5. In Response to the Social Customer: Social CRM
The global rise of social media usage has presented a huge opportunity for companies that want to acquire new customers and retain existing ones. With the amplified voice and influence of the social customer, it’s much easier today for companies to identify these prospects and customers and determine their needs and concerns. This is certainly an improvement from when most firms were using traditional CRM systems to manage their sales and customer life cycles.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy for managing a company’s relationship with customers and prospects. It involves using technology to manage and synchronize business processes for sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. The underlying goal of CRM is to find, attract, and win over new customers; retain current customers; and potentially reduce costs for marketing and client management. Social CRM simply adds social to the definition.
Social CRM is also a business strategy. It’s one component that helps organizations evolve into a fully operational social business. It’s a strategic business initiative that not only considers the social customer, but also requires collaboration, customized internal processes, and technology integration. With a successful social CRM initiative, organizations will know what to say to their customers and prospects, how to say it, where to say it, and when to say it, to provide a more relevant customer interaction.
Although the management of social CRM focuses internally on people, process, and technology, it is in direct response to the external social customer. Social customers use a variety of channels to express satisfaction or discontent about a product or service, so it’s imperative that companies not only monitor these channels, but also be prepared to take action there. Additionally, prospects are simply social customers of other companies, so an effective social CRM program will equip sales teams to engage with them at the right time.
However, before a company can fully accomplish any social CRM initiative, it must ensure that it is capable internally first, which speaks to the entire premise of this book: Before a company can successfully manage external conversations, it needs to master its internal conversations first. This is especially important when a company wants to get its IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams to agree to work together to address the many facets of CRM.
Social CRM is still relatively undefined, despite all the attention it’s getting in the blogosphere. For now, put aside what the pundits are saying, along with all the terminology, jargon, and abbreviations. The following key facts will help bring some perspective on the growing nature of social media.
• By the end of 2010, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will have some form of online community deployed for CRM purposes (Gartner Group, Business Impact of Social Computing on CRM)
• Member communities reach more Internet users (66.8 percent) than email, which is a traditional component of CRM (65.1 percent; Nielsen, Global Faces on Networked Places)
Many industry experts have different points of views on social CRM and how it’s defined. This is because the social and technology landscape is moving so quickly that it’s still being developed. It’s important, however, to highlight these differences and showcase their perspective, to provide a more clear and well-rounded definition.
Various Definitions of Social CRM
Martin Walsh, who leads digital marketing at IBM, wrote that social CRM is a process of monitoring, engaging with, and managing conversations and relationships with existing and prospective customers and influencers across the Internet, social networks, and digital channels.
Paul Greenberg, author of the best-selling book CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century and also president of The 56 Group, LLC, says that social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes, and social characteristics that’s designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s control of the conversation.
Michael Fauschette, who leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group, defines social CRM as the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community, with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tie it to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what customers want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints, such as sales and customer service.
Jacob Morgan, founder of Chess Media Group and social CRM expert, states that organizations have the same customer-facing problems today that they did last year, five years ago, and ten years ago. Social CRM is a strategic approach (supported by technology) that helps organizations solve these same customer-facing business problems, but in the context of how people’s behaviors (who they trust, what they expect from brands, how they show, where they shop, and so on) and communication methods (social channels or Web 2.0, but traditional channels such as email, phone, and in-person discussions still apply here) have changed. Social CRM is an evolutionary business approach for solving customer problems.
What’s important to extract from these definitions is that the core focus of any social CRM initiative is the external nature and influence of the social customer. It’s equally important to establish a scalable technology infrastructure and organizational processes to serve as the foundation of the program internally. Of course, defining social CRM is much easier than deploying a full scale social CRM initiative within an organization. The following sections will serve as a guide to get started.
The Social CRM Response Process and Workflow
Imagine all employees in the company, regardless of what department they work in, equipped with a dashboard on their computer monitor. This dashboard includes all relevant and verified customer data, including recent purchase history, demographics, previous interactions, call support history, and recent tweets and Facebook status updates. Social media practitioners and support agents can use this data to provide a more relevant customer interaction via the social web, over the phone, and even in person.
To make this a reality, there must be a process that guides employees’ decision on whether or not to take action.
