Social CRM is coming and has potential to completely change the insights and influence you can have on the success of your company, products and brands. Oh, and your personal success as well (assuming it’s tied to the success of your company, products and/or brand).
The best article I’ve read so far on this topic (“Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship”), provides a lot more detail on what the future might look like. I’ll provide you with my opinions, mixed in with some conclusions from the article.
SCRM can be thought of as a better way to manage a community. (Click here to see more on Creating Great Communities). SCRM has the potential to create a deeper and more engaging relationship with your customers. For your customers, it can enable them to:
- Be in more control,
- Stay in contact with you,
- Leverage self-service, collective history and peer to peer relationships.
However, issues remain:
- Who decides what the “official” answer is, or if there is one?
- Which customers are the right ones to listen to? (see a historical perspective on Dell’s IdeaStorm)
- How do you measure success? (Here’s one thought)
- How do you (a small number of people) successfully interact with the community participants (hopefully, a large number of people)?
A successful SCRM scenario includes a few of the following:
- Peer to peer and person to company interaction
- Participation mechanisms like competitive contests, joint product design, innovation / prediction markets
- Shared collective intelligence
- Mechanisms to handle huge volumes (believe it or not, you may need more people to help make this happen)
What are you seeing happening in Social CRM?
Recent Comments