Defining Social CRM

With the advent of the next edition of CRM @ Speed of Light near due and keeping in mind that the new edition is going to have a LOT of Social CRM, we have a solid definition of Social CRM from Paul Greenberg.

SCRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

There is also a condensed discussion of what Social CRM is about and is definitely worth a look at. What interests me at this point are these quotes (quotes by Mr. Greenberg, comments are mine):

• “Social CRM is not a replacement for CRM”: In my view SCRM would never replace conventional CRM. Of course it will add a better communication channel between the organization and customers. This facilitates a more effective listening to the customers , providing a better service proactively and maybe sell/up-sell/cross-sell products/services
• “The customer controls the business ecosystem and the conversation, but not the business”: The organization itself carries on with its established way of doing business, what SCRM provides is an add-in (a powerful one at that) to effectively align business processes to customer needs and determine how to effectively manage business by mapping customer’s expectations with the organization’s goals
• “We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers”: The customers do not talk and get recorded as a single “activity”. We need to capture the length & breadth of how the customer views the organization, what he is saying about the service/products and determine how we can turn him into a believer
• “When you look at the SCRM applications out there - there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side”: One of the basic ideas to being customer friendly is to engage the customer on his turf. CRM suites will capture this information from multiple sources, help analyze and actionize the identified items. But I don’t believe this will discourage organizations from using the Social CRM tag. As of today any CRM suite which can provide a decent integration with Social media out there may classify itself as enabling Social CRM. But I would expect the product vendors to delve deeper into the interfacing capabilities to retrieve, understand and act on the “word on street”.

Read more at ZDNet Blogs

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.