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Five Tips for Better Social CRM

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Ziff Davis | White Paper | Five Tips for Better Social CRM

ziffdavis.com

Five Tips for Better Social CRM

Customer relationship management is fundamentally about managing and maximizing a company’s interaction with the people who buy its products, influence its markets, and support its operations. With social media now playing such a large role in the lives of just about everyone, it reasons that CRM also must be social.

And indeed it is. Social CRM accounted for roughly $2.22 billion of the larger $24 billion CRM market last year, according to a recent MarketandMarkets report, and it is forecast to grow to $17.92 billion by 2019 on a healthy compound annual growth rate of nearly 52 percent.

The social component of CRM typically includes enhanced customer profiles, social listening, segment analysis, social selling and social marketing, among other benefits. With its rise, CRM is changing from department-specific to encompass all areas of a business. It also is making CRM a customer-centric process instead of a company-centered process, creating dynamic communication channels that are constantly changing and transforming CRM from a transactional system into a conversational one. Further, for many systems it is bringing messages inside the CRM instead of moving interactions outside of it.

Yet, not is all healthy with social CRM.

While 70 percent of marketers feel personalization is key to increasing traffic, conversion and average order value according to Forrester research, only 14 percent say they are able to personalize their interactions across multiple channels. Social juggernauts Facebook and LinkedIn also have restricted API access in the past year, cutting off much of the social listening functionality social CRM systems previously touted. Is social CRM living up to its expectations?

“Almost all CRM vendors were surprised with the fact that LinkedIn shut off its API to just about every CRM except two major vendors. We see this as an interestingly anti-social development,” says Michael Rooney, the senior vice president and general manager for CRM firm, Bpm’online.

“That said,” he adds, “the free market has a way of correcting proprietary restrictions such as this. We see it as temporary situation that will resolve itself.”

The greater challenge, perhaps, is teaching businesses how to take advantage of the opportunities that come with social CRM. A business might possess the tools, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it knows how to use them.

With that in mind, here five tips for better using your social CRM system.

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Ziff Davis | White Paper | Five Tips for Better Social CRM

1. Get Your Objectives Straight

An inherent problem with social is that it is noisy and can waste time if you’re not careful. This is true for individuals on Facebook, and it is no less true for businesses using social CRM.

“Businesses often start out on the social CRM journey without defining their objectives or looking to define the value exchange they are offering to customers in return for their data,” notes Celina Burnett, a partner at marketing consultancy, Gain Theory. “These are imperative to get right at the beginning in order to understand what data you need to collect and how and to have an effective customer proposition.”

Jenny Sussin at Gartner concurs, a research director who focuses on social CRM.

“The biggest mistake I see is people just doing things to ‘increase engagement’ or ‘broaden reach’ without tracing it back to business impact,” she says.

2. Make Sure You’re Not Stuck in a Silo

All parts of a business are essentially engaged with the customer, whether customer service, sales, marketing or product development. Making the most of social CRM therefore requires buy-in from all stakeholders in the company and the avoidance of departmental silos at all costs.

“Failing to unify and share dialogues in a holistic approach to CRM is a huge missed opportunity,” stresses Rooney at Bpm’online.

“CRM systems are most effective when they unite marketing, sales and service, and make sure social dialogues in one part of the chain are available to the others,” he says. “Then CRM can become a focal point of the entire organization and truly deliver value.”

Make sure you get that buy-in.

3. Experiment and Stay Nimble

If there’s one thing that’s sure, it is the changing nature of social media. From new communities and technologies that emerge, to policy shifts such as Facebook’s API changes that harmed social listening systems, the social CRM landscape is not static. Success, therefore, requires constant adjustment and experimentation as the landscape evolves; business processes and CRM systems themselves cannot be built and then run on autopilot.

“As new social channels emerge, it’s important to continually refine and realign customer-facing processes so the social CRM can truly deliver value in today’s omnichannel world,” says Rooney.

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Ziff Davis | White Paper | Five Tips for Better Social CRM

4. Mind the Metrics

While more than 80 percent of small businesses use social media for growth, according to a 2014 study by research firm, TNS Global, only 44 percent tried to measure it. Large enterprises and savvy smaller firms hopefully take a more scientific approach, because an important key to social CRM success is knowing what is working and what is not. That means minding the metrics.

If knowing the social CRM objectives is the first step, getting the whole company behind it is the second, and iterating is the third key, a fourth important practice is paying close attention to the statistics that prove if social is meeting the desired goals.

“Set up a robust measurement framework which roll up to your business objectives and enables you to track progress in real-time and make iterative changes to increase effectiveness,” advises Burnett at Gain Theory.

5. Don’t Expect a Unified System

We all want a single CRM system that brings together all customer data, social signals, interactions and campaigns, and CRM vendors would love to give it to us. The trouble is that systems probably won’t ever all talk with each other. The dynamic nature of the market, changing technologies and self-interest make it nearly impossible for a single CRM system to encompass and work directly with all the data, and CRM vendors could not maintain it even if such a system were possible.

Don’t expect that social CRM will be an island unto itself—make it the hub of several systems and data sources that come together in aggregate to paint the full customer picture. If there is anything the Facebook and LinkedIn walled gardens have recently shown us, it is that a single unified system will never be completely possible.

“In order to produce personalized experiences for customers across their lifecycles, you need to combine sets of data which exist in a series of different systems today,” notes Sussin at Gartner. “All parts of the business and IT need to recognize that their success is subject to the success of the rest of the business.”

Knowing customers deeply is the holy grail of business arguably, and social CRM helps firms get there. Making the most of the technology is not easy, though, and it is a moving target.