Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of the backbones of business success. It's what drives success for sales teams across almost any industry or vertical, from selling consulting services to selling real estate. Innovation around CRM has also created numerous tech giants, including enterprise-class players like SAP as well as online, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud service providers like Salesforce. CRM commands so much industry attention that an event such as Dreamforce attracted 135,000 attendees last year and its 150,000 attendees eclipsed that figure at this year's conference.
CRM is all about using the latest technology to make interactions between customer and company pleasant for the customer and fruitful for the company by squeezing every drop of information and opportunity out of every touchpoint. Lately, that's meant using lots of automation software and cloud-based solutions that make CRM interactions faster, more intuitive, and ubiquitous in terms of user experience (UX) across whatever device the customer is using. Companies want to interact with users where they live. In today's hyper-connected, always plugged-in world, that means reaching out to customers on social media platforms in a way that doesn't feel like an invasion of privacy. That's where Social CRM comes in.
The concept of Social CRM has been around for years, with buzzword-laden articles such as "Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM" appearing as far back as 2010. The basic idea is for businesses to build a more personal relationship with customers by monitoring them on services like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, or any of the myriad other social networks towards which your customer base might gravitate. It plays into the borderline unsettling way online advertisers and marketers show contextually relevant ads based on what a user has liked, posted, or tweeted. Everyone's still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet, and these free services versus privacy tradeoffs are why Facebook's ad revenue topped $2.9 billion in Q2 2015 and accounted for more than three quarters of its revenue.
The customer information found on social media is invaluable data for businesses—as long as they're sticking to the information users choose to make public. But being a corporate creeper on your customers' profiles is only part of the Social CRM equation.
Social media is still a rapidly evoling internet phenomenon. The way users interact with social media is very different now than it was in 2010. There's a more diverse array of social networks, each increasingly specialized in user expectations about the kind of content and interactions they will and won't encounter. For example, a job solicitation is right at home on LinkedIn but sending one on Facebook feels like an unsolicited invasion of a more personal social space. Users are also far more privacy conscious. You can't just slap an "S" (for Social) on the front of your CRM strategy and expect it to be effective.
Social CRM is about listening to what your customers are saying on social media, analyzing that data in terms of how it relates to the goals of your enterprise or small to midsize business (SMB), and then engaging with the customers in ways that, while ultimately tying into marketing and sales goals, also establish a trusted and worthwhile social brand for your company—whether that means a timely and informative tweet back to a customer's question or translating a Facebook or LinkedIn interaction into an email exchange with a customer service or sales rep.
But before you can build that social customer relationship, you need to listen. Without using a comprehensive social media platform that consolidates your different business presences into streams and using a social media analytics tool to measure engagement, you won't know which customers you should be targeting. Basing your social strategy—posting, listening, analytics, and interactions—in a third-party service such as Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social Premium can help you better identify your most engaged customers (and the ones with the most "influence," meaning those with the loudest online voices that are worth some extra social CRM focus). Those kinds of third-party services can also integrate directly with a standard CRM platform, such as Salesforce, which merges these new channels for direct and upfront customer engagement with core functionality (such as task assignment, call logs, and meetings). This brings social media directly into the processes your sales team has always used to manage customers, interactions, and pipelines.
An active social media presence is more and more about how customers form opinions on which brands they like and which they don't. Social CRM is a buzzword for sure but it's one worth some thought on how the strategy behind it can color a business' public perception. In a world where your followers are your customers, and where what you post or tweet can be screenshotted in an instant, it's absolutely critical to have a plan and Social CRM can definitely help.