Earlier in the year I wrote a beginner’s guide to customer relationship management entitled What is CRM and why do you need it? Welcome to the next chapter.
Here we’ll be investigating the next vital stage in your CRM strategy: social CRM, and how this can help your company track its relationships in an increasingly multichannel landscape.
First though, for anybody who needs a refresher, a quick recap of what CRM actually means….
Social media is still growing rapidly. I’m pointing out the obvious here but social networks are a dynamic medium for entertainment and interaction, including content discovery and product recommendation.
As such, the auto industry seems almost uniquely suited to social.
While most consumers buy cars infrequently, their interest in them (based on price tag, necessity and if you indulge me, the embodiment of the American dream) often transcends the purchase event.
As such, social analytics has cause to mature in the automotive industry, where it surely stands to play a part in the sales funnel other than simply branding.
I’ve been reading a nice little CMO Council report on social analytics in the auto industry. Here are some thoughts on integrating social into automotive sales.
The more digital we become (define and measure that how you will), the more advantage we can gain from being ‘human’ in our communications and sales approach.
As community and privacy is eroded, social skills and the ability to network become high-value attributes, where once they may have been called soft skills.
Social customer service gets more interesting by the day. Increasingly, customers demand it, and brands can benefit from answering questions publicly.
Our Social Times recently published some reflections on social media monitoring for customer service. I’ve taken some of the tips from Ronan Gillen, Community and Social CS Manager at eBay, and listed them below for your convenience.
I’m always impressed just how much eloquence is there for the mining on Quora. I guess it makes sense, as good answers are upvoted and people answer questions that rev their engines.
Suddenly, there’s a clarity to most threads that is addictive in its intense scrollability.
So I searched for ‘customer experience’, to see what I could find to report back with, and to shape a proto-strategy for a transforming business. Most of the interesting stuff I found can be seen more as comment on customer service, and specifically its social dimension.
Here goes….
Real-time customer service and in turn, marketing, are hard to achieve. The first step is acknowledgement of what Generation Y is actually doing to your market.
I attended Social CRM 2013 last week, hosted by Our Social Times. From some of the talks I got this feeling: we’re still on a long hike towards transparency in business, but there’s no doubt lots of companies are striding out.
In this post I wanted to collate some of my highlights of the conference. Social media isn’t the only thing changing business, but it’s a useful crucible in which we can see the spark of emerging values.
Creating value for customers, supporting them fully, and being an interesting brand are challenges which, of course, persist.
In recent years social customer service has endured crises and successes in equal measure. Here’s a quick evaluation of where we are today, with some pointers for the future.
For an increasing number of people, social media is the first place they turn when they experience a problem.
Fewer than 50% of companies are actively responding to these enquiries and many of those are using cost-cutting copy and paste tactics, which is exactly what call centres were criticised for.
We need to invest in finding ways of supporting customers more effectively on the channel of their choice and ensuring a consistent customer service experience across all service channels.
Are you missing a critical social media KPI?
‘Social media disconnects’, or when consumers unfriend/unlike or unfollow as a result of a social media marketing initiative or campaign, isn’t a term in many marketers’ vocabulary.
Perhaps it’s time for that to change.
CRM strategist and consultant Andrew Campbell is the author of our recently published Customer Relationship Management in the Social Age Best Practice Guide.
Here, he answers some questions about social CRM and other topics covered in the guide.
The rising tide of online collaboration is highlighted by a new infographic. But why are businesses finally turning to online collaboration tools?
Most businesses know that online social collaboration tools can form part of the solution to inefficient working practices, but they’ve been around for ages and, for various hotly discussed reasons, never seem to have caught on.
Until, now, it seems
Big news recently from Facebook: companies can now link their customer data, including phone numbers and email addresses to those provided by people on Facebook.
It mightn’t seem like much, but this move, initially for ad targeting only, could be huge.
Those brands that have embraced customer reviews are now starting to look at how they can drive increased engagement with their customers by facilitating, embracing and in some cases participating in customer to customer conversations, to drive sales and advocacy.
With 89% of consumers reading reviews before some or all purchases, most now see reviews as a must-have for brands.