you, it's not a replacement for traditional CRM, it simply augments it.

There are so many new channels — ways — to communicate with our customers, and the social web has become a primary one. But where traditional CRM is more about operationalization, Social CRM is about relationships. People no longer talk to just to an organization about their products and services, they talk to other people across social networks, read blogs, comment on articles. They share their thoughts and opinions and get other people's, sometimes long before they ever communicate with an actual vendor.

As an organization, you need to be aware of these conversations and actively participate in them. That's where Social CRM comes in. Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang from the Altimeter Group have written a report called: Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. The report states that Social CRM is "the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation."

In the report they outline 18 use cases in seven categories for implementing Social CRM. Now you aren't going to implement all of these use cases, and some of them are more futuristic in that they require technology that either doesn't yet exist or is on the extreme bleeding edge. But there are foundations that you must start with if you are going to be successful. Here's a glance the list:

Altimeter Group's Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

The New Rules of Relationship Management

A few key points to keep in mind:

Customers connect with each other
The conversations are so vast and numerous that organizations cannot keep up with the channel
There is lack of a holistic approach to tying social in existing CRM and enterprise apps
Social CRM captures both official and unofficial customer conversations
Social CRM allows organizations to engage with customers in their preferred environment

One of the most important things to remember is that you don't implement Social CRM "just because". There needs to be some clearly defined business value. To start, you need to be actively listening.