Dan Miller (@dnm54) and Greg Sterling (@gsterling) from Opus Research (@opusresearch) put on a unique, intimate and thought-provoking conference last week in San Francisco built around the challenges and opportunities facing different companies as they try to close the gap and get folks from marketing, customer service and PR to work towards the larger organizational strategy. To me there were four big takeaways from this event:
- Marketing, PR and Customer Care need to come together with a larger organizational objective
- Social CRM is the new CRM - for any and all consumer-facing businesses.
- Organizations need to listen to both customers and employees, and apply what they learn to their business in order to succeed
- The next big step for Social CRM is VRM - and 2011 will mark it officially moving from theory to practice for most intelligent organizations.
I've also gathered some more in-depth thoughts and tweets from the event, though this is by no means a comprehensive summary of all of the panels:
Dan Miller opened the conference with the thought that this was far from another social media gathering, but as expected, the thoughts and questions from panelists spent a considerable time discussing how new media affects customer care. As Miller said, "for many companies, Social CRM both correctly and incorrectly lends the feeling of better customer service."
One of the more fascinating sessions was the first, which touched on how social media is offering a continuous feedback loop for organizations, particularly when it comes to customer service. As Pete Blackshaw (@pblackshaw), formerly of NM Incite but recently (as in Friday) named Nestle's Global Digital Chief, said: "Customer service is THE #1 driver of organizational external communication." The audience couldn't seem to agree more. The conversations that are happening in the social arena give marketing the chance to gather data for future campaigns while also measuring the success of their current product and time spent, and a successful customer service unit finds a way to sync up with marketing to align those goals. See the photo below for some of Blackshaw's thoughts on how organizations can best close the aforementioned divide:
When it comes to metrics in social conversations, there are many different opinions on what really matters. As noted by Dennis Yu (@DennisYu) of WebTrends (@Webtrends), "Everyone has different metrics when it comes to understanding the ROI of social media." In many ways it is so much more than just fans, followers and friends. The long-held opinion of quality over quantity certainly holds true in this regard. And as Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie) of Weber Shandwick noted in the same panel, the best way to see what kind of value you're providing (an old adage she said her grandfather once used) is to "Listen to employees, listen to customers, integrate that all into your service-you'll have an amazing company."
If you aren't thinking about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as an organization, you need to be. It offers marketers a unique opportunity to connect with consumers, and as Julian Gay (@juliangay) of Orange San Francisco put it best, "VRM complements CRM and SocialCRM by enabling the 'voice' of the customer to be communicated directly to company's 'ears'. With a CRM and VRM infrastructure in place, we have a platform for dialogue, and ultimately a context for building scalable trust-based relationships." Gay also showed off this great graph depicting the shift form CRM to SocialCRM to VRM. Certainly something to contemplate...
These are some simple and initial thoughts, but if you want to check out a pretty cool compilation of tweets from #C32011, check out Chirpstory: http://chirpstory.com/li/649.