What is Social CRM?
As per Paul Greenberg - Social CRM 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.
Actually speaking CRM is for maintaining customer relations and for doing so Social media instruments such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace etc plays a very important role considering the huge user base they have attracted.
So if one integrates monitoring of Social Media applications with the realm of CRM it gives birth to the term “Social CRM”.
Why you need Social CRM?
The idea is not just a cliché, it’s being discussed by various organizations and also been part of Course by Rotman School of Management and the centre is in collaboration with Microsoft which essentially vindicates that there is a tremendous potential in this opportunity.
Customer expectation is on increase as the day progress and in the fierce competitive world that we are living in it’s essential for any market driven company to sustain itself and for that they MUST listen and engage with Customers proactively.
To do so the age old rules have to be changed and an enterprise wide adoption of Social CRM must be done. It’s important to understand that today’s customer is pretty much connected with most of the widely available social media applications which connects them to the world of free information.
Traditional CRM is built considering the various touch points available to end user at some point of time; those were the formative years for CRM. World is changing very fast, it’s changing as you read this blog and the way we communicate has changed rapidly. So in order to tap the very feedback customer is giving about a product that he/she had purchased may result into a WoM(Word of Mouth) campaign.
How to do it?
Twitter, if well integrated into CRM, will prove a milestone in addressing customer service.Facebook, if well integrated and used in CRM, will provide a complete turnaround in marketing capabilities of a traditional CRM.
SAP CRM 7.0 has the capabilities built in to allow integration with such applications. All what is now needed is the integration and usage of such tools inside the traditional CRM.
SAP has already provided glimpse of what can be done. It’s time to take it forward by exhausting the capabilities of CRM and showcase demos during upcoming TechED.
Facebook Integration For Marketing.
Twitter Marketing Campaign.
Twitter Customer Service.
Lively discussion which SAP Mentors had sometime back on the same topic and SAP Mentors are really passionate people and experts which yet again proves the importance of this topic.
Also check the Top 10 Demos from the Customer Line of Business Session at the 2010 SAP Influencer Summit, which would make you believe that most of the demos shown had flavor of Social CRM.
PS: Not every organization treat their customer the same and that’s where the USP comes in. Embrace Social CRM the way end user has.
