Social CRM: The place where everyone wants to be
I am a Liverpool fan. I regularly follow all the matches they play and visit a set of websites to capture the news at the club. Sometimes I don’t get to watch all the matches, if I’m travelling or attending some important meeting or busy with some personal task. I would be yearning to see if someone can send me the details through SMS for matches with video clips of the goals scored. I get some updates from a website which charges me way too much since it’s a UK based service. I have a Liverpool theme on my desktop and constantly discuss the club in Facebook and Orkut and other public forums. And this month when I visited the website of my mobile company to pay the bill I saw the link to download Manchester United ring tones etc. If you knew about the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United in the past season, you would realize how much that link irritated me. I was thinking, “if only the company knew there are enough Liverpool fans in this part of the world. If only they knew I would be interested in such content on my mobile. If only there is a way for them to realize that I leave enough clues in public forums. If only…” This situation could be very true with IPL fans or in general any sports fan. This can be further extended to any interest that a regular person might have including cooking, travelling, etc etc.
The need of the hour is for organizations to understand the customer in much more innovative ways and to go along with the customer like a true friend. A traditional CRM tries to go after the customer. The systems and applications which are part of the traditional CRM are very good in capturing leads, following up the opportunities and closing the sales. These tools have matured in capturing customer information right from contact details to the entire interaction history for all past inquiries, orders and service requests. Analytical CRM has gone further to see how to get ahead of the customer by predicting behavior using past data and market trends.
There are success stories in traditional CRM where companies have been able to avoid cumbersome applications and have been able to follow industry best practices. Analytical CRM too has given organizations the benefits of slicing and dicing their data. But what we see here is either we are after the customer or we try to get ahead of the customer. While going with the customer is the place everyone wants to be, there is a lot of ground that any organization needs to cover before I can get updates on my mobile about Liverpool. They need to understand on where are the possibilities for a customer to leave digital footprints. They need to know what kinds of footprints are left behind. They will need to figure out how to channelize the gazillion bytes of unstructured data that they are going to deal with. Organizations have to be conscious of the privacy of the social citizen, since another Liverpool fan may not like to get any content on his mobile.
Even though there are many CRM systems which already integrate social networks, they do not provide the kind of understanding of the customer that is needed to be a true friend of the customer. Rather those kinds of integrations only enable another channel to go after the customer or they tend to be too smart and get ahead of the customer. There are no social CRM applications in the market (like we have analytical CRM applications). There are trends towards integration, but there is no application that will extend the traditional CRM into the Social CRM space. While the benefits are clear and the trend is developing and we are stepping into the Social CRM era, let us hope Liverpool wins the premier league next season.
Comments
There's quite a lot of hype surrounding Social CRM and its benefits. Making sense out of the gibberish is very important. Twitter has so much gibberish:) In terms of applications a few I've come across are Radian6 (very promising!), Oracle Social CRM suite and my favourite HubSpot.
Posted by: Deepak | July 16, 2009 11:31 AM
Thanks for your comments Deepak,
In my next post I will be discussing some applications on social CRM. We can also see how mature the applications are and how the market will evolve.
Posted by: Pradeep Baptist | July 19, 2009 06:13 AM
Pradeep,
If I really look closely at social crm, it is one of the channels that is being incorporated and merged with already existing channels in CRM.
The key difference here that users drive the choice, medium & forum of discussion as compared to traditional channels which are being driven by an organization.
Most of the recent developments in social crm area are more analytical in nature and feed to reporting CRM. With obvious challenges around privacy, operational CRM is still tricky and trickier is to separate noise from real data.
It is an interesting journey, none the less and everyone is figuring out the hype for now!
Cheers,
Nitin
Posted by: Nitin | October 13, 2009 03:36 PM