Social CRM « Social CRM ideas by Mark Tamis

Social Learning and Customer Engagement

9 12 2009

One of the approaches to improving Customer Engagement and Experiences I’d like to explore is the potential to include customers, partners and suppliers in the Social Learning process. One of the drawbacks of an customer ideation platform/community is that more than 99% of the ideas are never looked at or implemented because they do not take into account the business context and constraints.

Whilst ideation may be a good source for innovation for companies, they can be a source of dissatisfaction for those customers who submitted ideas if they do not receive any acknowledgement for the effort they put into it. So rather than feeling closer to your brand and becoming advocates for it, the quite opposite may occur.

The approach that I would advocate is to educate the customer about your brand and its environment, even let them actively get involved in your internal Social Learning processes of continously striving to gain new knowledge and insights. By infusing ideas from outside of the silos of your organisation, you may discover innovative ideas that will give your company a competitive advantage.

Crowdsourcing has lost favour a little due to the number of uninformed suggestions that bubble up and which generate a lot of overhead to percolate into useful innovations. Smartsourcing has been put forward as a better approach, relying on the ‘better elements’ in your community to exchange with for customer insights. As such I agree with this, but I believe there is an even greater opportunity for informed innovation through the education and deeper implication of those we wish to engage with for smartsourcing by implicating them in collaborative learning.

Education and customer collaboration has the potential to create a real and very deep level of engagement, and thus the germination of fervent customer advocates, who in turn entice others to join this process (and increase the smartsourcing base for qualified innovation).

As Harold Jarche points out in the comments below, I herewith add that the objective of this type of collaborative learning would be to close the loop, not only take the feedback but reinjecting it back into the customer communitites and so on with insights so that we get a virtuous learning cycle. And by being open with your social learning approach, you will lower the barrier for new entrants and thus new points of view and sources for innovation, as well as sending a clear signal to the rest of the customer base that you are listening and collaborating to take their needs into account.

There is of course the (perceived?) risks of competitors glaning information and using it to their advantage, but examples have shown that this risk can actually be a driver for more rapid innovation integration such as Sage has shown with its ACT! community.

To summarize, I believe there is an opportunity to create a collaborative community learning platform that will ultimately lead to informed ideation and nurture more fervent customer advocates.

Let me know your thoughts, am I completely off-track, or is this the TGV to Customer Engagement?

Comments : 21 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Online Customer Communities

The Future of the Training Department

6 12 2009

In my previous role at BEA Systems/Oracle, I created and managed a Professional Services business unit for training clients on the implementation of Enterprise Portals (including Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Content Management, Integration of third-party products) and Business Process Management tools. I have been exchanging with many people on twitter, mainly on the topic of Social CRM, but I keep my eye open to the topic of Enterprise Learning, and from time to time I exchange tweets with Frédéric Domon (@fdomon). So I was happy to be asked to contribute to the Enterprise Collaborative Initiative

Enterprise Collaborative - Ecollab 250x250

Social Learning seems to me to be an innovative approach to continuous learning (I am an eternal student of life myself). From what I understand, the idea is to use the web 2.0 to enable free-flow collaborative learning that builds upon the insights of others and leads to new ones. This is advocated in opposition to the more traditional, structured instructor-led top-down approach to learning (tell me if I’m wrong?).

Though I do believe that there is a valid argument to the collaborative approach, I believe there should be a juxtaposition with the traditional one. In my opinion be, what is learned through collaborative learning should formalised, structured an made available as traditional learning. The main reason behind this thinking is that there is a risk to create barriers to new entrants to access and acquire the knowledge of the ‘regulars’. One could argue that the regulars could do knowledge transfer – which is great in theory – but who has the resources to do so (time, effort, motivation)? I think it will simply not scale.

I would advocate the following schema for new entrance to empower newcomers to become active contributors.

Formal training

Baseline knowledge transfer (developed through a ‘community effort’, extracted from the results of collaborative learning process) to acquire the thinking patterns, guiding principles or just plain knowledge elements.

