Salesforce.com - Expanding footprint of Social Strategy
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If CRM has been a struggle or a passion for you then Infosys’ CRM blogs is the place to be in. Come join us as we discuss the latest trends, innovations and happenings which will have a bearing on CRM.
January 13, 2012
January 5, 2012
Social CRM & Salesforce - Part 1
Social media is impacting every aspect of our lives. People share their ideas, happiness, events, and issues over these social media websites.
"Arab Spring" is a classic example of what social media can do to a country; imagine what it can do to your business if used in the right way! Social media has evolved from just being a mode of interaction to a revolution that harnesses the power of multitude.
Social Contacts in Salesforce.Com
Social Contact
Social Contacts feature is enabled by default for organizations created after October 7, 2011, and for existing organizations, they have to be enabled by default. It lets the user of the system view contacts' social network profiles directly in Salesforce.com instance. Currently, it is supported for the following social networks.
LinkedIn® - Can be used for being up to date on contact's professional information and history
Twitter™ - Can be leveraged to understand the contact's public personas and track their interactions. Recent tweets, followings, and contact's following can be used to gain insights
Facebook® - Can be used to gain and track personal information regarding contacts and their interests. Integrate the information related to profiles, status updates, and mutual friends.
November 23, 2011
Atom of CRM - Part 2
By Richy Yati Mishra
In the last part, we discussed about how CRM is bound by the feeling of the consumers. To understand the same, we tried to focus on the 7 O's framework of consumer behaviour on which the marketing managers rely on for establishing a strong relationship with their customers. In this part, let us try and analyze on the basis of the 7 O's framework how the atom of CRM - feeling plays a key role in the relationship management of the customer.
November 17, 2011
Atom of CRM - Part 1
By Richy Yati Mishra
Customer Relationship Management... Some say it's a strategy and some say it's a process. It is an art or even could be science of understanding the customer behavior. However, in essence what is common is that we need to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors; we need to develop a strong relationship with customer. And through this the overall goal is to find, attract and win new clients, farm and retain existing clients, get the old clients back and reduce marketing expenditure.
Getting the best out of social networks for customer connect
The last 5 years have seen an exponention growth of internet as a medium and a boom in social networking services. Since then, companies are leaving no stone unturned to utilize this opportunity to be constantly in-touch with their customers. Product announcements, event invitations,product reviews etc. have all gone 'social'. But, there is a fine line between customer connect and spamming your customers through emails, status updates, tweets and the like.
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September 8, 2011
CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites
Social commerce is being talked about as a game changer for organizations in the near future. The adoption will be quicker for those operating in B2C domain. Social Commerce in itself is an umbrella under which many sub-models can be defined. One such model that is gaining popularirty are the emergence of Group buying sites like Groupon, Snapdeal.com and others.
This business model has seen lot of growth in recent times. Be it the incessant amount of funding for start-ups or the craze among customers, this concept has caught the eyes of all alike. Being a customer for few of them, somehow I couldn't resist myself in analyzing the model from CRM standpoint. Thanks to my passion with stuffs that brings value to customers :).
September 6, 2011
Next Level Enterprise growth is in going Social - Dreamforce 2011 and beyond
By Atul Chandra Pandey
Senior Practice Engagement Manager - Manufacturing, Infosys
Dreamforce 2011 concluded last week in San Francisco. With close to 40,000+ attendance, this is indeed "the" event in the cloud industry and a living demonstration of the passion and mass-scale following Salesfore.com (SFDC) has created in the marketplace today.
Continue reading "Next Level Enterprise growth is in going Social - Dreamforce 2011 and beyond" »
August 24, 2011
DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2
By Praveen Kadayinti and Archit Agrawal
This blog has come in two parts where we are discussing about internet banking models and CRM. In the previous blog (Part 1 - find here) we have discussed about two such models. We will highlight a third model in this part and analyze our views.
Model III
A new market has also been identified online where prospective lenders and borrowers meet online, thus reducing transaction time and costs involved with traditional banking methods. Currently banks act as middlemen, collecting funds from individuals who have a surplus (providing an interest rate), and disbursing to people in need (charging an interest rate). The difference in interest rates funds the operation as well as helps the bank make a profit.
Continue reading "DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2" »
July 19, 2011
What Google Plus can teach us about Social CRM and MDM?
