In my recent rant on why Social CRM is a non-starter in India, I said that even the most progressive Indian brands are using the social web to say the right things with the right tone, whereas they should be trying to do the right things, with the right soul.
In my Social CRM use cases framework, the twenty use cases can be classified across five business areas (Marketing, Sales, Support, Innovation, Collaboration) and four dynamics (Insights, Response, Proactive, and Crowd-Sourcing).
In each of the five business areas, the first two dynamics involve listening to needs, leads, ideas, or complaints (Insights) and responding to them by doing something: changing the product or the marketing, or closing the sales or the support issue (Response). These use cases require direct involvement from the company, and I have decided that companies in India aren't ready for them, as they are not prepared to change themselves in response to market demands.
In each of the five business areas, the first two dynamics involve proactively reaching out to customers for viral pass-alongs, referrals and suggestions (Proactive) or organizing and energizing customer so that they can connect with each other, solve each others' problems or validate each others' ideas (Crowdsourcing). These use cases don't necessarily require direct involvement from the company, as long as the agency is playing the community manager role well. So, I have decided that Indian companies might do better with these use cases, and I have spent the last fifteen months evangelizing them.
Like I said in my last post on why consumers are turning to Twitter to solve their problems, one-to-one conversations can happen between the brand and the consumer, or between consumers themselves. The first dynamic (real-time, public, customer support) doesn't always work, as brands find it difficult to engage in one-to-one conversations at scale. The second dynamic (crowd-sourced customer support) is more likely to work, and lies at the core of customer-driven support forums like Get Satisfaction, Salesforce Service Cloud and the Social CRM movement.
In response to my rant on why social CRM is a non-starter in India, Karthik wrote a post on why social CRM should be seen as social PR. Well, social CRM is about doing the right things, whereas social PR is about saying the right things. In my mind, the focus on saying the right things, instead of doing the right things, is not the solution, but the problem itself.
For more on social CRM, check out my slide deck on "Decoding the Social in Social CRM" -
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