For me, the recent acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com indicates the theory of Social CRM (SCRM) is now becoming a reality. I've heard a lot of discussion around what SCRM really is and what it isn't. A leading authority in this space is Paul Greenberg who authored "CRM at the Speed of Light". He defines SCRM as:
"...designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It's the company response to the customer's owning of the relationship."
Another theoretical definition comes from Michael Fauschette:
"Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc..."
Ok, so that sounds logical but still overly theoretical and complex to me. My definition, albeit simplistic, is more like:
"Social CRM allows you to knowledgably talk to people through the tool of their choice."
If CRM includes sales, marketing and customer service moving the customer through the lifecycle of engagement and sales workflow with your company - what changes with the social bolt on? If traditional CRM is based on data collected about the customer for better targeting and engagement, is this any different from SCRM?
The Chess Media Group has developed a great visual for what they define as the evolution of CRM to SCRM. The next step in the capability. The primary difference is control and interaction. Control is more dispersed and customer defined, interaction is the focus rather than transaction.
So what is SCRM in action? How do you make it a reality? It requires an investment in technology, people AND process to evolve to this model. For starters, requirements for a SCRM enabled organization:
- A strategy for how you want to engage/interact/transact with customers. From the technical standpoint a strategy must include: the current investment in CRM and/or social tools and how you plan to integrate them to have an actual real life conversation with your audience. On the business side, the strategy must include who is going to interact through these tools, how and when they are going to interact and what the guidelines will be.
- Well defined processes and workflow for utilizing SCRM. This includes defined interaction with documented audience touchpoints. For instance, if I am a contact center agent which tool will I use when? When is it appropriate to use the phone, email or social media. My advice is to follow the customer, communicate with them through the media they selected. You probably only need to expand these from your existing CRM methods and procedures.
- Better integration between self service, supported service and high touch service capabilities. Moving a customer from one to the other is clunky in some CRM systems, sometimes due to self imposed business rules or blueprints rather than technology limitations.
- Adaptive and organic technology, people and process. The technology should be scalable to grow with your customer base, the people need ongoing training to adjust to where the discussions are taking place and the processes need to allow enough flexibility for conversation to feel organic. Your workflow should be rigorous but the rules of engagement need enough flexibility to enable "real" dialogue. Customers can tell when your engagement is too scripted. This is going to present a challenge for an organization using automated smart scripts as the primary means of interaction in their CRM.
- Some means of outbound listening. You need to be able to engage potential customers and contribute to the online dialogue increasing your share of voice and establishing thought leadership for conversions.
- Well defined measurements for the interactions, by media type. How much are you spending per touchpoint call, email, web, social? If you know how much each costs you, you can also decide workflow - what touchpoint goes to which media to drive high efficiency and still deliver high levels of service? You also need to be able to prove these social engagements are actually delivering to your company's bottom line above traditional CRM.
I agree with the Chess Media Group, SCRM is an evolution of CRM. The next evolution of relationship management capabilities, including email, will be aggregation (not necessarily integration) in some way. Another great chart from Chess is the Social CRM Process. This is a very simple but helpful visual for executives to understand how these technologies work together to deliver human interaction through technology.
I'm interested to see how Salesforce/Radian6 markets their union. There are very few frameworks or proven execution studies published for exceptional SCRM. But, I'm certain those will soon be materializing as the market begins to adopt the evolution of CRM. What else is required to execute a successful SCRM implementation?