In this age of Social CRM, the ability of any company to successfully engage with their customers depends a great deal on a well-defined "Social" MDM strategy.
Social MDM by its very nature presents unique challenges and thus opportunities as well to companies as well as technology partners.
Continue reading "What Google Plus can teach us about Social CRM and MDM?" »
July 5, 2011
How to 'Friend' your customer? - Social Media CRM strategy
by Sinoi Daniel Mathai
The most compelling reason for a customer to want to 'friend' you on the social web is when a connection based on similarity in values and interests is established.
As touted often, a significant benefit Social CRM enjoys over Traditional CRM methods or even traditional channels is the intimacy of the relationship a business can establish with its customer. The level of engagement and experience one can have with an existing and a potential customer is unmatched compared to other sales/communication channels. Getting into the friend's circle of a customer is thus central to the strategy for a business targeting customers on social media. However, getting into the special, sought-after zone is, biblically speaking, similar to a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Continue reading "How to 'Friend' your customer? - Social Media CRM strategy" »
June 24, 2011
Avoid mistakes of traditional channels on social media
The sad part is that I have already started getting the same vibes. Leveraging social media for your CRM initiatives makes sense but don't treat it in the same manner as other channels. If we observe,introduction of a channel as a customer touch point has always been governed by the following reasons: uniqueness, growing usage by customer and the proposed benefits it brings for the organization.
Continue reading "Avoid mistakes of traditional channels on social media" »
February 14, 2011
Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?
I am in no way going to contradict this statement. We are social and the same can be seen of different species in the world. But an interesting piece of news: Ford car that tweets just gave a new insight into the whole social paradigm. It took me to a whole new world of interactions and the change it can bring about in future relationships. We have seen it in films, cartoons and sometimes even we talk subconsciously to the objects!
Continue reading "Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?" »
February 10, 2011
Social CRM - will horseless carriage syndrome help the uptake or block the evolution?
February 3, 2011
Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attutide to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 2 of 2)
January 27, 2011
Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attitude to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 1 of 2)
January 25, 2011
Social CRM - can organizations actually rely on the ideas from customers for future innovations?
Co-creation has been an interesting topic for last couple of years and we have heard so much from C.K. Prahalad on this who firmly propagated that future of competition is going to be based on the ability of the organization to co-create with their customers. In my view, ultimate value of the social technology paradigm (in the context of CRM) is actually going to be the creation of new customer experience possibility which seems to be in the core of this co-creation theory.
To me it is clear that creation of new customer experience is going to be the light at the end of the tunnel that will drive the future of the social CRM. However, the important question is if this customer experience creation will happen by the organization or will it be driven by the customer community. Is co-creation really sustainable and can organizations bet on it for their future innovation?
January 17, 2011
Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?
Continue reading "Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?" »
January 14, 2011
Social CRM - managing the accountability challenges for the customer interactions on social media
Enterprises need to start taking the social media transactions no lesser seriously than the regular customer engagement transactions when it comes to issues like privacy, response liabilities, customer identity theft, information misrepresentation etc. I recently came across various cases that clearly highlight the need for the same. I will share some of them below in this blog.
Electronic social media platforms is intensifying the visibility, reach and speed with which sentiments and specifics related to customer experience travel the globe. I recall reading a news article sometime back in 2009 where a district judge in Boulder, Colorado (USA) approved the validity of the use of social media tools like twitter and blogs to cover the court trail cases. It highlights how the speed of information dissemination across various walks of life inclusive of personal, business and even legal eco-system is becoming 'cooler' option that allows influence of the information be 'here and now and across'.
January 13, 2011
Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers
Social CRM - so much is being said, debated, discussed and speculated but sad part is that much of it is more of the same. I guess that's temporary phenomenon because there is little that is available and there are too many to talk about it, another side of the social networking power - gets everyone to talk, share, express, couldn't have been any other way. But I suppose we may re-live the experience of dotcom days, may be in slightly different shades of color. As I said earlier, more than what is being talked about, I'm excited about stuff that is still to be discovered and to be talked about. Here is one of such side-effects of the social CRM revolution - emergence of 'Social Customer Experience Designers' - a creative specialist community that will have power to revolutionize how social technologies are put to use between enterprises and customers.
Continue reading "Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers" »
January 11, 2011
Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?
The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.
Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.
So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that.
Continue reading "Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?" »
January 10, 2011
Enterprise Collaboration and Social CRM - exploring the relationship?
From last few months, I have come across the term "Enterprise collaboration" very often and that too mostly in the context of Social CRM. In my view, the primary relationship between Enterprise collaboration and Social CRM is due to 'Social' behavior shown by the people and that's about it. The objective for using either of these in the organization can be as different as chalk and cheese.
Continue reading "Enterprise Collaboration and Social CRM - exploring the relationship?" »
January 3, 2011
How can predictive analytics leverage social customer behavior?
Predictive analytics, by definition, deals with analysis of vast amount of historical data to capture relationships between variables and use it to predict future trends and behavior patterns. These predictions can be used to recommend actions that will drive outcomes to meet business goals.
While predictive analytics has a wide range of applicability, from churn management to budgeting and forecasting, one of its most popular application is in the marketing process to improve efficiency of campaigns and identify cross/Up-sell opportunities. So how is social customer behavior impacting these typical applications?
Continue reading "How can predictive analytics leverage social customer behavior?" »
September 8, 2010
Facebook or own community ( part 2)
August 19, 2010
Facebook or Own Community ( part 1)
The first question that comes to mind is are brands big enough for anybody to move from a user friendly, loved by all Facebook, to a community that is no doubt 'walled' , or the other way to put is .. Would the brands any day be able to create something that is as attractive as Facebook that can ever scale up to 500 Million users? I think while these are valid arguments, the way one needs to look at these is with a different view; no brand owned community would ever be Facebook like or should even think of competing with it, the focus of the two are very different and more and more examples that I read about suggest is that they are ecosystem partners and can co exist without hurting each others' motive.
June 24, 2010
Look what Google did to your TV!
Google is at it again. With the launch of Google TV, they are set to do to the TV market what they did to the search engine market a decade ago - revolutionize it. If adWords took online advertising to new heights, the ads that Google is looking at in the TV space is set to take the advertising industry on to a new plane altogether.
Maximizing Social Networking Value
CRM, as we see it, is all set to change. The problem is - we just don't know how. The popularity of social websites such as Twitter and Facebook have made many companies jump into the social bandwagon by opening up Twitter or Facebook accounts - for many, it is simply a brand building exercise; for some others, it is a casual attempt at customer relationship management - whether sending updates to followers on marketing events, or responding to sales or service inquiries. Still very few do exceedingly well in the new social sphere; most notable in Twitter are Southwest Airlines, Dell and JetBlue.
June 22, 2010
Blogging into the CRM world
By Nishith Gupta
In continuation with the theme of my earlier blog post, CRM embracing Social Media: Opportunities & Challenges, I start with exploring the social media platform on which you are probably reading this content. Yes, you get it right, its blogs!
As I write this blog post, many companies would be taking inputs from different blog feeds to identify both positive and negative points being said about them. Why have blogs that were essentially just meant to be a personal diary in a digital form become such a powerful medium today?
May 27, 2010
CRM embracing Social Media: Opportunities & Challenges
by Nishith Gupta
I had been thinking a lot lately about how CRM systems could use external feeds and how different CRM vendors would leverage it in the near future. As I was looking up on various features provided by social networking sites, I came across a recent acquisition news - 'Attensity Buys Biz360 for Social Media Monitoring'. This justifies my belief that in the time to come CRM product vendors would either plug-in the external data as an inbuilt enhancements or would try to integrate it with players like Biz360.
Continue reading "CRM embracing Social Media: Opportunities & Challenges" »
April 26, 2010
The Three Social Pillars and Batman!
March 17, 2010
Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 2
by Amrith Rajasekaran
What are companies and corporations doing to enhance their presence on the social sphere? For starters, they create accounts on sites like Twitter, Facebook and mySpace. They use these forms of social media to spread awareness about products and also do a lot of branding and marketing activities through these.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 2" »
February 25, 2010
Rendering a social experience to your Social CRM strategy
by Satyajit Swain
Each day brings another milestone in the constant evolution of Social Media. Recently, Google launched Google Buzz to give a social experience to its popular mail service and the other day I was going through OneYoungWorld(the world’s first global youth leadership summit ) forum website and was amazed to find that it was inviting registration/selection of delegates not through its own site but through an application hosted on Facebook. The last time I checked OYW’s Facebook campaign had 6619 fans and the One Young World Facebook application had 12,305 active monthly users; these statistics could indicate an emerging trend in the way Social Media can affect us in the coming days.
