Michael MaozAre you having an easy time or a difficult time with this term, Social CRM? Here is where I am on the topic: The background is that I spend most of my professional life helping organizations with their customer engagement processes. That simply means ‘post-sale’ unless you are a government (and don’t call them the income confiscation folks – they don’t think it’s funny!), or an educational/philanthropic organization. But you get the point: I don’t look after upfront marketing or sales. It is supporting the customer on the website, on the telephone, at the kiosk, or with the cable guy. And now it is about “how can organizations tap into the increasing desire/demand of customers to participate in the creation of solutions, or sharing advice and tips and best practices?”
On this exciting area, which has been cooking at a low heat for eight years, I feel that Social CRM carries a lot of freight. I mean a lotta lotta freight – like a Burlington Northern Santa Fe Coal train running over your foot kind of weight.
I’m afraid folks are going to miss the freshness of the approach. This is not about taking Siebel software and bolting on some social bits, and it is not about taking social software and hoping for a miracle. In my area, this is Social Software for Customer Engagement and Support. It is the newest addition to the Customer Service area, and as it pertains to the post-sales experience, Customer Engagement. It is how customers are creating their own content, videos, and solutions to problems. It is about integrating their recommendations and impressions into your existing customer systems, and getting the information back to marketing, or logistics, or quality. It is about being aware that they have a certain sentiment and level of commitment or indifference to you and your brand. And bringing that, too, into your existing systems. So, these are Customer Engagement Systems, but we are stuck, so far, with Social CRM. We are a bit at a crossroads, and maybe a rose by any other… and I am making too big a deal about the term. You’ll get it, right?
I think that this will be the most innovative area of focus for service organizations over the next five years, with a new set of vendors entering the field from their broader focus on External Social Software. These companies will need to focus on three processes 1) to help customers engage one another on the web and on their mobile devices, 2) to foster engagement between employees of the enterprise and the customer, and 3) to improve the dialogue amongst colleagues inside the enterprise working on behalf of the customer to resolve issues. (and of course the analytics and scale, too)
I have my eye on some vendors , but right now they are representative only, and the list will change rapidly over the coming 12 months: Communispace, GetSatisfaction.com, Jive Software, Lithium, Mzinga, and Salesforce.com. Each has a different approach, with some similarities.
Let me know what you think, eh?
Category: CRM Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Tags:
7 responses so far ↓
1 Felix Velarde May 14, 2010 at 11:59 am
You seem to be focusing on the technology as opposed to the strategy. Technology serves strategy – it doesn’t drive it.
Social CRM (or SCRM) is about why we engage customers at specific points in the customer journey cycle: the ‘how’ is the easy bit. First we need to set out a strategy based on observations about the effectiveness of a given contact (or nudge or peer interaction), establish the motivation and any correlations between motivation and bahaviour, perhaps based on observations about demographics or situation. Once we have a strategy then we can call in the vendors.
As with most marketing communications, the vendors will advise based on their experience with their solution, not based on an holistic view. If you want to get involved in delivering Social CRM as a means to improve customer engagement and response, bring in a specialist in customer journey planning (or look up ‘eCRM agency’ in Google), and they’ll tell you who is best placed to provide the technology (or as in most cases, which technologies need to be employed), which will save you a lot of blundering about in the wrong direction.
2 Mike Fraietta May 14, 2010 at 10:54 pm
Michael,
Thanks for including Jive Software in your list of vendors, we greatly appreciate it. I really enjoyed the writeup; bringing some humor to this subject is always refreshing.
We have an brand-new, efficient system that they let me run that’s great for B2B, but I think Jive’s focus is on the enterprise and having customers and fans answer each other questions and support each other as you suggest in the third paragraph. A nice way of doing this is point-based system, with real rewards, to give the community incentive to assist each other (Who will be John Stockton?). When I first started at Jive, it took me a week or so to stop asking other folks in the company questions I had about our products and company. The answer was usually already discussed and explained in our internal community. I am now seeing the power of 2.0 software as I visit big-brand’s external communities. FAQs and forums are have been helpful, but I find it much more personal and social when dealing with 2.0 software. “Social CRM” is probably not the correct term for this…or is it? Either way, I think companies will find cost savings in by turning customer service over to a combination of it’s internal and public communities.
