Sorting Out Social CRM Options for Business
By Dylan Persaud, CTO Forum Team
What does the term Social CRM mean?
According to Peter Greenberg, the author of CRM at the Speed of Light, social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform and designed to engage a customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.
It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.
CRM has incorporated a social aspect to a business tool by adding the features and functions of social networking sites.
Contact management now includes customer interaction, internal and external collaboration, locating experts, soliciting feedback, extended customer service are some of the social aspects that are evolving out of traditional CRM with social components.
One of the problems faced by organisations is how to incorporate these benefits of SCRM and manage it accordingly.
These problems stem from the additional administration, storage, meta-tagging, archiving and content management.
Traditional CRM vendors are trying to adapt to this new business model and enterprise software. As put by fellow analyst Jeremy Owyang, SCRM vendors can’t cut the mustard.
There are a few categories that are mainly considered social CRM:
1. Traditional CRM with Social integration
2. Community platforms offering CRM
3. Brand monitoring offering social CRM
4. Social media with Twitter capabilities
5. Social Customer experience
6. Sales 2.0 and Social graph aggregation
7. CRM applications and plug-ins
8. Social networks and others
These are considered the main categories in social CRM. As organisational usage increases, vendors will vie for the attention of companies until the market matures.
Then mobility on top of this is a rapid evolution that will occur within this software arena and how they react may make or break the market.
As any software matures, newer vendors will enter , yet traditional vendors will have the advantage of brand recognition on their side.
Whatever changes occur in this space, organisational usage evolves and differs from company to company. It still becomes an exercise in finding the best fit for the organisation and catering to the specific functions you are looking to solve.
A software evaluation methodology will still need to be considered, as it just keeps getting more complicated and sometimes unnecessarily so. This is a software name that is ahead of the actual software being delivered for now.
Organizations should create, review, monitor social network strategies and policies, as there is no magic formula to convert buzz to ROI.
Even if there are ways to convert buzz, it can be detrimental as well as a waste of time for C-level employees.
* * *
Stay Informed With ISR News Alerts:
* * *
The CTO Forum is India’s leading fortnightly magazine for technology decision makers. It promotes the exchange of informed perspectives and insights on trends, management techniques and new IT business strategies, between CIOs and other stakeholders. The CTO Forum is acknowledged as a ‘trusted source’ of knowledge for top management responsible for balancing the demands on technology for ‘growth and governance’.
The Publisher gives permission to link, post, distribute, or reference this article for any lawful purpose, provided attribution is made to the author and to Information-Security-Resources.com
Filed under: Breach, CTO Forum, Cloud computing, D&O Liability, FEATURE ARTICLE, Financial, Uncategorized, due diligence, hackers, identity-theft, malware, privacy
Comments
Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