Jacob Morgan, social CRM expert at Chess Media Group, describes this as the ARM process: a five-step process that revolves around action, reaction, and management. It’s a response framework by which all customer interactions can be managed, evaluated, and responded to (or not responded to).
The first component of the ARM process requires an employee to identify, document, and track the conversations people are having online about the company’s brand or products. The conversations may come from existing customers (satisfied or not), prospects, influencers, advocates, and even partners or vendors. The key to managing these conversations is to look for keywords such as purchase, buy, bought, renewal, cancel, canceling, or cancellation coupled with a brand/product, such as “I just bought this new Dell Laptop and I love it!” or “I am thinking about canceling my Netflix account.”
The second component of the ARM process examines where the conversation physically happened. This can include the obvious channels of the social web, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, YouTube videos and comments, and review sites such as CNET. It can also take place via the traditional lines of communication, such as a toll-free number, an online form from a customer support website, or even word of mouth. What’s important about this component is that if the interaction is on Twitter, that the response must also be on Twitter (as in, “@madcustomer just saw your note about your computer. Please DM me with your email address so we can solve your problem”). Same goes for the other networks as well. The way a company responds might also vary depending on which community the customer interaction is taking place and the technology capabilities within that network.
The third component of the ARM process involves analyzing the sentiment of the conversation (probably the most difficult step) and then deciding whether any action needs to be taken. Technology vendors such as Lithium include a pretty accurate sentiment-analysis tool in their social listening software solution. Analyzing sentiment (or intent) is much easier to do during a live phone conversation because it’s easy to determine whether a customer is happy, mad, or neutral based on the words they say and the tone of their voice. This is the one step in the process that will never be automated and requires some level of human intelligence. What’s important to extract from these conversations is whether any action is needed.
The fourth element of the ARM process is to reconcile the current data, if any, about the customer with the external conversations that are being tracked. This is where the core customer data set (such as sales/support history or demographics) is taken from traditional CRM applications such as Oracle (Siebel), Sugar CRM, Pivotal, and Salesforce and integrated with external data (from sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) to get a more complete view of the social customer. Integrated social media data with traditional CRM data can answer important questions such as these:
• What was the customer’s latest purchase, or what version of the product does he have?
• When was the last time the customer called into customer support, and was there a resolution?
• Is this a lead, a prospect, or a current customer? Where is he in the sales cycle?
• Where does the customer live, what is his annual income, and what is his ethnicity and other demographic data?
• What social properties does the customer belong to, and which is he most active in?
• How many friends does the customer have, and how influential they are?
The fifth component of the ARM process is to establish business rules. Every company is different and applies different intelligence to this process. One example is a series of consumer behaviors that triggers a set of actions—for example, a customer who just bought product A and registers it on the corporate website might trigger an email inviting her to be a part of an internal community. Business rules are not static and constantly change as both the internal business changes and the external customer evolves. Examples of business rules are a flag or trigger to a customer support or sales agent if a community member unsubscribes to a piece of content or a notification to sales when someone downloads a whitepaper of the latest product and asks to be notified to get more information.
Figure 5.1 The social CRM process takes into consideration the social customer and relevant profile data, such as previous purchase history and demographics.
Applications of Social CRM
Social CRM can be used effectively to engage with several types of customers and prospects.
The Venting Customer
This customer might be complaining on Twitter or Facebook, but a response might not be necessary. In many cases, these customers are just seeking attention from their networks and usually make statements such as, “I love my Dell laptop, but it’s way too heavy,” or “I just got Comcast installed. The high definition is amazing, but the cable box doesn’t match my furniture, ugh.” In certain cases, a company can choose to follow this customer on Twitter if that’s where the conversation is happening and may even take it one step further and say “Thank you for ordering,” or something similar.
The Passive Customer
This customer is definitely in need of customer support but isn’t actively seeking a response—yet. Usually, these customers aren’t that vocal and are more patient than others. They’ll likely tell their communities about the issue and seek help while mentioning the company directly. They’ll make statements such as, “My Toshiba laptop keeps powering off after being on for 5 minutes, please help!” Often they also include the infamous #fail hashtag if they’re using Twitter. In this scenario, it’s imperative for customer support to be flagged and either fix their problem directly or send the customer information about how to fix it. Ignoring a passive customer can turn that person into a “used-to-be” customer, which is never a good thing.