A couple other vendors I would keep my eye on are Attensity (recently acquired Biz360), BlueKiwi, SocialText, and Telligent.
Mike Fraietta I Director of Social Media I Jive Software I @MikeFraietta
3 Richard Brust May 15, 2010 at 10:51 am
Take a look at Nimble.com, send them a note and ask for a demo. It seems to meld nicely with what you describe…
4 Mike Williams May 17, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Hi Michael…great blog on an extremely relevant and timely topic. From a Mzinga perspective, Social CRM (or CES…you’re on to something!) is rooted in the one constant that continually challenges an organization regardless of the medium…communication.
I agree with Felix, the tools certainly play a role, but the affect a customer(s) voice can have on an organization and its customers is where the power truly lives. Mike also raises a good point; rewards are needed and provide incentive. The real incentive however is a customer actually \feeling\ like they’re being heard. Customers become a vital part of the process…whether it’s helping to extend the customer care channel, or driving a product roadmap.
Social CRM, if taken seriously, fundamentally changes the \support\ game from the inside out. It’s about proactive listening, genuine engagement and building the customer relationship.
Take care,
Mike Williams
VP of Customer Care, Mzinga
5 Evan Hamilton May 17, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Definitely one of the most readable posts on this subject I’ve seen lately.
There’s a lot of discussion out there but much of it is written to seem smart rather than to be helpful.
I agree with Felix in that the “why” is most important, but I think most large organizations have already grokked the “why” (or at least someone in the organization has). The “how” _is_ important because it’s easy to have good intentions and put in place something that totally strangles them.
UserVoice helps all three processes you mentioned (though we have lots of room to improve on point 3 and will be working towards that). Where the “how” is important here (and what sets us apart from sites like GetSatisfaction) is how we make votes a currency – every user only has 10 votes and can place a maximum of three towards a single idea. They get points back when an idea is implemented, creating a system where only the most-desired ideas float to the top and company interaction and action is key to maintaining the ecosystem.
Are we the be-all end-all of Social CRM? I don’t know, but I think focusing on the “how” is something that a lot of these services haven’t gotten to yet – they’re still pitching the “newness” of Social CRM, which is rapidly become less of a shiny new fascination and more of a process that needs to be actionable and organized.
Evan Hamilton
Community Manager
evan at uservoice dot com
6 Maria Ogneva May 18, 2010 at 2:33 am
Great point. I am actually in the middle of writing an article that talks, along other things, about why SocialCRM is a misnomer. That being said, I agree with you completely on the 3 major tasks it has to solve: socializing and aligning inside the enterprise, the business talking to consumers and consumers talking to each other. It’s about processes and the tech is there to augment and scale the processes.
I’d also add Attensity360 from Attensity Group to your watch list as well. Integrating (as a result of a recent merger) large-scale social media monitoring of Biz360 and advanced unstructured text analytics and routing capabilities of Attensity’s suite of products, will yield a product that empowers the enterprise to take action on each piece of social media content (Disclosure: I work there). We are building a social media platform that interprets social media data, prioritizes, routes and queues it up automatically, integrates with existing CRM data for a complete view of the customer, tracks, measures and recaps.
Exciting times indeed!
- Maria Ogneva
@themaria @attensity360
7 Beth Goldman May 20, 2010 at 6:16 pm
Social CRM is about being present on the social networks that your customers are already engaged in. Reach them where they are and use the knowledge you gain about them to enhance their experience with your company. I just attended Lithium’s conference on Community Management and Social CRM and gained many helpful insights on the topic.
You can check out my summary here: http://wp.me/p5wjc-gP