Skills and knowledge Transfer

Exchange with and guidance from the community to put into practice, get up to speed,

Collaborative Exchange

Continuous learning to further one’s own ideas and incorporating those of others, attracting newcomers to infuse new insights and ideas, and synthetisation, formalisation and diffusion of current knowledge to reduce barriers to entry

The training department can play an important role, especially in the the formalisation and diffusion area, assisting newcomers in their entry and identifying those whom they can help in improving their social learning skills in order to improve the collaborative learning experience for all.

When getting a customer or system integrator up to speed for successful project implementation, my experience has found that it was more beneficial to have everyone talking the same language and understand the base principles (base knowledge), and have this followed through by co-development with subject-matter experts (the Consulting department) to acquire the Best Practices. This I believe was a good basis for both the customer and integrator to effectively communicate and progress in unison towards the desired outcome of the project, whilst leaving sufficient leeway for collaborative learning to achieve improvements beyond the inital goals. Even though the primary subject of Entreprise Collaborative concentrates on internal-facing issues, the above ideas are valid in this context as well.

Would you agree with this point of view? Please leave your thoughts below so that we can all learn from this together

Comments : 4 Comments »

Categories : Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0

Customer Contexts

3 12 2009

[draft]

When reading through the tweets and the post on Social CRM I often get the feeling that we are focusing too much on the individual customer. We store personal and business informaion in our CRM system, we keep track of what they have bought as well as their history of interactions with Customer Service and Support (or at least we should be…). We try to analyse, extract leads and forecast whether they will be buying from us in the future or inciting them to do so through push marketing (informing us that our little niece Suzy’s birthday in just under a week, so we should buy her a gift through our online store…).

I also hear more and more often that the major difficulty that we will be facing is the potential for data/information overload (‘drinking from a waterhose’) – even though Nenshad Bardoli argues that this will be dealt with eventually). The individual customers that we have in our systems suddenly are tweeting and bleating all over the internet, and curretn theory seems to say that we need to capture ALL of that so that we can then let lose the ever more sophisticated and more expensive Analytics Engines & Business Intelligence solutions on the data in order to extract ‘insights’ to guide our business and customer engagement with this individual.

Although it seems to make sense at first glance, is it not that we can’t see the forest because of the trees? Are we not focusing to much on the individual to miss out on the bigger trends? Customized service as opposed to being treated as cattle when contacting a call center is like Nirvana, but if we focalize to much on this as the main objective of Social CRM, do we not not risk getting too close when all the customer wants is to be ‘just friends’ (or said differently, ‘get out of my face!’)?

As an individual, it could be that I am not particularly looking for your company to engage with me. Engagement takes time - which is ultimately my rarest resource - so I want to optimize the time I need to spend with you (so that I can have more time on Farmville or socializing with my friends…about your brand for example . What I do want you to do is know enough about me, my situation, my preoccupations, my conversations with others, my likes and dislikes and so on…in brief, my context, so that you can get me to my desired outcome as efficiently as possible (and I may even volunteer some information about me to speed this up).

So it’s not about the tweets I twitter out and blogs I post, but rather about which conversations and exchanges I’m having and with whom, at what moment in time, what my current sentiment is and how it evolves, how my friends’ sentiment evolve, how the sentiment of people in my network evolves - or put simply the context in which I am evolving. Ideally, when I do need to exchange with you in any way, I want you to take all this into account and treat me as an individual. Moreover I want you to take into consideration that, whilst you are exchanging with me, I should be considered as a representative of my ‘tribe’, and if you do not treat me the way I feel I should be treated my tribe may sanction that behaviour.

So what am I trying to get at here? Basically, I’m trying to make the point that even though it may be technically feasible to store reams and reams of data about each customer in your CRM system (and your database vendor will love you for it), it would be more interesting to store information that provides you with the context in which the customer is evolving, metadata that will allow you same-time access to context facebook/linkedin/twitter or whatever other channel that is appropriate hobbies

Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : Analytics and Data Mining, Social CRM

Social CRM for SMEs : WeCanDo.Biz Review

20 11 2009

I’ve been out and about the last couple of weeks, first to Holland to the Dutch CRM Awards where Paul Greenberg gave a great Keynote presentation on The Social Customer, and then to the UK to meet with some interesting people to further my understanding of Social CRM – what it is and how it could provide value to how business is done. As I continue with my journey I will try to give you my impressions as I go along.

