Chapter 15
Keeping Up with Evolving Technology
- Educating on the future technology
- Unraveling the future of CRM
- Pushing mobility and embedded technology
Social CRM technology offers the promise of a 360-degree view of a customer, information that reaches every department of the business. It ties every department together with the same goal of providing an outstanding customer experience.
As social media platforms evolve, the technology we use to capture customer data will have to evolve along with them. The transactional data captured by CRM 1.0 is complemented by a deeper view into our customers with the advancements of technology for social CRM.
Many of you reading this book are most likely thinking, “Man, we were just getting used to our original CRM software. Now social media has us running just to keep up.” You're not alone.
Educating on the Future Technology
Have you ever worked at a company and felt lost when it rolled out a new initiative or software development? It's an unsettling situation, and one that can lead to less than ideal job satisfaction. Employees don't like to feel like they aren't prepared for something or that they don't understand what their role is within the organization.
Educating and training employees on future technologies is vital to company-wide adoption of new and ever-changing software, tolls, and platforms. Employee training for social CRM and any related technology or culture changes will help you retain talent and increase job satisfaction. When you have a good training program, you increase your recruiting opportunities as well. People want to know that they'll be empowered to do their job well and will have the knowledge to meet organizational expectations.
Developing your current employees’ skills with ongoing training and educational opportunities demonstrates how much you value your employees. It's wise to reassure your team that you're willing to invest in them. You can foster long-term retention and put loyal team members on a career path for growth within the organization.
Social CRM is all about the customer, and your employees might be your most important customers. Invest in their education and training in order to keep up with the dynamic technologies affecting how you do business.
Changing the employee outlook
Not everyone is quick to accept change. In fact, some people become overwhelmed with the fear of the unknown, especially when they don't clearly see their place in the changes. When introducing new technologies, be transparent with your employees and focus on how it will help the company achieve its goals, and what that means for them. When you incorporate employee sentiment into your technology evolution, consider how you can convey the following to your employees:
- Demonstrate a healthy balance sheet. Most technology changes and integrations require some financial investment from companies. A healthy balance sheet can show your employees that you have the financial means to invest in the future of the organization.
- Improve employee confidence in the company. You can show your employees that you're staying in front of technology changes. This can demonstrate to your team that you have an edge over competitors.
- Show your team that you have long-range plans. When you make an investment in technology and strive to keep ahead of market changes, you show your team that your long-term plans can evolve with the times, that you're in this for the long haul.
Evolving with the customer
The social customer changes daily, and the technology that companies use to interact with them changes at the same pace. It's important that you stay in tune with the changing social ecosystem, from Facebook to Pinterest to the next social channel on the horizon, and watch for mobile marketing to take the spotlight as more and more customers rely on mobile devices to stay connected.
Customers have more options for how they can communicate with your brand than ever before, and with those options come varying customer preferences. Companies must listen and adapt to customer preferences to keep up with the evolving social customer. Missing the target on a customer's communication preferences can result in a lost customer, and disregarding what they've clearly stated to you could cause them to quickly become frustrated and unlikely to do business with you again. If you frustrate customers in these ways, you can bet that they won't recommend your brand to anyone else either.
Social CRM technology helps you stay on target with the wide range of preferences across your customer base. It's a lot to keep straight, but plenty of technology options are available to help you. In Part V, we review several software and cloud-based solutions on the market that help you evolve with the social customer.
The key to keeping your marketing messages in front of your customers is to stay true to the permissions and the preferences that your customers express. When you reach customers where and how they prefer, you must provide relevant content! Be sure that you make it easy for customers to obtain useful information. Each channel — e-mail, social media, blogs, and so on — serves different purposes for each customer. You need to craft your messages appropriately for each channel you participate in.
The most effective marketers in the ever-evolving social landscape will research, read up on trends, monitor social media conversations, use data analytics, and quickly adjust messaging. Marketers have to stay on their toes to keep up!
Unraveling the Future of CRM
Traditional CRM aimed to gather essential data to move customers through a buying cycle and gain incremental revenue from existing customers. The customer data collected was somewhat flat compared to the robust information now available through social media.
