Social CRM: An Introduction
I’ve been thinking a lot about social CRM recently.
First, the Convergence 2010 show could have been called the “Cloud Computing and Social CRM show”, at least as far as I was concerned.
Second, Bob Thompson wrote an excellent article — Will the Real Social CRM Leader Please Stand Up? — on the site http://www.customerthink.com. Bob’s article plus the ensuing conversation got me thinking even more about it.
Then, as luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to have a customer engagement in the CRM hotbed of Moultrie County. (Sullivan, IL, of course, population 4,400.) If you’ve ever driven from Chicago to Sullivan and back you’ll appreciate that I had a lot of time to think, and not a lot of curves in the road to distract me. I made good use of the time. OK, I made use of the time; you can decide whether it was a good use after you watch the video. Anyway, here’s an outline of my current thoughts on the topic:
- To think about what Social CRM means, think about ante-Social CRM (like ante-bellum, as in “before the war”). Back in the olden days 18 months ago, we thought we were doing great if we had one version of the truth — in the form of a single customer record – for each of our customers in our internal CRM. If we had that plus a 360 degree view of our customer interactions — in the form of our emails and appointments, sales and service history and so forth — we thought we were doing great!
- NOW it’s obvious there’s a lot of important data about our customers and potential customers out there in the socialsphere — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so forth — and at the very least, our so-called single version of the truth should probably be augmented by our customers’ LinkedIn profiles. And compared to the kinds of activities the socialsphere has data on, our internal CRM 360 degree view of the customer looks pretty paltry!
- To see the potential of social CRM in a hands-on way, go to any search engine and enter this text in the search box: site:linkedin.com “dynamics crm” . You can filter the results down a little by doing something like this: site:linkedin.com “dynamics crm” – groups . Try it — it’s pretty cool!
- The potential value of all that information is tremendous…the challenge is how to order it, how to pull it into your CRM, how to make it actionable.
- So far, Dynamics CRM doesn’t really have any out-of-the-box features to leverage the power of the socialsphere, so we’ll have to rely on third-parties and ISVs for now. Fortunately, the xRM platform loves to be customized and extended, and a small army of third-parties and ISVs are doing just that as we speak, filling in the gaps for social CRM. Stay tuned for much more on this topic.
And in the meantime, here’s the video:
Brought to you by Richard Knudson and IMG.
Social CRM: A Simple Example in Dynamics CRM Said,
May 11, 2010 @ 10:09 am
[...] another article — Social CRM: An Introduction — I talked about what we mean by social CRM and tried to come up with a workable definition. [...]
Charles Said,
May 25, 2010 @ 1:46 am
Most of the current Saas cloud apps should be renamed “Customer Rolodex Management”
Relationship is about interactions, communications. Few if any CRM apps are actually built around a relationship hub (or paradigm). Email marketing apps are–they did not inherited a pre-digital age paradigm.
Batchbook, Network Hippo are showing the way…
Richard Knudson Said,
May 25, 2010 @ 7:59 am
Thanks for the note, Charles. I think a lot of my customers would be happy with Customer Rolodex Management CRM if attached to each digital rolodex card they could easily access every interaction they’ve ever had with those customers: important email correspondence, sales history, relevant tweets, press releases, linkedin profile…
You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.
I know what you mean about the importance of the interactions themselves, and I can see the advantages of architecting a CRM with the interactions at the center. But I think that can be limiting, also. For example, if email marketing was the only kind of marketing you do, the email marketing apps would make great CRMs…but it isn’t and they don’t. That’s why most organizations would be better off having their customers in Dynamics CRM or Salesforce or their customer rolodex of choice. I guess you could say they’re focusing on the nouns rather than the verbs, and I don’t really see anything “wrong” about that.
But I’ll readily admit to not having experience with more social-centric apps like I take it Batchbook and Network Hippo are. I have watched a video on Lithium, however, and it looks pretty nice. I definitely need to learn more about those apps.
Charles Said,
June 28, 2010 @ 2:38 pm
A rolodex is indeed “a bad thing.”
The rest of us need a data hub between social networks, email marketing apps, project and collaboration sites, etc… Especially true for the service industry (clients become project partners then prospective clients again) and small business without an IT department to integrate and keep playing together nicely a bench of disparate apps.
The current paradigm is inherited from desktop apps designed for sale department silos — when there was no such thing as cloud computing and collaboration platform. On the other hand, “social” CRMs have to be social with their ecosystem. That paradigm forces developpers to keep in touch with the operational environment of their applications. But we are not there yet.
For example, I found unbelievable that none of the CRM iphone apps includes a business card scanner to automatically create new records (we all have hundreds of business cards bundled together in a drawer) or that no CRM app has the capability to self-populate a new record based on selected text (Linkedin profile, the contact info at the bottom of an email or company website). Few CRMs (Relenta), if any, are offering solid segmenting capabilities, type iTune playlists — leaving that field to redundant email marketing apps. Most CRMs rely on flat/monolytic tagging systems….
Digital stone age.
Email marketing apps, collaboration apps, project management apps, social network apps, communication apps and email clients are slowly converging or invading the CRM field. At some point, Teambox, Huddle or Google will become the data exchange backbone between CRM, Marketing, PM, KM, HR/PSA and collaboration modules — and external data entry peripherals (iPad, iPhone, laptops…).
Looking at Worketc, BantamLive, Solve360 (Norada), Batchbook, and the like it seems that Google is becoming that hub. Apple and MS are trailing — although Apple might be able to leverage the iPad and iPhone success to carve for itself a niche market, if they can bring me.com up to speed.
Richard Knudson Said,
June 28, 2010 @ 6:34 pm
Hi Charles,
Thanks for your note. Thought-provoking as always!
Richard