I met with Ian Hendry of WeCanDoBIZ, who is a great guy with some very sound ideas. This being the small world it is, I discovered through LinkedIn that we had a mutual acquaintance called Myla Memon who had worked for both him and myself in the past! I got in touch with her as well and she made the arrangements for Ian and myself to meet up – networking in action . After our exchange concerning Social CRM and WeCanDoBiz, she subsequently joined us for dinner and we had a great evening.

Ian has set up a business based on a very simple premise: there are aprroximately 4 million small & medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) in the UK, and they are increasingly looking to the internet to for new business opportunities through networking. He had actually commisioned a study in the autumn of 2008 to validate his impressions, and found out that for 48% of the respondants the main reason for using the internet for SME’s was because they wanted more business. Preliminary results for this year this figure is going to be near 65%!

If you take into consideration that most of these entrepreneurs are not what you could describe in general as being very ‘technology-literate’, it also means that if you want to offer a service to help them improve their business, it needs to be straight-forward, practical and cost-efficient, with a very clear value-proposition.

WeCanDoBIZ (WCDB) started off as a classic B2B Business Directory where each member is listed per its category and in ordered based on the number of endorsements they have received (a search function is also available). Once you have identified someone you think you can do business with, you can contact them directly by using the details provided or add them to yourWCDB contacts. They also have many connectors to import your LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo and other contact management systems.

They have also included a full-fledged online CRM system which they have dubbed WeCanDoCRM (powered by InTouch). This system is provided on a freemium basis, does Leads/Sales and Contact History tracking, Calender, Email and SMS campaigns and so on. Anyone who is in My Contacts on WCDB, and approved (that is both ends have confirmed the relationship) automatically get copied into your contacts in WCDC. It’s quite likely that WCDC will contain many more contacts from other sources though, such as LinkedIn, email, Twitter, CSV files and the like. There is a tool on the website that brings the contacts over, but this is not done automatically. Once they have been carried over, they are synched without further ado. So far though it seems to me that the service delivers on what you would expect and provides a simple way of getting SME’s to connect and manage their interactions. I think they have great potential to set themself like a multi-sided market provider (see point no 7 in G.Hill’s manifesto on social business)

“So what makes all this Social CRM?” you may ask. Whilst I was there, Ian explained to me that they have added a new channel that will dramatically change the way supply and demand are matched between members. Tere is the basic Twitter search function that will find all messages containing your keywords, but it gets much more interesting for premium (members are called Pro Networkers) with the ability to create and respond to Biz Needs. Where WCDB innovates is in their use of Twitter/BizNeed to automate Sales Leads generation in the CRM System.

Rather than have members look at Tweetdeck all day and hopefully pick up on something relevant, the system automates the whole process so that all that needs to be done is look in the CRM Leads section and see a list of opportunities based on Biz Needs tweeted by other members. This list also contains the possility to better qualify the prospect by allowing you to obtain more detailed information on the company, as well as endorsement received (which is basically about reputation). A further novelty is that the need can be created as a leads for multiple suppliers that can all put in a bid (as long as the filter criteria are met).

WeCanDoBiz’s approach basically functions as Esteban Kolsky’s Pivot Point. The WCDB community uses the Twitter channel, rules then funnel this into the CRM system as an actionable insight (a Sales lead). But rather than be dealt with by a single supplier, you can potentially have many responding. There is an advantage for the suppliers because they have qualified leads with a client base that they would never have touched before in the past, and the same reasoning stands as well for those looking to fulfill there need. More qualified opportunities and better options.

Now let’s take a look at the system design. WeCanDoBiz twitter-follows all members and analyses the tweets that start off with “I need”, “We need”, “looking for”, “can recommend”, “can suggest” and a few others. The rest of the message is then “scraped” for its content and matched against the business keywords (currently a maximum of 10 for free users, 50 for Pro Networkers) that are set up in each member’s profile. Operators AND and OR and LIKE or exact matches can be used to filter the leads before they automatically create an entry in the CRM system. Currently the supplier needs to go back into the interface to refresh the current leads (maybe in the future they can choose to be notified by email or SMS that there are new leads in the system?).

