Social: All the Rage in the CRM Machine
Best practices for CRM are at the heart of enabling the vital roles of sales and marketing.
And Social CRM is rapidly creating a lot of buzz in this arena.
One of the exciting enabling technologies forming the underpinnings for today’s CRM is social media monitoring. My favorite company in this niche is Spiral16. Among other things, Spiral16 provides intelligence in near real-time, as well as valuable insight into customer’s sentiments and a platform for listening to, measuring and visualizing brands’ online presence. Spiral16 has the unique ability to scrape the entire web and capture highly relevant data, (by that I mean “clean’ data”, analyze it thoroughly, interpret the data and integrate it into other data sets and CRM packages to manage a variety of business metrics.
Integrating the data gleaned by companies like Spiral16 into your organization’s other data sets is essential since CRM has always included data from multiple channels.
It is imperative for organizations to link to and engage with your customers via which ever forms of channels they prefer to utilize. Over time, that meant adding emerging technologies to the channels which already existed to accommodate all the channels customers were using. Naturally, organizations who are wise about their CRM are adding social media to supplement existing channels like direct snail mail, e-mail, telephony, point of sale, their web sites, and SMS.
While “Social CRM” has become all the rage, it should be thought of as the addition of social media with the rest of the CRM channels. Please don’t make the mistake of becoming overzealous and opt to use social CRM only and forgo your current CRM channels. Social CRM is an extremely important component of multichannel CRM. However, by no means should the other CRM channels be abandoned.
Instead, companies must be dedicated to holistic approaches which allow them to align all aspects of their organization with the wants and needs of their customers. Enabling technologies that help facilitate this customer-centric process of business management include data mining and predictive analytics.
Smart companies will ratchet up the automation made possible by social CRM as they maintain their existing CRM channels and increase their overall customer data integration initiatives.