What Does a Social CRM Process Look Like?

By Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) Aug 31, 2010

6 comments

Social Customer Relationship Management (Social CRM or SCRM) can mean many things to many people and organizations. This post explores visually what a Social CRM process for organization can look like.

Social CRM has been quite the hot topic as of late. However, much of the discussion has been focused around ideas and what some would argue as “theory.” I’m not one to claim that I have all the answers or have a pile of case studies hanging around. However, I’m also the first to admit that I enjoy exploring what models and frameworks around Social CRM can look like, perhaps going a bit deeper into the topic by providing visuals.

Social CRM Process

One of the things we haven’t really been able to see is what a SCRM process or flow of information could look like. I’m not going to argue the definition of Social CRM but I’d like to get into more detail in terms of what I think the process actually needs to look like.

A little while ago Chess Media Group, in collaboration with Mitch Lieberman, developed the following image which I believe is a great starting point for visualizing Social CRM within an organization — a sort of Social CRM “map” if you will.

If you look at the image above you will see that information flows in the following way:

The community provides feedback via offline or online channels.
If the channel is online then it is monitored and picked up by a “listening” tool which then integrates with a CRM system to provide customer information. If the channel is offline then it goes directly into a CRM system.
The information collected is automatically routed to the proper person in the proper department (several vendors are in the process of working on this to make it happen, others have some form of this developed already).
Once the person receives the information they can decide how to respond which will either be a macro response (public) or a micro response (private), or both.
The response is funneled through business rules which will dictate how and where the response will take place.
The response is once again captured by the CRM system so that the record is complete.

A Starting Point

I don’t think this model is perfect, in fact I think it’s far from perfect. However, I believe this is a good starting point for organizations to look at and try to understand what their processes CAN look like.

Some organizations, for example, deal with multiple CRM systems. If that’s the case then those multiple CRM systems need to be shown. You can then replace things such as “listening tool” and “CRM” with actual vendors and solution providers that integrate with one another.

So now let’s open this up to feedback, what do you think of the process diagram? What is missing and what needs to be fixed? I’d love to make this a collaborative effort so please contribute your thoughts.