In the WCDC interface he can then separate the wheat from the chaff by for example drilling down to get more context; check company details, endorsements (reputation), tweet history, twitter member lists and so on. They then can decide what action to take (without forcing them to go through the CRM interface for example if they feel more comfortable to pick the phone and call) and track all other interactions in the system as you would in standard SFA software.

As such, the idea is very simple, and very (cost) effective and has the advantage that it rapidly connects businesses that normally speaking never have know of eachother’s existence.

Where to next? When looking at how WeCanDoBiz could provide more value to their members with insights derived through interactions with the #scrm crew, I believe there is great potential for them to start an online community where members can discuss doing business as Small/Medium-sized companies (Running a Small Business is a Social Object too). There are many pitfalls when starting a company, and sometimes it is good to exchange experiece with others. WeCanDoBiz can feed the community with information and even act as a connector, and in turn receive valuable feedback and insights on how their service can be continuously improved to better meet the needs of its members. I understand that they are looking into Google Wave as many of its members are currently using Gmail, but I think it may make sense to look at a forum-like solution that allows monitoring and analysis as well to get a better understanding of overall community health as its usage grows.

I wish Ian the best of luck in this venture and will be watching the evolution of WeCanDoBiz closely!

If any of you have feedback, questions or suggestions about the above, you’re very welcome to provide your comments below

Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : Social CRM

On Social CRM Options

5 10 2009

The discussion around Social CRM is entering a phase whereby we are trying to move away from turning around in circles about semantics, towards a more practical and pragmatic approach that businesses can identify with so as to consider implementing it. I won’t deal with CRM Vendors here, as Social CRM can be seen as an extension to CRM. As a primer on SCRM I suggest you look at Bill Band’s article on Customer Think. The main idea that we all do agree upon is that we need to become customer-centric in order to respond to their changing needs and expectations, and this may have some major ramifications on the way we organise our businesses.

Wim Rampen recently did a must-read post on Real-Options for Social CRM, with great comments from the #scrm crew. If you’re like me, you have been looking around for what these options could be - sifting through all the information links provided through the accidental community on Twitter #scrm- so that you can start mapping your own options and seeing where they would fit in an approach that is apt for your business situation. Below I have tried to describe some of the the landmarks that you may encounter on your journey. Please join in and tell me what I’ve missed!

1. Monitoring and Analysis

We have settled on the idea that we cannot manage what is being said about us (as long there is any Buzz we should be happy, right?). What we do need to do is understand what is being said and for which reasons. We also need to do some introspection and find out whether we are aligned with customer perceptions about our business, and this is where monitoring and analysis comes in.

- Social Media Monitoring
Twitter, FB, Search Engine Result Analysis, crawling non-managed forums, or whatever this month’s Black is (according to Altimeter you need at least 6 channels to be an engagementdb.com Maven).

- Sentiment Analysis
Natural Language Processing in order to extract opinions - automation of Social Media Analysis

- Customer Surveys, Website-, Call Center-, Customer Support Feedback, Email Campaign Results
Feedback from other channels should not be neglected - Social CRM is not only about feedback obtained through Social Media channels. I suggest reading Aggregated Stats Are Key to Social Media ROI

The return of this could be used to shape your Marketing Strategy (Social Media and traditional) or for even for Lead Generation. Vendors in this area are Radian6, Scout Labs (see list), or for the budgetarily-challenged Open Source/Freemium

2. Social Media Marketing

I know I am over-simplifying, but sometimes I think SMM has sofar mostly been facilitating banner clickthroughs based on adwords and user browsing history and the likes to push trafic to brochure websites in the best case, and buckshot email spam in the worst. Consumers are however becoming more web-savvy and filter out these ads from the content they are interested in so this is becoming less effective.

