PlanetNTF

Guest post by Chris Bucholtz

Imagine that, for some reason, your business decided to serve only customers who called you on the telephone. Walk-ups would be ignored; mail orders go directly into the circular file; emails are be deleted without ever being opened.

That would be dumb, wouldn’t it?

But that’s a little like the attitude that people who deride social CRM are bringing to their businesses.

Increasingly, customers are living their lives in social media. It’s where they talk about their lives – people, places and things. In fact, you might sell some of those things they’re talking about.

So why would you deliberately ignore those conversations? By not having a social CRM strategy, that is what you’re doing. It’s like you’re excluding potential customer information because it’s being provided in a format that’s not convenient for you.

So start taking advantage of social CRM and social media. First, start listening to what’s being said about your business, and bring technologies into play that allow you to record and organize that data. Next, start thinking about ways to use what you’re hearing to identify places where you can join into the conversation. The word “social” implies a two-way exchange of ideas; that means opportunities to identify potential new customers and to foster loyalty with the customers you already have.

This can seem like a lot of work – and it can be. But, like anything in the CRM world, the key to effectively introducing these new concepts is to match them with pain points that exist in your organization. Start gradually and expand. If your sales team is lacking data to build rapport with potential customers, use social to give them more data. If support is being criticized in social media, build a social component into your customer support organization to allow them to satisfy these customers. If marketing is searching for insight on how the company is perceived by its target customers, give them the ability to listen in to what customers are saying.

Social CRM is not a replacement for CRM – none of these capabilities can be fully utilized without a CRM solution deployed and functioning as a foundation for your efforts. But it will open up an entirely new dimension for your CRM efforts – and since it’s a dimension where your customers are dwelling more and more every day, it makes sense that you join them there.

With 17 years as a technology and business under his belt, Chris Bucholtz took over the role of editor in chief of the CRM Outsiders blog in 2011. He first focused on customer relationship management as the editor of InsideCRM, then moved to Forecasting Clouds in 2009 to continue honing his views on how the discipline of CRM can impact the entire business.