The “Used-to-Be” Customer
This customer is mad and very vocal, and needs the company to address the issue as soon as possible. These customers have most likely expressed their discontent several times online and either haven’t been responded to or haven’t had their problem resolved. They’re consistently telling others about their negative experiences. They make statements such as “My Internet just went down again. I am sick of @Comcast and canceling!” or “1-800 Flowers was late delivering my mom’s flowers for her birthday. This is the second time. I am done with them forever!” In this case, the customer support teams should be flagged immediately so that they can proactively reach out and offer them a complimentary promotion of some sort.
The Collaborative Customer
This customer is happy with the product, service, or company. Often times, these customers will seek out venues for suggesting new products or enhancements to an existing product, much like Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea. They make statements such as “I think El Pollo Loco should also serve baked chicken for people who want to eat healthy” and then cc: the company on Twitter (as in “cc: @ElPolloLocoInc”). This, way, they ensure that El Pollo Loco will be notified via their @mentions on Twitter. Although this isn’t a customer support issue, customers like this should be flagged and paid special attention to because they could potentially be turned into advocates. In this case, a marketing or a community manager should be flagged, and the customer should be added to a list and leveraged for future product launches or promotions.
The Customer Advocate
This customer will talk about a brand, product, or service even if he or she is ignored. These customers don’t need incentives, either. They talk about a product because they’re thrilled with what it does for them and how it makes them feel. Often they make statements such as “You all should buy the new Sony 3D TV. It is awesome and perfect for gaming and watching movies on Blu Ray. We love it!” Marketing and PR departments should be flagged immediately and should reach out to these advocates. It’s good practice to invite advocates to private communities and give them sneak peaks into future products, seeding them with new products or just asking them for specific feedback.
The Future Customer
This customer, also known as the prospect, is one of the reasons CRM systems came into existence. They can either be new customers or customers who are considering an upgrade to a new product or service. The prospect will say things such as, “I am thinking about getting Comcast. Tired of Dish Network’s constant outages. What do you guys think?” What could be a future customer for Comcast is potentially a “used-to-be” customer for Dish Network, so each company would handle this scenario differently. In any case, the sales team from Comcast should be flagged immediately and should be prepared to offer this customer a really good deal for switching services. In a business-to-business (B2B) environment, this could be an existing customer talking about upgrading the hardware in the data center; the account manager should reach out to them directly before the competitors do.
Just as various types of customers in the social landscape require attention, companies that want to achieve social CRM effectiveness must vary their approaches. Before doing so, however, there needs to be alignment internally on the roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders involved in the social CRM process.
Social CRM Roles and Responsibilities
Any social CRM initiative needs key support from a variety of different job functions from within a company to succeed. Depending on the size, culture, and dynamics of the company, these might shift or be managed in unusual business units—for example, marketing might own the customer service function.
IT plays the most important role in the deployment of any social CRM initiative because it is the gatekeeper of all the internal technology resources. The IT team has access and information about the entire portfolio of web assets and IT infrastructure hosted internally or on the cloud. They also have insights into the current social CRM applications and technology capabilities that the company is currently deploying. IT plays an instrumental role in integrating the existing CRM application with other, external platforms such as Radian6. IT might even own and manage the contractual relationship with each vendor.
The sales team is also crucial in helping make the social CRM initiative a success. Its input on prospects, sales cycles, and current sales processes are key to integrating into new customer workflows. The sales team will likely have really good customer and CRM intelligence because most of their time is spent using CRM applications to acquire new customers and manage the existing sales lifecycle.
Customer support departments play an equally important role in social CRM. Their responsibilities include drafting workflows and processes to address customer inquiries externally. Much of their time will be spent working through the ARM process and interacting with the social customer through the CRM application. They’ll also work closely with IT or the CRM vendor to supply inputs and requirements to their support dashboards.
The marketing and public relations departments will need to collaborate and either provide their specific recommendations on which vendors to use or supply existing information on which social vendors they’re currently using (such as Sprinklr or Radian6) to engage externally with customers and for social listening. They also have to work closely with support teams and give input on external engagement processes with customers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels.
Many companies also have collaboration teams that serve as project managers and ensure support, collaboration, and communication across each of the functional teams. They might also be responsible for managing deadlines, following up with stakeholders, and even “owning” the social CRM initiative until it’s fully deployed and operational.