Continue reading "Rendering a social experience to your Social CRM strategy" »
February 11, 2010
Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 1
by Amrith Rajasekaran
‘Follow us on Twitter.’ ‘Become a fan on Facebook.’ These are now common messages on sites of so many companies wanting to reach out to their customer bases. The rate at which social networking has grown in the recent past is nothing short of phenomenal. Facebook crossed 250 million users as of July ’09 and Twitter has recorded a growth of over a thousand percent (year on year). What has that essentially done for the CRM space? Well, for starters it has really made the corporate world sit up and take notice of this new phenomenon of social networking.
Continue reading "Social Media – Be Aware or Beware? – Part 1" »
January 19, 2010
Let's get it straight - Social Media and Social CRM aren't twins!
Busy day at Azune Solutions in Bangalore...
@impcust: @custsvc_azune: your prior solution did not work and i do not have enuff space to explain will send mail
@custsvc_azune: we value your mail and will respond back
Meanwhile in NY...
"The biggest question on our minds right now, here at the Corp HQ of Azune is the need to arrive at a strategy for our CRM offering with Social media in tow, the 'trend' of the year. We really wonder what we are doing with all the tweets/comments/bookmarks/Q&A aggregations!"
Continue reading "Let's get it straight - Social Media and Social CRM aren't twins!" »
January 14, 2010
Social Media ... an eventful year for Digital Consumers
The year 2009 has been quite an eventful one, and would be remembered for a long time for the action packed days..we’ve seen it all the … Government bailouts, companies being bought or dissolved, CEOs getting sacked etc etc..inthe middle of it this there has been something that has seen a tremendous growth - A beast called Social Media, digital consumer today has fuelled the engines of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other similar portals so much so that if you were to look at the following stats you would agree there is that there is something that is happening around us that neither the end customer nor the companies around can afford to ignore.
Continue reading "Social Media ... an eventful year for Digital Consumers" »
November 27, 2009
Back to CRM Basics: Why Social Media-CRM can wait!
Ever heard of Arena X-Glide, polyurethane swimsuits? Or of the 16 world records broken in the recently concluded swimming World Cup? They share an uncanny resemblance to our own superstar, Social CRM!
Allow me to explain…
Continue reading "Back to CRM Basics: Why Social Media-CRM can wait!" »
November 17, 2009
Social Media, minus the Mania
Has the emergence of social media as the next big thing (and not all that recently too!) totally displaced all other concerns and aspects of CRM hitherto considered important? Does having a nicely managed presence on Twitter, a super blog, smart wikis and generous media sharing guarantee that you have your social media act neatly in place? What are the benefits you expect? And does a perfectly executed social media strategy imply that you now have half your CRM strategy in place, in the new scheme of things? Would social media and CRM intersect in a Venn diagram, or does one figure as a subset of the other? Which is bigger? Are you sure?
November 11, 2009
Social CRM – is it that straightforward?
Social CRM is the buzz word in CRM circles today, be it marketers enthusiastic to dig and tap into this gold mine of information, albeit unstructured, or CRM implementers at the prospect of taking CRM technology and infrastructure to the next level.
All is good about the intent of Social CRM and how it will benefit all involved. But a few nagging questions have not left me, and hence this blog.
CRM is about building relationships with the right customer segment. For CRM to be effective and profitable, it is imperative to have a targeted approach for each customer segment. With Social CRM, businesses are touting about getting access to reams of consumer conversations on the web, and be able to get insight into their needs, issues and proactively act upon them. All rightly said, but what is the use of information without correctly identifying the customer segment it is coming from?
Continue reading "Social CRM – is it that straightforward?" »
November 6, 2009
Data management policy to embrace SCRM
There is no doubt the amount of customer generated data in the social media these days are huge, to put it mildly. One of the main challenges that the organizations are faced with today is management of data. Managing data across the enterprise in the most efficient way is a challenge that can send shrills down the CTO’s spine. The MDM guys will vouch for it. And all this, is for structured data. When it comes to unstructured data, as generated from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, one can imagine the complexity of the data management technology. Traditional CRM systems are mature enough and they classify, transform and store data in a way that is not easily compatible with data generated from SCRM which is in its growth phase.
