CHIPOTLE AND ITS SOCIAL CRM STRATEGY

Chipotle  is one of the fastest-growing restaurant companies in the United States. 

With 1,300+ locations, and a clear social customer service strategy, Chipotle needed a scalable solution to provide business insights, keep pace with its growth, and expand to address social media over time.

You might be asking yourself, how is Chipotle achieving its Social CRM strategy?

They are using a Social CRM tool called Service Cloud by Sales Force.

This tool was ranked # 1 in 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for Customer Service Contact Centers:

2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for Customer Service Contact Centers

So how does Chipotle leverage the Sales Force tool to achieve the customer contact and integration they look for?

• By using the multi-channel contact center provided by Sales force, Chipotle maintains a record of all customer service inquires. In this way, agents and administrators have in one central location SLA´s and visibility over customer’s needs.

• Service cloud has an Agent Console that allows to integrate back-office systems into the console to give agents one screen for the entire service process.  With this functionality, Chipotle has integrated its back office systems for reporting.

•   Chipotle has a new team that is entirely devoted to listening to conversations about its brand and building even closer connections to customers. They are using the Social Support feature that allows to listen to customers in over 200M social media channels, filter actionable social posts, and respond to customers in the channel of their choice. As of today, Chipotle has more than 2 Million likes in Facebook with a 95.28 response rate.

• Chipotle identify trends as they develop and like to find problems that may be general of several of their stores (quality of a supplier for example). They are able to do this with the Analytics and Reports feature, where they can see in real time reports and dashboards with a few mouse clicks and no calls for IT support.

Despite what it may seem, Chipotle’s social CRM approach is not only the typical close contact and incisive relation strategy that most enterprises explore to ensure certain communication and customer relations. Considering it is a higher scale/gourmet fast food chain restaurant, its products are more customized to their consumer’s requirements; therefore this conversation becomes inevitable, especially considering that food trends are variable.

The most important reason for Chipotle to stress such is the fact that their customers are part of the selection of the ingredients that go in their food, rather than just choosing a specific meal.  So, in a substantial measure the outcome of their products depend on the customers, on how informed they are about their choices, and about how informed chipotle is about their customer’s preferences.

In conclusion, social CRM is very relevant in most businesses, in some cases it is necessary due to the fact that not only your target is a sensitive massive amount of people but also that their response directly affects the product quality.