CRM and Social CRM – Where company battles are fought and lost

Many people claim to know CRM or even Social CRM, but fact is: they do not fully understand the key drivers and thus fail to succeed in a highly competitive environment, where mistakes a crucially punished and where only few leaders reap above average results.

CRM is a business strategy to maximize revenues (Sales), profitability (Marketing) and customer satisfaction (Service). And this has a major impact on necessary leadership, organization, people, culture and technologies…

Effective CRM

Companies must manage all tasks through a customer centric process cycle: Segment prospects, develop offers, launch campaigns, manage leads (increase win rate), configure quotes, manage eliminate orders (capture/ eliminate), activate service and assure service.

Marketing is to manage the process of anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer requirements profitably.  Focus is on Analytics (Segmentation/ Pre-Analysis, ROI Analysis), Campaign design (Budget Allocation, Product/ Offer definition, Creative development), Campaign Execution and Campaign tracking.

Marketing must understand the customer throughout the entire journey: Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Service and Loyalty.  The challenge is that Online and off-line interactions become increasingly interwoven and must be effectively managed throughout all touchpoints.

Customer service is provided through assisted (email, IM, Contact Centers), self (Web portal, ATM Kiosk, IVR/ Speech) and field (agents, partners/ dealer) service.  Its role is to build increasing customer insight to improve operations.

CRM’s goal is to increase the opportunity by improving the process to communicate

}  Right Customer: Manage customer relationships throughout their life cycle. Realize customer potential by increasing “Share of Wallet”.

}  Right Offer: Efficiently introduce customer and prospects to your company and its products and services. Customize your offerings for each customer

}  Right Channel: Coordinate communications across every customer touch point. Communicate to customer’s channel preference. Capture and analyze channel information for continuous learning.

}  Right Time: Efficiently communicate to customers based on time relevance. Communicate with real or near-real time or traditional marketing.

Trust is very important

Companies need to understand the different kinds of trust: blind trust; trustworthiness based on reputation of a person or product; contextual trust (dependent on circumstances) and referred trust based on opinions/ recommendations of people we respect or admire.

Depending what kind of trust an individual prospect or customer has, companies need to customize their communication style and promotional efforts.

Objective is to develop a full 360 degree Customer view:

-          Descriptive data – Who?

o   Attributes, characteristics, relationships, self-declared information, geographic & demographic data 

-          Behavioral data – What?

o   Orders, transactions, payment & usage history

-          Interaction data – How?

o   Email or chat transcripts, call center notes, web click streams, in person dialogues

-          Attitudinal data

o   Opinions, preferences, needs and desires.

Starting point is a solid CRM strategy

Starting point is solid CRM Strategy to acquire new customers (new product launch, prospecting & lead generation and qualification, new sales), to optimize existing customers (Cross & Upsell, increase product usage), to retain customers (retention & loyalty, customer care & service, win-back) and to optimize margin (Channel migration, results measurement, product stratification).

New success drivers to ensure organizational collaboration

-          Trust & Relationship

o   Communicate common vision

o   Make true client engagement part of organization’s culture and DNA

-          Direction & Leadership

o   Executives and management to role model a participative/ servant leadership style

o   Offer freedom and support to excel

o   Drive brand values

-          Innovation and continuous improvement

o   Drive customer understanding

o   Strive for creative, close engagement

o   Develop right skills, positive management reinforcement, coaching

-          Agility & Alignment

o   Create necessary new roles to address needs

o   Build fluid teams working in matrix or customer focused structure

o   Nourish community engagement

o   Implement relevant metrics

o   Align compensation with customer expectations

-          Process optimization

o   Establish department specific, cross departmental (quote to cash, campaign to compensation, etc.) , industry vertical specific

-          Offer right tools

o   Use of latest technologies

o   Offer enterprise mobile apps for internal workforce

o   Provide external apps (customers, partners, etc.) and cross functional apps (real time mobile BI)

Example: Focus points of Telecommunication operations

-          Case management

o   Create, track and manage customer service requests integrated with contract management

-          Service progress work flow

o   Case queues to manage agent work load

o   Rules based case assignment

o   Customizable business process

-          SLA Tracking & Management

o   Contract management and service level commitments

o   Escalation and notifications

o   Follow the sun support

-          Unified Agent Desktop

o   Simple and intuitive user interface

o   Single desktop for all supported channels

-          Integrated CTI

o   State of the art telephony with rules based routing and context sensitive screen pop ups

o   Outbound dialing and support for call scripting

-          Email management

o   Auto acknowledgements with rules-based personalization

o   Library of email responses

o   Email tracking, monitoring and integration

Social CRM

Social CRM is the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation. It enhances and not replaces CRM described earlier. It is a business strategy not a technology, tool or platform. It is designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment.

All businesses have always been social; what’s new is the set of observable behaviors and available technologies that enable businesses to leverage these to solve business problems.

Social CRM must be understood in the context of Experience, Networks and Events.

Consumers, and people in generally, do not want to be sold anymore. In response, effective companies develop and practice the art of storytelling. They describe with talking about situation that starts with a Challenge (1) that a Character (2) has and then moves readers/ listeners to a solution (3) through a roadmap. Conflict is used to maintain suspense and interest.

Social CRM changes approach of traditional CRM

Now, everybody in an organization has CRM responsibility. Now, the customer defines the engagement process, determines the channels, engagement time, level of interaction. Companies now need to truly align to customer needs and specific expectations.

Companies must strive every hour to build, maintain and develop a happy customer into an advocate and life-long customer. Consumers today have an immense knowledge and power to switch to a competitor with a few clicks.

CRM and Social CRM combined gain a crucial part in the success of a company. Both functions, ideally integrated and managed as one, need to help its organization understand the motivations, experience and objectives of the internal and external clients of the organization.

Further, CRM and social CRM should

-          Provide focus to the organization, community and networks

-          Drive improvements of processes, participation and relationships

-          Offer knowledge (explicit, emergent, embedded)

-          Help leverage transactions, innovation and interactions

-          Measure effectiveness, efficiency and engagement

For more thoughts on successful implementation and supporting technology aspects, please refer to previous articles in my blog section covering social media, mobility, cloud, big data and digital transformation.



+++
To share your own thoughts or other best practices about this topic, please email me directly to alexwsteinberg (@) gmail.com.

Alternatively, you also may connect with me and become part of my professional network of Business, Digital, Technology & Sustainability experts at

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwsteinberg   or
Xing at https://www.xing.com/profile/Alex_Steinberg   or
Google+ at  https://plus.google.com/u/0/+AlexWSteinberg/posts