Much of this chapter has been spent defining social CRM, establishing a process model, showcasing practical examples of social CRM in action, and discussing various roles and responsibilities in the organization. The next step is to research the social CRM vendors and understand the technology available for deployment.
A Look at Social CRM Vendors
A full-scale social CRM solution should include communities, collaboration, social analytics software, social media listening applications, and a traditional CRM platform. Chapter 2, “Surveying The Technology Supermarket,” highlighted many of these vendors—such as Jive, Microsoft, IBM, Tibbr, Sprinklr, Radian6, and Lithium—whose software platforms are at the cutting edge of their respective categories.
It’s no secret that the nature of business relationships is changing. The speed at which consumers and businesses can learn more about each other before ever having a face-to-face or telephone interaction is staggering. The following vendors were chosen because they’re building tools to keep pace with this accelerated rate of change. Of course, few social CRM vendors offer a full, comprehensive solution, but some are well on their way and others are doing some new and innovative things.
SugarCRM
SugarCRM is an open-source software solution and traditional CRM vendor. SugarCRM provides packaged sales, marketing, and support tools in addition to a highly extensible platform. It also provides social features but enables users to decide how to leverage social data and channels inside the Sugar system. For example, users can quickly and easily monitor Twitter streams of contacts or accounts, as well as instantly uncover relationship capital from networks such as LinkedIn right inside the CRM record. Additionally, the Sugar platform enables users to embed photos, blogs, and other social data right inside the system at the dashboard or the record level.
In addition to offering a flexible take on social data, SugarCRM has layered next-generation collaboration capabilities into the Sugar product line. Sugar Feeds enable users to collaborate and share data in a more ad hoc manner than through traditional email. Sugar Feeds can also be set up to alert users and managers of important changes in the status of existing accounts, prospects, or customer support cases. Feeds can also house multimedia and other files, such as a YouTube video that might help users learn about the market or product they provide.
Although SugarCRM has built many social tools into its platform, the vendor also understands that many vendors are focused on social media in other interesting and valuable ways. Thus, SugarCRM also leverages partners to expand the social capabilities of its product. For example, integration with Qontext enhances Sugar Feeds so that users can fully interact with their customers inside the Sugar system, collaborating on such processes for support case resolution. This is a great advancement over other collaboration tools, which can be accessed only by internal employees and not actual customers. Also, a partnership with Box.net enables fast, simple sharing of documents between Sugar users and their customers. For example, a Sugar user could quickly invite and share a contract or invoice with a customer, all instantly visible and edited in real time right inside the Sugar user interface. SugarCRM also partners with sales intelligence providers such as InsideView, which enables sales and marketing professionals to gain valuable insight into their prospects and customers from social channels from around the Web in an automated fashion.
Pivotal Social CRM 6.0
In June 2010, CDC launched Pivotal Social CRM 6.0, a social product that integrates with its traditional CRM application. It also integrates with external social channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This solution equips companies to identify qualified leads, gather sales intelligence through increased collaboration with customers, develop effective sales campaigns, help close more deals, and improve customer service.
Pivotal Social CRM integrates external conversations into the native Pivotal CRM application. This social product is built specifically for Pivotal CRM 6 and integrates with the most popular and ubiquitous social media channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, InsideView, and Google BlogSearch. The goal of this integration is to gain insights and intelligence into customers’ and prospects’ daily activities via the social stream. This application also incorporates the social stream into daily workflows of the sales, marketing, and support teams.
Additionally, Pivotal Social CRM offers the capability to streamline all public communication messages into one view. It also enables companies to broadcast marketing messages to existing CRM contacts and external community within the database. This makes it easy to expand, grow, and cross-pollinate the various external communities by inviting customers, prospects, employees, and everyone else in the Pivotal CRM database to connect with each other and the company.
Within the applications, it’s easy to identify prospects and find out what they’re saying, who they’re saying it to, and where they’re saying it. Additionally, the applications allow companies to take immediate action within the CRM system, assigning tasks to other stakeholders and follow-up as appropriate. Monitoring social media conversations and updates from the social stream can help sales teams uncover potential revenue opportunities and provide intelligence about the social customer.
