Infosys-Oracle Blog : Giving Wings to your Social CRM Dreams

Guest post by
Srinath Pydimarri, Senior Consultant, Infosys

I have been observing the Social CRM market space for the last 1 year and the first impression I get is that organizations are far more closer to the reality of Social CRM - both in terms of their interest in Social CRM and the availability of suitable Social CRM solution options. Our frequent conversations with client organizations have gradually moved from being centered around 'What is Social CRM' to discussions on how Social CRM can be applied in the organization's context. In fact, a handful of our customers are coming up with specific scenarios where they'd like to see Social CRM in play. In many of the cases, however, we observe a sense of uncertainty and a few misgivings accompanying the tangible intent in taking up Social CRM, something that is common whenever organizations are faced with the prospect of new concepts and technologies. Organizations do seem to have a difficult time deciding what their first steps in Social CRM should be. I believe they can deal with this tricky situation by taking hints from the success stories that are slowly stemming around in the Social CRM space.

Having observed some of the best-in-class examples (Cisco, Intuit, P&G, Pepsi, Wells Fargo, Amex to name a few) and interacting with client organizations in this regard, I believe the following to be necessary steps to ensure your Social CRM journey starts on the right note -

Get the right team into place
Social CRM aims to synchronize social media channels and traditional CRM, in an effort to enhance the customer-facing activities of an organization. It is imperative that organizations have a dedicated team that includes expertise on 3 key fronts - social media, traditional CRM and CRM business functions (sales / marketing/customer service) expertise. I believe the best approach is to have such teams led by the business functions as Social CRM usage has to tie-in to one or more of the key CRM functions. Such a team would be capable on answering the following key questions -

Which CRM functions will social media usage impact and benefit the most
Which social media is the most appropriate
How to integrate social media with traditional CRM and act on social data

In addition to the above, such a well-constituted team would be best placed to scale up Social CRM efforts on an enterprise-wide scale

Engage customers using appropriate social channels
Identifying the appropriate social channel
Social CRM intends to make CRM activities more customer-centric and it inherently means being able to take an organizations customer-facing activities onto channels that ensure greater customer reach and participation. Couple of key parameters that help in organizations narrow down their choice of social media are - the type of customer targeted (B2C / B2B / B2B2C etc) and the CRM function that is involved (sales / marketing / service). For example, there is a higher chance of connecting with retail customers of beverages on Facebook while corporate customers of a bank are best engaged using a dedicated community. Also, for an organization which aims to reduce its customer support costs, its interests are best served by enabling peer-to-peer support using customer communities where as an organization aiming to ensure greater reach of its marketing communication should resort to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Along with these two parameters, it's advised that organizations conduct a survey of / profile their customers to get an on which social channels a majority of their customers are using. In summary, the choice of social media by an organization would be a conjunction of the 3 dimensions - Type of the customer (B2C / B2B), business function (sales / marketing / service) and the preferred channel of the organization's customers.

Engaging customers using social channels
Success of an organization's engagement of its customer using social channels depends on how well it enables the following - connect, collaboration, and contribution. Rather than identifying the success criteria, which would greatly vary at an industry, organization and business function level, I'd rather call out a few guidelines organizations should adhere to in order to avoid failures -

Mere social media presence presents the danger of social media being hijacked by brand detractors causing untold damage to brand reputation as witnessed in case of many a organizations' case.

Organizations should establish a two-way communication with customers, and ensure rapid response to customer comments. Opportunities, capabilities should be created for 'social' customers to actively converse - some useful ways are regular opinion polls / dedicated discussion forums / regular marketing communication / response to customer comments

Greater a collaborative environment, greater is the customer participation on social channels and greater are the chances of crowdsourcing / customer-driven innovation

Reward customer contribution. Social Analytics plays a great role in being able to identify key influencers so that organizations reward them suitably and reinforce brand loyalty, while also addressing concerns of brand detractors

Conversations and content on social channels need to be moderated

We've observed that it takes many months, if not years to reach the right level of customer engagement!

Identify the low-hanging fruits and execute a Proof of Concept (PoC)
However much one theorizes on Social CRM, the only way to realize the true potential and the right approach is by doing a Proof of Concept (PoC). Looking at our own experiences, we've been able to understand a great deal on Social CRM once we started developing such PoCs. Customer Support by integrating Twitter and Traditional CRM, Aggregated Social Insights within CRM and Customer Engagement / Cross-sell using Facebook are some very simple, low-cost and easy-to-implement PoCs we developed. I believe organizations should opt for such PoCs as they stand to gain the following benefits -

Create a Social CRM strategy and roadmap / understand gaps in their existing Social CRM strategy
First-hand experience of the possible RoI from Social CRM
Narrow down to specific Social CRM use cases that would be most appropriate for their context
Understand the level of changes required at organization / business function / IT landscape levels and the cost impact of the same

Many organizations we've come across have started employing a social media tool - either a Social Community platform (Lithium, Jive etc.) or a Social Analytics tool (Radian6, SAS etc). A PoC would need such organizations to take the next step of involving a system integrator with the knowledge of social media tools and capabilities to create the end-to-end landscape required to implement a complete Social CRM solution.

The Infosys Next-Gen CRM Solutions team has been working for more than a year now conceptualizing and developing innovative Social-Mobile CRM solutions which aim to aid organizations start their journey towards Next Gen CRM. The key objective of these solutions is to enhance Traditional CRM systems of organizations with readily deployable, easily configurable Social CRM and Mobile CRM components. We're interacting with a few existing and prospective Infosys clients across FSI, Manufacturing and CME domains to discuss the possibilities of implementing our solutions -