Evolving social CRM platforms capture the same types of information that companies are used to, but with a wider view of customers, including information like the following:
- Transactions: Just like traditional CRM, social CRM provides a historical view of customer transactions and those in the pipeline.
- Conversations: Beyond scheduled appointments and recaptures of previous interactions with your company, social CRM can provide insight into the content of every conversation a customer has ever had. This helps to paint a broader picture of their likes and dislikes.
- Influence: Here's big piece of the yummy social CRM pie! Social media and the CRM solutions that capture social conversations dig into the reach of an individual customer based on his or her network and sphere of influence.
- Demographics: Social CRM tools can tap into networks like LinkedIn, allowing automatic updating of demographic information. With traditional CRM, keeping up with customer demographics required manual updates.
- Feedback: Customer feedback through social channels can be categorized and captured, and then used to drive product evolution.
- Customer needs: Social media monitoring tools can identify key conversations taking place online where your brand can step in to provide needed information and meet customer needs.
- Relationships: Many people use social media to announce life moments like marriage and the birth of a child. You can track and help celebrate these milestones the way their friends might on these sites.
- Preferences: You can identify the types of conversations that take place on varying social media platforms and adjust your approaches to match your customers’ preferences.
Building the customer module of the future
To build the customer module of the future, you must understand the customer life cycle. As mentioned in the previous section, CRM typically has tracked and managed the activities needed to move customers through a sales and buying cycle. The customer life cycle goes beyond a single transaction and seeks to manage the customer relationship for loyalty, retention, and even referrals.
The idea of the customer life cycle is to keep loyal customers moving through the buying cycle over and over again. The key is maintaining customer satisfaction along the way to earn the right to ask for the sale over and over again. Social CRM enables organizations to meet customers where and how they want, which increases your brand's chances of developing a longer-term customer life cycle.
Diving into the 360-degree view
The 360-degree view refers to the ability to completely see a customer, to have all-around insight into what makes that person tick. Reaching for the full view of customers means looking at how customers use and view social media, mobile technologies, and e-mail. Make sure that you understand each of these aspects of your customer interactions.
When you get the full view of your customer, you're empowered to craft more relevant messages and disseminate them with accuracy. The 360-degree view gives a more robust customer profile that incorporates past, current, and future touch points of the customer. These include, but definitely aren't limited to
Pushing Mobility and Embedded Technology
Mobile technologies speed up the rate at which we do just about everything. From a single handheld device, we can search the Internet, fire off an e-mail, engage via text messaging, play games, pay bills, and access a huge number of applications. Social CRM technologies that incorporate mobility factors have a huge opportunity to increase customer interactions and accelerate customer service and transaction opportunities.
Bricks-and-mortar retail shops can take advantage of the power of mobile technologies, too. Consider the following possibilities:
- Tablets can enable customers to enter their own profile details onsite.
- Mobile attachments enable you to swipe credit cards. Instead of leaving customers waiting in line with time to reconsider their purchase decision, meet them at the point where they made the decision to buy.
- Inventory tracking can also benefit from mobile devices within the store, providing real-time data on inventory.
- Mobile devices also allow you to quickly communicate with your team to keep everyone informed of sales and promotions, or update stock of any items.
Empower employees to develop deeper customer relationships by providing mobile devices that fit with social CRM solutions. When employees have down time in the store, they can reach out to past customers with new product information, service information, and current promotions. You'll end up with more effective employees who are engaged the whole time they're on the clock.
Many CRM solutions today are web based, which makes it easy for employees to update the system from anywhere the Internet is accessible, often using mobile devices. For instance Siebel, an Oracle CRM solution, provides mobile access to its users. The mobile version has the same capabilities and functionality as the desktop version.
A social media plan or strategy that doesn't take into account customer use of mobile devices is missing a big piece of the social picture. Anyone with a smartphone can accomplish just about anything on his device that he could on a computer, especially when it comes to social media. Mobile device users can send e-mail; upload photos; and engage on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The list of mobile applications that connect users goes on and on, and it's growing every day.
Keep in mind that businesses must remain agile and in tune with how people connect online, especially with their mobile devices. The building of a new social data set is extremely important to the future of social CRM and requires careful consideration of mobile trends.