Analytics and Data Mining,Social CRM
It’s been a month since I attended Cloudforce in Paris, followed bythe Radian6 User Conference in Boston – so I thought it would be about time to gather my ideas and impressions and ‘commit them to paper’, so to speak. Especially in the light of the acquisition of the latter by the former just before the events. Salesforce clients in particular will stand to gain through the connection of social customer insights to the Sales and Service Clouds, by identifying new opportunities to engage with customers and to explore the customer’s context in order to facilitate service interactions.
Analytics and Data Mining,ROI,Social CRM
I have been reading some very interesting books about strategies around becoming a customer-driven organisation and also about the benefits of Customer Engagement Programs (more on that in later posts). In the discussion around Social CRM we agree that it is beneficial to business to engage the Social Customer, but what seems to be more difficult to articulate is the Business Value Proposition – why should a company invest in Customer Engagement Programs in conjunction with CRM? What value is in it for the company and what is in it for the customers? We also talk about the need to move from value-in-exchange thinking to value-in-use. What tangible benefits are there for companies to take a a customer Lifetime Value approach rather than concentrate on the sale? Or simply, how can Social CRM Strategies can provide a significant impact to the bottom line.
Analytics and Data Mining,Social CRM
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.
Analytics and Data Mining,Collaboration,Enterprise 2.0,ROI,Social CRM
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.
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