Social CRM Ideas by Mark Tamis

I met with Bernard Parisot and Catherine Chapuis of Net7 in Paris today to exchange with them on the subject of Social CRM. Net-7 consists of a number of C-Level Executives who have founded a company to provide expertise to Senior Management in many different sectors. They have often come across the issues involved implementing CRM systems so I highly value their input and experience!

The key point that I took away from this meeting is that not only do you need to put the right Social CRM tools in place to better communicate with your client base, you also need to gear your organisation in order to create a mindset that facilitates this interaction. Not only do internal employees need to come to grips with using the tools, analysing the data that comes out of them, but they also need to understand that they need to reach out and communicate with the other ‘silos’ that exist within their company. Information should flow freely and correlations should bubble up in order to create a synergy that will help to better serve the customer and provide her with what she is looking for.

Not only does a company looking to integrate Social CRM need to acquire the technology to allow them to interact with the customer and analyse data patterns, but also change organisational behaviour to become the much-touted ‘Enterprise 2.0’  – all this to better serve the customer’s needs. This is where experience and expertise can be a great asset – look at what is available when choosing your CRM system, be it from the vendor’s Professional Services or your favourite SI!

The other main topic is convincing the C-Suite crowd of the ROI that can be obtained by the implementation of this extension to traditional CRM – but will be the subject of another blogpost 🙂