Community and conversation is all - if the consumers trust the community, they will extend the trust to the brand (Brand and Marketing trends for 2010). People have spontaneously gathered for example on Facebook, now companies are trying to get in on the act by setting up their own Fan Pages (at their own risk and peril, I must add…). These communities offer the company the opportunity to engage in the conversation, but it still very much an unstructured, resource intensive approach. My take on SMM will be aimed at driving people towards and participate in Brand Communities (point 3) where monitoring what is happening and identifying causal relationships will be more manageable. See Junta42 42+ Social Media Marketing Tools.

3. Brand Communities

Providing a platform that can house a community around your Brand and attracts prospective customers would be the next step. The objective is not to gain control, but rather better monitor what is going on, find opportunities, work on your reputation by adding value rater than pushing a message, and react in a timely manner to any issues.

I would like to split this out into three separate areas (even though they could share the same platform provided by the same vendor)

- Social Support Communities
Peer-to-peer Support can be great means for finding out what customers have issues with concerning your offering, as well as deflect calls from your Customer Support, leaving them with more time the more difficult cases or just to go beyond the Call Handling Time and focus on the Customer Interaction (see Cicero). To me this type of community because sometimes its super-users can provide more value than has its merits for because ROI can be shown (see John Bauer’s comment on SCRM for SMBs, reduce by at least 10% your case load).

- Social Objects Communities
In an earlier post, I set out to give a name to another type of community that has as its purpose to provide a platform for people to socialize around “Social Objects”. Barnes & Noble Review would be a good example of this. It is said that participants have a higher average customer spend and higher customer lifetime spend on the B&N site (any hard datafacts, Lithium?). Furthermore upsell opportunities are placed into the community site to drive revenue.

- Ideation
Behind this is the objective to create communities where customers would put forward ideas for the company (crowdsourcing). Where they have failed is that the ideas not always were in line with the operational realities or objectives of the company, and are often left unanswered (leading to dissatisfaction). Graham Hill has written an interesting article on co-creation that has some insights on what could be a better approach to co-creation.

Players here are Lithium Technologies, Helpstream, Parature. Prem Kumar recently mentioned on John F. Moore’s blog that there are Open Source solutions out there, I think they do not (yet) have the monitoring & analysis capabilities that we’d be looking for here

4. Feedback Management

Our friend Esteban Kolsky is very keen on this one. The main idea behind this is that we take existing data available through the CRM system about our customers (not only profile information) and mix it so that get a full 360° view that includes history and information gathered from monitoring and analysis as well as information from 3rd parties. Just as there is a market now for Credit Score informatin, there may be a time when companies sell trend information to other companies as a by-product. Imagine if PayPal or eBay were to make historical purchase data available!

FM has the potential to analyse and determine a response and who should be dealing with formulating it (add a dash of Business Process Management?). The wikipedia link has a list of vendors, no actor has a significant advantage as far as I know

5. Response Communities

In the way that Brand Communities can be used for customers to share and collaborate, the same platform could also be used to let cross-functional teams (and even cross-organisational if we also include partners and suppliers) collaborate on the response to the events generated in EFM. Super-users could be identified and nurtured in the same way as in the Brand Communities.

Response Communities only really make sense once your company has learned how to collaborate internally – which takes us to Enterprise 2.0 (the collaboration kind, not the knowledge management one…). Internal networking will create the right mindset to then go out and collaborate with customers, for value co-creation.

6. Insourcing

Insourcing is about allowing your employees to collaborate directly with your customers, such as your store personnel providing product informationor answer support questions through the likes of Twitter (see Best Buy’s Twelpforce). This can increase the breadth of your response by added more voices to the conversation than just your customer service and support reps, but increases the risks of potential blunders. Good, clear and precise policies can help to mitigate these risks.

I am aware that I have probably missed out on some elements (and have not developed each of the bullet-points sufficiently) but my objective here is to give a quick overview, a starting point. Please chime in and add your point of view!

Comments : 28 Comments »

Categories : Analytics and Data Mining, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, ROI, Social CRM

Social Media Communities

20 09 2009

About a week ago John Moore @JohnFMoore put his stake in the ground on what Social Support Communities are in the arena of Social CRM. His definition centres around their purpose of conversation around dealing Support questions, for example the Dell Support Site. This got me thinking about what Lithium and Helpstream o.a. actually do, and I believe they cover can a far wider purpose.

