Customer Centric Business Strategies Blog ? Social CRM: The Next ...

by Barton Goldenberg, President, ISM Inc.

I continue to be amazed at the confusion regarding the value and importance of Social CRM. I entered the CRM industry in 1985, as founder and president of ISM Inc, when it was still called Sales Force Automation (SFA). SFA functionality soon was complemented with valuable ?customer service and support? functionality (late 1980s), then with market campaign management functionality (early 1990s), then eBusiness functionality (late 1990s) and more recently business intelligence functionality (early 2000s).

Around 2005, social media took the market by storm as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and several others public communities took hold. Companies like Mzinga, Lithium, Jive and others joined the fray by offering private social communities that has similar capabilities to the public communities (i.e., forums, blogs, polls, contests, rankings, etc.). Most recently, CRM vendors like salesforce.com and RightNow Technology have also moved the ?community? capability into their own CRM software and have begun to offer internal as well as external private communities. Simply said, ?Social? and ?CRM? have now merged and in 2012, Social CRM is here to stay.

In my latest book, Social CRM, to be published later this year, I define Social CRM as the process of leveraging ?social insights? and integrating them into your overall customer relationship efforts. More specifically Social CRM gathers social insights from both public and private social communities, filters this ?free-form? information to ensure you have captured meaningful social insights (by no means an easy task), and then integrates this filtered insight into your CRM customer profiles so that you have a deeper understanding of how your customers and prospects. In other words, with Social CRM, you now have both transactional as well as non-transactional information currently residing within your CRM system, such as:

? sales forecasts,
? customer service incident management,
? market campaigns, as well as,
? sentiment-based insight such as how your customers feel about doing business with you.

Many companies, including several of our global, best-in-class customers, are well on their way to mastering Social CRM to deliver increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, customer advocacy and a meaningful ROI. I?ll talk about some of these companies in my presentation at the upcoming the Sales Management 2.0 Conference in Philadelphia on March 5 at 9:15 a.m. (check out the full agenda)

Social CRM is not going away as the payback is overwhelmingly positive, which is why I strongly believe that Social CRM is the way of the future; it takes CRM to an entirely new level in terms of understanding your customers and deepening your relationship with them.

Posted by - jennifermq @ 10:42 am

Source: http://ismguide.com/blog/?p=546

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