Baggage For CIOs To Handle On Their Social CRM Journey

Social CRM does not mean just Facebook and Twitter. It’s time Indian enterprises got this distinction right. Simply scouting through popular social media platforms, posting and responding to posts may not yield the necessary customer insights and the moolah that businesses are looking for. Social CRM needs a strategy, and one that is for the long haul.

As Paul Greenburg, a noted authority on CRM and author of the bestselling book ‘CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies , Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers’, cites “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform…”

Readying Up For A Different Ballgame

Social CRM, by definition, is the use of social media for organisations to engage with their customers and stakeholders. In essence, it is the social aspect of a company’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. Hence, a different ballgame altogether.

It’s not just about using social media to communicate with the customers. As Rajendra C. Mruthyunjayappa, Managing Director at Talisma Corporation points out, companies need to be sure about what part of the customer strategy will the social initiative affect and how, whether it is for marketing, brand-building, community building, or product assessment, etc.

So, here we tackle some of the baggage that CIOs need to load up and those that they need to unload as they move ahead in their journey of social CRM.

Unload The Baggage Of Misconceptions

Even before organisations ready themselves to play the CRM game on a different field, and work towards devising the right strategy, it is imperative for them to overcome the deep rooted compulsion to equate social CRM with Facebook and Twitter .

“It is a popular misconception to think that social media is only restricted to Facebook and Twitter. In fact, any community gathered together to share ideas and discussions via social medium present an opportunity,” says Mruthyunjayappa. According to him, the idea is to create a platform to leverage discussions around the company’s products. He further cites an example of how a company planning to launch a new car in the coming months can use social media for viral marketing (social marketing) to create a buzz around the product and generate customer excitement and interest in it. This will result in a community being built which follows and discusses the car online resulting in pre-orders for the car before it launches in the market.

Load Up On Social Analytics

Having tackled the big myth, the next stumbling block is processing the gigantic volumes of information available about the customers over the Internet. While there are tools to collate Facebook and Twitter feeds, the question remains - what should these be analysed for?

Here, Mruthyunjayappa suggests thinking along the lines of personalising communication depending on the social behaviour of the customer.

This requires social analytics, which can be expensive. The business here needs to consider the cost of opportunity that the business is missing out on vis–vis the investment costs in these technologies. Considering most consumers are almost always connected socially through their mobile devices, the cost of opportunity lost turns out to be higher than the investment costs.If a company does not utilise social analytics to capture and react to information pertaining to its product or brand, a huge opportunity would be wasted.

At the onset, companies have to start with social analytics as an operational expense and work with providers who specialise in this field. As they progress, they might want to expand the scale of this implementation.

Having said that rapid analysis and real-time action is the key without which the investment into analytics will be lost, considering the fast pace at which information is being disseminated. Among the other challenges that arise is that the shelf-life of this information is very low, and the validity of data is also under question.

“Data has to be kept in perspective for six months to a year. Over a period of time the demographics of the audience will change. Historical information makes no sense in social media. For example, when a product like the iPhone comes out, people talk about it. But the moment a new version of the iPhone comes out, the information about the earlier iPhone becomes redundant,” Mruthyunjayappa further explains the case,
Handling The Sentimental Baggage

With social analytics, organisations will be able to react in a structured way and develop a process to direct the customer grievances and feedback to the concerned departments and collaborate on a solution. Sentiment analysis comes into play at this stage to analyse the feedback. A drawback with an automated social analytics tool is that the sentiment might be captured wrong. For instance, an automated tool would be unable to attribute a positive or negative sentiment for a sarcastic statement like “Yeah, right”. This kind of binary nature of language is a major issue.

Here, the organisations need to be very careful in terms of handling sentimental analysis. Mruthyunjayappa suggests that based on the previous sentence and other prior information the sense of the sentence can be gauged in an example like the one stated above.

And, The Privacy One Too

Privacy laws on social CRM are not very clear and standards need to be built around this. For instance, if a person gets married and changes his/her status on a social site, then pitching a honeymoon package may become a question of security and privacy. But, if they say that they are seeking good packages then you may reach out to them. Hence, privacy may end up becoming the proverbial ’thorn in the flesh’, unless handled deftly.

So, yes, while social CRM will always encompass Facebook and Twitter, CIOs will finally need to come to the realisation that it can mean and be used for so much more - be it customer interaction, customer support, promotions, or even market research. With the right kind of baggage that they pick and drop off on their way, CIOs can help their organisations attract the right customers rather than just project their offerings as one among the many at the customer’s disposal.