A couple of days ago I stumbled on an excellent piece of out-of-the-box thinking (and rant) called ‘the hughtrain’, first started in 2004 in response to ‘the cluetrain’. What stuck was what Hugh MacLeod described as ‘Social Objects’. (The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson has a nice synopsis of Jaiku Founder, Jyri Engstrom’s “Social Objects” idea).

The main idea is that people use Social Objects (not necessarily limited to physical object, but they can be ideas, faith, culture, events, activities such as bowling etc…) as a way to socialize, which is an ingrained basic human need. Quote: “The interesting thing about the Social Object is the not the object itself, but the conversations that happen around them”.

To take this back to our Social Media Communities discussion, we can find some excellent examples such as iRobot and Barnes & Noble Review. The brand provides a convenient platform where people passionate about their Social Objects can gather and exchange (and salivate) over them. Think of the Star Wars franchise – every guy in the world would probably want to be Luke Skywalker. Put a plastic Light Sabre in his hands and there is a good chance he will start swashbuckling whilst making the characteristic ‘zoom-zoom’ sounds . Star Wars is a shared Social Object to which people can relate and start conversing about.

By implementing Social Objects Communities and offering incentives for people to gather there - such as exclusive content, or just lively discussions - around which they can socialize, the brand has an opportunities to exchange with a captive, passionate audience and better understand their needs.

Below I will quote John Moore’s definitions, and add my comments on Social Objects Communities. Many points overlap of course but there is one main difference, one that offers a tremedous opportunity for improving brand equity.

Social Support Communities are not Social CRM [and neither are Social Objects Communities (SOC)...]

SSC is a discussion group, a forum, on steroids.So is SOC
SSC incorporates social networks as additional channels through which customer conversations can occur. Same goes for SOC
SSC enables customers to directly converse with other customers. Companies and partners can also be equal participants in this conversation, but are often playing the role of moderators in the examples provided by the webinar participants. Again, same thing
SSC is a small subset of Social CRM, a very small subset. Ditto
SSC focuses on the customer almost exclusively, ignoring in large part, other participants in the marketplace including the company, partners, and competitors. Same thing
SSC focuses on customer support services. It fails to provide value in marketing, sales, finance, or other aspects where CRM is utilized. Hold on, this is the main differentiator!

Barnes & Noble Review is a great example where Social Objects Communities provides value in marketing and sales. The content is rich, it has a very positive effect on B&N’s image, and average customer spend is increased for participants in the Review as compared to visitors that only go to the webstore. Nike+ is another example where add-on sales are generated by selling enabling gadgets that allow you to share and compare your ‘Nike’ experience with others.

The other ‘pierre à l’édifice’ that I would like to add is the notion of Hosted and Non-Hosted Social Media Communities. Hosted implies that the brand manages the platform on which the community they can hang out (. The advantage to a non-hosted community is that it is easier to monitor and analyse behaviour and provide for the needs of the community (define the respone). In theory this monitoring could be done on non-hosted communities as well, but the data gathered will be less rich and less useful for understanding the customers.

Whilst SSC focuses on dealing with the ‘unpleasant’ side of unmet expectations (‘I have a problem, how do I get it fixed without wasting too much of my time’), Social Objects Communities have a whole different purpose and can be a tremendous opportunity for engaging with and responding to the community – for Brand Marketing in particular. Help people express their passion, understand what makes them tick and add value to the conversation as an equal.

Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : Customer Communities, Online Customer Communities

The Paradigm Shift is in the People, Social CRM is a Response to it

17 09 2009

I think the actual paradigm shift is the realisation of the consumers that they now have power derived from choice and the means to share and influence others with a far greater reach through the use of Social Media. We can now interact in far greater numbers, when we choose and share our experiences about how happy or unhappy we are about your business. Happy customers can drive more people to become customers. When we voice our gripes, you had better listen and meet our expectations to make us happy again. We have no obligation to do business with you, there are others out there and we’ll go elsewhere. As a group we have power, but you’d better listen to me as an individual!

