The Key Trend of Social CRM

By John Chan, ISM Software Lab Director

As ISM’s Software Lab Director, I have noticed a key trend in CRM marketplace – an increasing interplay of Social Media with CRM. This has created an entirely new marketplace phenomenon, Social CRM, which is forecasted by Markets and Markets to grow to a $9 billion+ worldwide market by the end of 2018. Social CRM is the intersection between Social Media and CRM. It consists of the ability to: harvest information from Social Media communities, integrate this information into customer profiles and use the expanded profile to better personalize customer service, marketing messages and sales offers.

With Social CRM, an organization can gather information about customers from information that their customers have placed online (such as their opinions on a product/service). Afterward, filtered customer information can be placed into an organization’s Social CRM system and added to the appropriate customer profile.

An organization’s staff can determine product-offer relevancy from Social Media postings by gathering and analyzing their customers’/prospects’ attitudes, preferences, thoughts and reviews. One can also find out what people are most interested in, what they care about, their buying history, etc., and obtain customer/prospect feedback about certain products/services. With Social Media, one can furthermore acquire sentiment analysis (their attitudes, likes/dislikes and sentiments on various topics/issues) from customers/prospects and incorporate this element in a way that will be communicated with an organization’s constituencies. Furthermore, with Social Media, an organization’s employees can quite easily open a two-way online conversation with their customers and prospects relating to their preferences and their emotional content concerning the organization’s products/services. Social CRM enables organizations to harvest such information and use it to make customer communications and product/service offerings that, as a result, have become more appropriate and more relevant to their target audiences.

In ISM’s next Webinar: Knowledge Communities: The Value-Add of Private Social Communities, we will discuss a precursor to an organization’s Social CRM effort: knowledge communities. We will show how knowledge communities can combine Social Media tools and knowledge management principles to create a dynamic environment where people can collaborate, share information, and organically create an evolving and up-to-date knowledgebase that can be used for both internal and external communities.  The Knowledge Communities Webinar is scheduled for Tuesday, September 16 at 1:00 PM EST and registration for this Webinar is available by clicking here.