Social CRM, on the other hand, means having a dialogue with your customers in a rapid response manner linking consumer social and lifestyle data with their relationship with your company by gathering information from different platforms such as facebook, twitter, blogs, youtube, etc. Social CRM allows companies to react quickly to changing customer tastes and requests.
Social CRM enables a company to proactively involve customers in the process of validating new products and innovating existing ones. A company creates a fan page for your company or product in a social media. Customers who like your brand and products will sign up as fans, creating a venue for communication, marketing and networking. A company can follow conversations about its products for real-time market data and feedback, respond very quickly to negative feedback to maintain, regain or rebuild customer confidence.On the other hand, a customer can easily tell a company -- and everyone else -- about their experiences with the products, whether those experiences are good or bad, and ideas for future products or tweaks to current ones.
The following images from The “Brand Builder” blog describe the differences of traditional CRM and social CRM
The concept of social CRM is a new one but it has actually been around for quite some time in different forms. While not related to social networks, the next example shows how integrating the responses of a large company to customer dissatisfaction. In 1985 the Coca-Cola Company changed the taste of its main product – Coca-Cola. It has been done without validating customer need for a new product, instead the company just decided that it knew better what the customers wanted the customers themselves. What happened was that after several months of receiving bad feedback from customers Coca-Cola finally admitted that the new product was actually not an improvement compared to the old one, therefore the company switched back to the old recipe. After losing market share and public image the company finally admitted that it should have listened to its customers before just deciding it knows best for them. Coca-Cola, even with it being a large international company – did not utilize the power of CRM which was already known in 1985. If it would have had access to a CRM platform which would enable it to receive feedback from clients in a matter of hours and not weeks, maybe the disaster could have been avoided. On the other hand, a quicker version of CRM could have helped the consumers avoid the pain of getting a product they didn’t want instead of the product they loved. Enter Social CRM.
The technological enabler of Social CRM is the social media derived from web 2.0. Without the rapid two way communications of social media we could not have had Social CRM. Social CRM could be described as a process of gathering information from users of social networks, forums and blogs by companies, deciding how to react to the information gathered (by an automated response or by a response formulated by an actual human being) and responding to the input customers provided. If needed, the company can also change its business practices according to customer opinion.
The world has seen huge technological advancement in the last decades, and the field of CRM has seen its fair share of the information revolution. The corporate world has moved from CRM to Social CRM, incorporating more and more of its clients and listening more and more to what they have to say. We believe that it is fair to say that the world has changed and that the corporations which will be able to adapt better than others will survive and flourish with the aid of Social CRM.
As technology is progressing new tools and applications have been emerging and are enabling companies to develop Social CRM strategies. As an example of the variaety of technologies that can support a Social CRM strategy, “Harish Kotadia” in his Blog : “5 Key Tech Trends Driving Social CRM” mentions 5 top technologies that are helping Social CRM to evolve: Cloud Computing/SaaS CRM, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Real Time “In Process” Analytics, Smart Phones/Tablet PCs and Enterprise Application/Data Mashups.
information about Coca-Cola switching to the new taste was obtained from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7209828/#.UTd0EhwUua8
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