November 3, 2009
Social Media – Feedback is essential and an important ingredient of SCRM. Use it to benefit
Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.
Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.
Scene-3/Act1 John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.
Scene-3/Act2 John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.
October 8, 2009
Is Customer Experience a lone ranger?
I have a theory. In the English language, 'Customer Experience' is possibly the term with the most variety of definitions. I wish to add to this record and hence this blog.
There are two dimensions of Customer Experience that I need to lay emphasis on while defining CEM– firstly, it is measurable and secondly, it isn’t an engine that runs in isolation to generate success. I’ll elaborate on both these dimensions…
October 5, 2009
Social CRM –Measure it, harness the benefits in tandem – A Balanced Scorecard Interpretation
With the evolution of Social media on a rapid scale, what with Salesforce now coming out with Service Cloud 2; is it already time to think how much of this can be measured?
In the good old days of CRM and other evolving concepts/strategies the innovation, acceptance, implementation, integration, feedback, service quality etc. took time, effort and a lot of money. Over the years all of these have been dealt with and there are many a ready-made solutions and excellent products made available. We have seen CRM mature over the years. The TCO, ROI, scalability, flexibility and high-performance were critical factors to success and these were taken care of. The measurement per se, of CRM has been lost in this mêlée somewhere though not completely and it came in late. Measuring the CRM success via the Balanced Scorecard model is one way.
September 16, 2009
MDM - Can it evolve to stay?
by Venkataraman Ramanathan
The comment from Ray in my previous post cannot be more relevant. The sooner MDM embraces social media the better it can serve and evolve. This is one parameter that will take the game more closer to the CRM+MDM realisation.
It was a hectic day for Michael (young Mike to us) and was traveling home, when he caught in a downtown traffic jam. “Well, why not tweet something for the lousy 15 minutes that I spend here. Let me vent out my ire here” and he picks up his iphone and puts in a tweet – “ Today, at work I found it very difficult to resolve all the false positives and false negatives. This just isn’t the way it should be for what I paid”. Now Michael is a consultant at his firm and has close to 3500 followers on Twitter. Some of them being the vendor consultants and sales people he is constantly in touch with. The next minute, he sees an alert on his iphone that says – “ Let’s set up a meeting tomorrow Mike, to discuss your issues with our product”.
September 11, 2009
Increasingly available customer generated qualitative data in the cloud and implications for Market Research
I recently came across a research forecast that marketers would shave off 9.5% from market research spend over 2009, reversing a 20-year trend of annual spending increases. It appeared in Marketing Week and here is the link. The article highlights the following as one of the research findings: "….while survey data and company sales data continue to be used by nearly all market research professionals, other methods, such as focus groups, syndicated research and scanner data, have all experienced decreases. For instance, use of focus group data has dropped from 80% for the past two years to 74% to date for 2009."
While I do not know the reason for the drop in usage of focus group data (the research, the full report of which I have not seen yet, might have some pointers), to my mind, this inflection may point to a long term trend for focus groups. I believe that the increasingly available customer generated qualitative data around attitudes, preferences, opinions, reviews, etc. in the Cloud - specifically the Social Media - will eventually lead to that.
February 4, 2009
Viral Marketing and CRM: A heady combination
No this is not about a terrorist plot to spread communicable diseases rapidly to bring down an economy :) This is more of an advertising concept which utilizes the immense popularity of social networking in today’s age of Orkut, twitter & Facebook. This is an online and more advanced, quicker and larger form of the traditional Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. This has been around for more than a decade now but it is yet to be leveraged by CRM product vendors.
Continue reading "Viral Marketing and CRM: A heady combination" »
January 27, 2009
How ‘Social’ is your Sales Team?
In the past few months, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations & debates on benefits of Social CRM to sales organizations. I’m jotting down a few fundamental thoughts gathered from these discussions on ‘Social Sales’ vis-à-vis traditional sales here.
January 16, 2009
CRM and P2P networks - A good combination?
Continue reading "CRM and P2P networks - A good combination?" »
January 13, 2009
CRM 2.0 - How do we get there?
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