It’s just as easy to monitor customer support-related questions as it is to monitor sales conversations. Pivotal Social CRM enables companies to get a pulse on what is happening on external social media sites for reports of customer issues, complaints, or questions about products and services. Its application enables support teams to capture support incidents, create tickets, and assign them to internal stakeholders for resolution.
Pivotal Social CRM enables marketers to broadcast messages to all external social media channels in one click; this dramatically reduces the time and effort required to coordinate messages across multiple channels. It also goes one step further and enables companies to manage online and in-person events on Facebook from within the native application.
Nimble
Nimble’s suite of products ranges from solutions for individuals to solutions that enable team collaboration, robust business reporting, automation, and forecasting. Nimble combines contact management, activity management, sales and marketing automation, traditional and social media communication tools, and collaboration features in one web-based solution. It imports, merges, and unifies the “3 Cs”: contacts, calendars, and communication. It’s easy to connect Nimble to any social network and unify all contacts. In addition, Nimble enables individuals to send and receive messages, status updates, and other social information. It also automatically searches social media sites, identifies relevant connections, and ranks them in relevance. After key information is identified, fully integrated collaboration tools enable individuals to share and act on that information among those who need it most to accelerate sales, marketing, and support processes. Nimble enables teams to more effectively communicate and collaborate via microblogging, which is tied to the customer record.
Any professional or business that works with end users and collaborates internally can use Nimble—in a social business, that’s just about everyone. Depending on the size of the organization, just a few people might be using Nimble and performing multiple tasks. Entire departments and teams also can use Nimble for internal and cross-functional collaboration. For example, the group that always has a direct line of communication to customers is customer service. Using Nimble, support teams can easily listen for support-related opportunities, complaints, questions, and distressed customers in appropriate channels. They can immediately understand which customer record the service instance relates to, track the background of this customer’s past multichannel communication history and past purchase behavior, and respond accordingly. Each response automatically logs as part of the customer record, keeping everyone on the same page both inside the service team and cross-functionally.
Marketing, public relations, and social media teams that are conducting influencer, analyst, and press outreach can use Nimble to track who has reached out to a particular person, as well as see the history and outcome of all communications. For sales teams, Nimble provides the same intelligence in researching key customers’ and prospects’ needs and responding to them accordingly. The sales organization can also use Nimble’s opportunity identification and forecasting to increase prospecting and revenue. Marketing teams can use Nimble’s connectivity to services such as MailChimp to understand the impact of email campaigns on customer and prospect activity.
Taking the Next Steps
Start small when creating a full-scale social CRM initiative. The biggest challenge is getting all the necessary players in one room and agreeing to actionable next steps. Collaboration is key, but having support from senior management will also help.
Several smaller-scale CRM efforts might already be happening throughout the company, so a significant amount of research and information gathering could be necessary. The information needed is who owns the company’s CRM initiative, which current CRM application is being deployed, and whether that CRM system has any built-in social capabilities. It’s also necessary to understand what social technologies the company is currently using (for example, social media listening software and collaboration applications), as well as which external communities the company is involved in (Twitter, Facebook, and branded communities). Strategic decisions will have to be made after all the CRM efforts are documented. The company will have to decide either to integrate all existing CRM deployments into a single cohesive initiative, abandon the programs that can’t scale or integrate, or leave the situation as is.
Finally, a vendor analysis or Request for Proposal (RFP) will be required to identify which social CRM solution will work most effectively for the company. It’s important to make this decision wisely and ensure that all the key players are involved in the vendor-selection process. A social CRM vendor isn’t one that can easily be switched, due to the complexities of technology integration. It will be a serious business concern if a company’s existing CRM vendor doesn’t have social integration on the product road map and lacks plans for opening an application programming interface (API). This will surely impact the progress of any social CRM initiative, and decisions will have to be made to address this.
Social CRM doesn’t have a light switch that can just be turned on when a company decides it’s important. It’s a strategic business initiative that requires time, commitment, planning, effort, collaboration, technology integration, and a budget. It’s a complete shift from the way companies are used to dealing with customers, so it demands organizational change and behavior across multiple teams and business units.
Regardless of what the right definition of social CRM is, it’s a well-known fact that the social customer exists today. And although social CRM focuses internally on culture, process, and technology, it’s simply in response to the evolution and influence of social customers and their behaviors on the Internet.