The Missing Link of Social CRM

Customer Strategist Martin Förster: Social CRM Requires a New Marketing Skill: Having a Conversation

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Customer Strategist

 

Many companies today are trying to understand Social CRM and integrate it into their marketing activities. The way they do this is by optimizing their existing campaigns for social media, or sometimes by creating wholly new campaigns revolving around the viral character of social media. These companies are present on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace; they send their marketing messages nicely wrapped through all channels, they reach a large audience of fans and followers. Just like they did before Web 2.0.
What is common to most of these companies is that they understand social media as another channel for campaigns. They fail to grasp the totally new character of social media, the one that justifies calling it Social CRM. By including social media in their channel mix, enterprises are giving up traditional outbound one-to-many communication to their customers. Instead, they are inexorably entering into a continuous multidirectional conversation between not just one but many customers and the enterprise that occurs permanently, that is driven by customers, and that takes place irrespective of the enterprise. The enterprise can opt to participate, but the conversation will continue regardless....




Customers today will not only read and watch the messages aimed at them, but they will also reply, to the company and to other customers. They will exchange about the good and bad of the message and the product and the enterprise. They will compare it with competitors' activities. They will blatantly state their opinion and make it easy for the enterprise to reply. If the enterprise were listening and set to reply.
In traditional marketing, listening occurred only with few and far between market research projects or customer satisfaction surveys. The reach of such surveys within the enterprise was doubtful, as was their impact. Since the survey results were controlled by a few people only, ignorance was often bliss, and so was idleness. Today, the "survey" comprises the complete web 2.0. All opinions are easily monitored and analyzed by anyone willing to make the effort -- the marketing manager, the CEO, or the competition. A multitude of answers is "out there," admittedly often to questions that weren't asked. But since they are on the customers' minds, it might just be worth it to think about them.
And to react. Customers who make the effort to state their opinions and to recommend product improvements don't necessarily expect but would gratefully appreciate a reply from the company. If they feel like they are talking to a wall, they might soon turn to a competitor that is more responsive. They do make it easy for a company to communicate with them: they send clear messages; they often identify themselves with name, picture, and a trail-blaze history of other social media posts. And they make it relevant for a company: they control the flow of the conversation; to a certain extent they can make or break a new product or a company brand.
Yet why do so few companies actually grab the chance to have a conversation? One reason is clearly the sheer number of entries that would need to be monitored and replied to. Yet for such cases companies usually have a set organization: the contact center. Their staff is skilled to interact with customers, to solve problems, and to log improvement recommendations. I believe the issue is more fundamental. Marketing in the past didn't need to enter a conversation. Marketing didn't think along the lines of continuous interaction on a one-to-one basis. And old thinking is hard to change. Marketers grab the cool new creative opportunities that social media offers, but they barely consider the responsibility that Social CRM places on the enterprise.
This changes the nature of campaign managers, communication managers, and customer managers at enterprises and forces them to continuously talk with the customers, instead of to them. This requires new communication strategies, new resources for the conversation, and new skill sets of existing resources. Most enterprises don't yet understand this when creating their Social CRM strategy.
If properly understood, it would be easy for Marketing to join forces with the contact center to involve customers in a conversation, to show that the company cares, that it takes its customers seriously, that it wants to improve both product and customer experience. As long as Marketing avoids the responsibility of replying to their customers, it not only misses out on opportunities to grow customer loyalty, it seriously jeopardizes existing loyalty. The bottom-line effects of jeopardizing loyalty are in turn easily understood. The competition is waiting. But here, the first step is the easiest: analyze where and what customers actually comment and build a response strategy from there.
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About the Author: Martin Förster is a Director with Peppers & Rogers Group