Social CRM Comes of Age (PDF) - Oracle

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Social CRM Comes of Age, by Paul Greenberg For example, how often have you read about the impact of social media or text messaging or Web 2.0 on marketing departments or PR firms, who are scrambling to understand this socalled phenomenon or on mainstream media like newspapers or network TV? NBC Universal, in October 2006, laid off 750 employees and was forced to slash $750 million from its budget due to what the Washington Post called “the impact of YouTube, social networks, video games and other upstart media” on traditional networks. This is also a generation with different expectations. They expect to get what they need. They’ve been raised to think they will. More often than not, they do. Bruce Tulgan, author of Managing Generation Y, put it well in an interview with USA Today on Gen Y’s expectations at the workplace: “This is a generation of multitaskers, and they can juggle email on their BlackBerrys while talking on cell phones while trolling online. "They're like Generation X on steroids," Tulgan says. "They walk in with high expectations for themselves, their employer, their boss. If you thought you saw a clash when Generation X came into the workplace that was the fake punch. The haymaker is coming now." The Social Customer Arrives This combination of factors transformed the way that the customer thought about doing business not just how they did business. These social customers didn’t have to rely on corporate literature and selfinterested sales people any longer. They could rely on the web and each other for information on their potential purchases and for deeper knowledge about their common interests work or play. Take a review site such as Yelp as an example. These sites are easily available to the users of products, services, or visitors to institutions and they provided a means for those who wanted to participate to rate, usually 1 to 5 stars and comment on the products that they used so that there was all in all an unvarnished idea of: • How good was the product? • Did it meet the expectations the buyers had of it? • What did it do right? Wrong? 5
Social CRM Comes of Age, by Paul Greenberg • Did the manufacturer or retailer product provide appropriate service around the product? • How did the company handle the order, shipping and, if need be customer service? These aren’t formal reviews with rigid specifications or review criteria. They are informal and their language is conversational. Certainly there are agendas being met by some of the reviewers some are shills for the companies that made or sold the products; others have a personal agenda usually a vendetta. But when taken as a whole and read granularly, each of the product reviews and the picture painted of the product affects whether or not someone reading the review would purchase the product. A study done by BigResearch in 2007 found that the most powerful form of influence is word of mouth (42% of respondents) once again, conversation among those who are “someone like me.” A 2007 study done by Doubleclick found that the Internet was the most influential medium among influencers (#1 at 39%) and noninfluencers (#1 at 28%) alike. Even putting this data together in a linear way, you can come up with the most powerful source for any business in how and where it engages its customers. A good guess would be word of mouth via the Internet. Translate that in pragmatic terms. What enterprises see is that social networks that are primarily review sites like Yelp or are customer feedback and action sites like Planetfeedback have become a primary source for the conversations among customer out of the hands of the company. Continue to translate and you find that the use of blogs, text messaging, participation in threaded discussions on forums, comments on the social sites, even satirical videos, are part of the mix of tools they use to communicate their thinking about those very same businesses. But a smart company, using similar tools, can use all this as a valuable place to learn from and engage with those same active customers. By themselves, CRM’s traditional tools don’t really provide the functionality to handle customer engagement in ways beneficial to the company but the addition of social functionality gives CRM a powerful new incarnation Social CRM. It is Social CRM that provides the enterprises with what they need to intersect all this independent activity. If having customers matters to you, using Social CRM helps you keep and even acquire them in good or bad economic times. CRM Morphs from the Traditional: What Differs? Just to be clear from the start, Social CRM does not substitute for traditional CRM it extends traditional CRM. Businesses still need to use technology, run processes, develop operational strategies, apply business rules, assign roles and responsibilities for those roles and develop the appropriate routing and workflow for their particular efforts. That hasn’t and will not change. Social CRM takes that traditional CRM set of functions and capabilities applicable to sales, marketing and customer support and extends it by integrating the social tools for communication with the customers and to allow you to capture even richer knowledge of that 6
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