Anton’s Hat

Jeremy Omyang wrote a post today about CRM marrying social media and while I don’t often agree with Jeremiahs asssertions about the future of Social Media this is somewhere that can REALLY make sense financially for an organisation. I was responding and it started to get a little long so I decided to do a post instead.

Having worked with and designed standalone CRM systems and supporting office systems while setting up Credit Control functions in various sized firms I think the value here is really obvious.Think about the lfecycle of the customer and all the interactions that customer has with a firm from query to pipeline to purchase to customer service and repeat purchase, interactions about faults or returns, complaints and son on, the whole kit and kaboodle. Jeremiah rightly points out that at the moment

“…we’re just at the early days, as many of these systems are deployed by marketing units with little interaction or support from IT. In many cases users are forced to create a new user ID, as these systems are not tied to existing enterprise software.

Thinking towards the future, I realize how important it will be for IT departments to think holistically about social media, especially large areas of customer and prospect congregation.”

So lets take a slice of this big holistic pie and answer a question. Why would a company do this?

CRMs are used by those in your company who interact with your customers or potential customers. Interactions are largely a stream of comments, details, emails, letters etc, all entered by the agent in time/date order. Obviously taking a holistic approach at this level even and integrating financial and CRM systems allow you to get a snapshot of the customer and his interaction with the company at a given moment. This is socialising your systems internally.
Now imagine your company turning this active profile over to the customer in a social environment and allowing them to co-own the relationship and share as much or as little of it as they want with fellow customers. IM, email, blog comments, and even voice-to-text translation services like dial-to-do mean that users interaction with you can be updated automatically freeing up agents time to concentrate on the customer and their issue. An integrated socialised system would allow that agent to really know the person they’re talking to and also to make the customer feel like they’re really involved. As a customer, imagine never having to worry whether the agent recorded what you said and started an action on it, because you can see it too. Imagine how you’ll feel when the person you speak to recognises your number says they spoke to you before, ages ago and knows every interaction you ever had with the company. Imagine not feeling that the someone has an advantage on you because you have that information too. As a company why NOT share this data it’s the customers data too anyway.

Giving the customers a way of socialising this data would be an invaluable resource for companys and customers as well. Imagine users could share their issues, queries, purchases. Users get to validate their experience as being common or unusual with other users.

The potential for companies is the huge opportunities from tracking these trends. Allowing them to prioritise action and get problems fixed, customers retained and products developed to meet real requirements. At the end of the day customers and companies have the same goal, a good experience for the customer, now and in the future.

Why Marry CRMs and Social Media? Well… you’d be mad not to!