Social CRM has got to be one of the most talked about areas in CRM today. And a great deal of the focus at the enterprise level in #scrm (Twitter speak) is around the area of customer service.
Being able to use Twitter as another channel to service customer requests and issues has proved to be a great move for companies like Dell, Comcast and many other heavy hitters. This works not only as another way to communicate with customers to solve their issues, but great service performed in plain sight of a growing social media audience can also double as a great indirect sales tool when happy customers tweet and re-tweet about their experiences with you.Using social CRM to deepen relationships with current customers makes a great deal of sense, particularly in this rough economy.
We all understand it's less expensive to keep customers than to acquire new ones. So the big boys focusing their Social CRM efforts on service and support should bring them the best bang for their buck. Small businesses trying to get off the ground are in a totally different universe. They are unknown and don't have enough customers to begin with. And Social CRM offers them a way to "win friends and influence people" on the way to hopefully turning clicks into customers. That is the number one goal for a majority of the small businesses I've come across over the past few years.
A company totally focused on the social CRM needs of small businesses is BatchBlue. BatchBlue's service, BatchBook, is a Saas-based CRM application that has built in social media/networking functionality (including Twitter integration) into the more traditional areas of customer relationship management. They've also built interesting partnerships with other small biz application vendors like MailChimp, Shoeboxed and others to form The Small Business Web alliance.
BatchBlue President Pamela O'Hara recently visited Atlanta and stopped by the studio to record a conversation for Technology For Business Sake. She shared her definition of social CRM and what it means for small business. She also talked about how BatchBlue is using social media to help small businesses get together and share information every Tuesday nights on Twitter via their SBBuzz chat sessions.
Pamela also talks about the importance of having the BatchBook service integrate with other business applications to make it easier for small businesses to get the most out of using technology.Check out the conversation below or download it here:Technorati : #sbbuzz, batchblue, small business, social crmDel.icio.us : #sbbuzz, batchblue, small business, social crm
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