The current reaction of business to adapt to this shift is to become customer-centric, to listen and adapt their offer to the changing needs and expectations and ensure a happy customer that come back and and influence others to come. CRM is the touch-point between the business and the consumers and can serve to formulate and coordinate the response of the company to ensure a positve experience. Social CRM is about extending the touchpoints to include Social Media, both internal to the company and external.

This customer-centric response plays into consumer risk-averse behaviour to obtain and repeat a positive experience. By taking away the risk of dealing with the company, the company will incite the consumer to avoid taking a risk of not meeting expectations when going to the competition, a potentially negative experience.

Technology is only but a means to give the customer the experience she is expecting. Social CRM is an attemp to optimize a company’s organisation in order to realise this experience in the manner that is most adapted to the Customer’s needs and expectations, whilst keeping in mind the company’s business continuity objectives.

Currently the focus is mainly on the external-facing tools that link CRM to Social Media - such as Online Customer Communities - mainly because this is where businesses can measure ROI, do profiling, monitoring and analysis (Helpstream, Lithium, Fuse, Radian6…). Other companies have been focusing on internal-facing tools, such as CRM with Web 2.0 Collaboration tools for helping the salesforce do their business better (Oracle etc.). As the market matures, these two approaches will become better integrated and like include what we now specify Enterprise 2.0, and evolve into “Social Business”.

Social CRM is about people and engagements, and about organizing the enterprise to nurture and value relationships to optimize the Customer Experience to co-create value that is mutually beneficial. The balance of power is changing with the (very!) main-stream adoption of Social Media, formulating a response (such as Social CRM) will be a fun journey!

Comments : 7 Comments »

Categories : Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM

The Boardroom’s Tipping-Point for Social CRM Implementation

9 09 2009

Bob Warfield recently posted a great article with the title The Customer, as Social CRM, is the Fourth Pillar of CRM. I posted the following in reply, for you to muse over.

Customer-centricity is definitely the way forward, and I like the idea of the customer as a stakeholder in co-determining the company’s success. Enterprise 2.0 is potentially a great basis to promote collaboration between employees. CRM is the touchpoint between them and the outside world. Social CRM adds the dimension of opening up the company to the customers, allowing for better communication, mutual understanding and foremost enables a collaboration model to be put in place between internal employees and the customer community. Many benefits are expected, such as co-creation, peer-to-peer support, First Call Resolution, brand image improvement, opportunity detection…

The question that now arises would be up to which point we open up, just how much before it becomes counter-productive. When I go to a restaurant, I don’t expect them to open up the kitchen to me – I’m there to enjoy the great food that is prepared there (and I can’t cook as well as the Chef). You could reply that some fancy restaurants do actually showcase the kitchen and you can see your food whilst it is being prepared (great entertainment!), but that doesn’t mean I can just wonder in, touch the ingredients, fiddle with the stove and visit at leisure. Other patrons would not appreciate.

The biggest obstacle to change will be not come from the customers, but rather from the Boardroom. Defining where the tipping-point for Social CRM (and Enterprise 2.0) implementation is for Upper Management will be the next big hurdle. It is not just about the ROI of a Social CRM software solution and its pay-back, but rather a “remise en cause” of the entire Business Model with far-reaching consequences for the way the company goes about its affairs. How much investment will it take to retrain the workforce to “think customer”, to implement and use the tools effectively? How much resistance to change will be encountered and how to deal with it? What will the implementation timeframe be and the cost of starting off too late? And most essentially, what is the ultimate overall pay-off. The Boardroom needs to justify its action to its Shareholders, and more specifically justify the expenditure of Social CRM in conjunction with Enterprise 2.0. If the metrics of the costs and the expected benefits are not clear it will be tough to swallow.

To summarize, the Boardroom will need to determine where the the tipping-point is to implement Social CRM, what level of customer-company collaboration they’re after, and in exchange for which expected benefits, and this needs to be understood by the shareholders.

Comments : 3 Comments »

Categories : ROI, Social CRM

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