Collaboration,Enterprise 2.0,Social CRM
We are slowly coming to a common definition of Social CRM, but I suggest that we should actually be taking it far further. Social CRM is the link between Social Media, Online Customer Communities and traditional CRM (an extension to CRM, Paul Greenberg et al), and CRM is just a part of what we do within our companies to bring products and services to our customers.
Customer Communities,Online Customer Communities,Social CRM
The very promising field of Social CRM has been using english as its lingua franca to discuss and exchange ideas. I for example am Dutch, live in Paris and but I use English to express myself in this blog. Likewise, the #scrm discussions seem to take it for granted that online customer communities will use english, and thus these communities run the risk of missing out on solutions found in peer communities hosted in other languages.
In the perfect online customer community the best-of-breed solutions are selected, localised and transposed for the benefit of all the customers wherever they may be. China for example now has more internet users (est.338 million) than the USA has inhabitants – imagine the potential for crowd sourcing!
Collaboration,Enterprise 2.0,ROI,Social CRM,Traditional CRM Interaction
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.
Having been in Enterprise Software for most of my active career, I am now looking into how companies can use “Social Media” to improve the way they do their business. We have now come to the point where a definition is bubbling up (Paul Greenberg et al) that is useful to build upon.
The communication tools that are now available allow us to not only push our marketing messages out to potential customers (B2C) but also allow these customers to interact with our company, leading to higher satisfaction levels or even to customer-driven innovation (C2B). Furthermore by providing a channel accessible to all customers, everyone that is a (potential) stakeholder of our company’s products or services can communicate, facilitating peer-to-peer communication and support and Brand advocacy (C2C).
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