Social Media in Action

Here’s one of the stories I came across recently that demonstrates the power of social media tools to really “listen” to the customer. In an impressive story of CRM in action, Gaylord resort chain gained a fan in Lauren McKay at CRM Magazine and will surely pickup other customers along the way.

At the end of the day, what did surprise me eventually was not that Gaylord used twitter. After all, a lot of folks including Dell, SAP, Pepsi, Oracle and a host of others are quite active on Twitter. The fact that Gaylord could make use of a isolated tweet sometime in the past and provide customer service based on that should classify as an achievement. In the above case, Gaylord listened to a single (but valuable) customer and was agile enough to leverage that information at a later time.

A large part of that service certainly comes from the people over at Gaylord, but I believe they are getting required support by IT. There may be some level of integration between Twitter and their customer management application, and it is a good example of what can be done to CRM applications. More than a few SaaS vendors have long made the integration part easy, but without building a business framework to realize value out of that exercise may leave the people disenchanted about the power of Social CRM.