Social CRM 101
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Mar 10, 2010
Social CRM is not a technology, though technology has created the need for it, specifically Web 2.0 applications. Here's how noted CRM consultant Paul Greenberg defines it:
Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.
Traditional CRM (Customer Relationship Management) was about aggregating and centralizing dispersed customer data: making the data already inside the company widely accessible throughout the company.
Social CRM is about aggregating and disseminating the customer conversations dispersed across social media sites: making the data outside the company widely accessible at the edges of the company where the appropriate department can respond. Customer service responds to a billing issue; tech support offers help to resolve a problem; product management makes note of a feature request; and the market research department...
...what are the ramifications of Social CRM for the research department? Ted Morris writes in The New Corporate Trust Agent, which I quoted a few weeks ago, "The best thing about Marketing Research, as I see it, is that it knits together Customer Relationship Management and Social Media as a primary step of customer engagement. It is catalyst in unifying the enterprise and the customer through insight. CRM needs research to design the customer experience; Social Media...needs research to make sense of the millions of consumer-generated comments that are posted every day.... Social Media and CRM are where Marketing Research insight is put into action."
Social CRM is not something most corporate market researchers are talking about, yet it promises greater strategic relevance to them as businesses adapt to the Age of Customer Capitalism.
For more on social CRM, check out the new Altimeter report The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management and follow the blogs of Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky.