Figure 9.1 The Social CRM Journey
Source: Based on an idea by Jeff Nolan
Chapter 9
Social Customer Relationship Management and Customer Communities
Social Customer Care
As social media become more accepted into the strategic operations of enterprises, a new hybrid of social media and customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged to help organizations engage with a wider range of customers and prospects. In 2010, the concept of social CRM began gaining traction with marketing and sales disciplines, becoming a promising combination of records-based CRM and social media engagement. By eliminating the database-centric notion of CRM and decades of inadequate communication channels, the closer relationships and engagement theorized by social CRM can unleash a number of key benefits for companies, though not without a few challenges as well.
SAP's Community Network, described in Chapter One, was a custom solution to a new problem. Today more companies have encountered the same issue and realized that the same solutions apply. Social CRM systematizes approaches like SAP's into a set of off-the-shelf social business solutions for customer engagement, opening a new front line in many businesses where the old ways of engaging with customers are no longer sufficient or even competitive. In 2011, only 6 percent of organizations had implemented social CRM, although a survey of thirty-three hundred companies in late 2011 determined that 56 percent are planning to do so.1 Research firm Gartner estimates that social CRM will be a $1 billion industry by the end of 2012, reflecting increasing adoption by companies as a common strategy and replacement for existing CRM approaches.2 By moving proven methods, use patterns, and features into a usable tool set, social CRM promises to be a predictable, reliable model, guided by the tenets of social business, for applying social media to customer relationships.
Many of the social media tools and communities that companies have deployed already to meet CRM needs are good examples of social CRM, despite the industry's focus on optimized, predesigned tools. Whenever social media let customers have a relationship with a business—in other words, interaction that is publicly visible to other customers whenever possible—social CRM can occur. The old CRM model, a closed, asocial mode of customer interaction, is the antithesis of social CRM and much less likely to lead to rewarding outcomes for the business and its customers.
Social CRM paints a vision of creating a deeper, more engaging community-based relationship with an organization's customers and prospects instead of the traditional approach where customers are relegated to a well-defined, rigid communication management process. Because it is one part online community, one part crowdsourcing, and one part customer self-service, social CRM can create an emergent, collaborative online partnership with customers that can result in an array of improvements to business performance in the customer relationship process. Beyond being just for the benefit of the business, however, customers in social CRM approaches tend to have more control over the customer care process, have more sustained contact with the organizations they care about because they are more likely to obtain what they need, and use self-service, mutually visible participation, collective history, and social conversations to assist each other as much as—and typically much more than—the classic CRM model ever could or even was intended to.
Like many aspects of social business, however, the crowd often has its own thoughts and feeling about how work gets done. For social CRM, this necessarily entails less deterministic control and outcomes at times, although many solutions now zero in on and optimize for predictable and reliable behavior, even if they reduce innovation. The Intuit example in Chapter Three of encouraging customers to help other customers within Live Community is a prime example of the customer care aspect of social CRM in action. A canonical pattern here is this: a social CRM environment will let a visitor ask a question publicly and let anyone else in the community, customer or employee, answer it.
Social CRM tools can also support processes that generate new ideas from a community. Dell's IdeaStorm allows customers to try to solve the company's problems for user and company benefit. For example, users generate an idea such as preinstalling specific software packages, and the community votes on its merit. At the core of making the process work is the question of who decides what the right “official” answer to a customer problem is or which ideas will be selected and how nonemployee submitters will be compensated. These are questions that organizations need to work through in order to transition their customer relationship management to a social business model. We explore how best to determine motivations and rewards for participants in the social business design in Part Three.
By its very nature, social CRM is asymmetrical when it comes to levels of participation; there are always many more customers than workers. Success here is defined by how effectively the resulting social business solution deals with the number of customers who will interact with a business through these new channels while still governing the relationship to make it consistently responsive and successful from a customer perspective. Participation (for example, generating user support questions) must be balanced with equally effective issue communication and resolution, operating within the requirements of corporate policy and commercial law guiding marketing, corporate communications, customer service, consumer privacy, and so on.
Get Satisfaction is a prime example of a targeted social CRM service designed to address the problem of asymmetry in the company-to-customer relationship. Get Satisfaction helps over sixty thousand organizations deal effectively with “conversational scale” from Fortune 500 enterprises to small start-ups—while having consistent policies and procedures for responses to customer-initiated social engagement.3 Conversational scale is a significant challenge for companies without the right social business tools, because they are so outnumbered by the size of their communities. Although social CRM ultimately includes all customer relationship touch points, Get Satisfaction focuses on customer service inquiry resolution. When a customer arrives at a Get Satisfaction social CRM community looking for help, he or she will ask a question. Get Satisfaction realizes that a million questions from a million customers are far too many to deal with efficiently. Consequently, it puts similar questions into the same bucket. If someone says, “I'm having problem X with your product,” and that question has been asked before in a similar fashion, the customer is asked to combine his or her question with that bucket. Because it's a social environment, everyone's questions can be seen and combined when possible. Instead of talking to customers about a million individual issues, only perhaps a few thousand total conversational buckets exist instead, each of which can have a conversational thread on how to resolve the issues contained in it. In fact, that's exactly what happens after enough collective intelligence is built up in the community: when a question is asked and then put in a bucket with other common questions, a solution—and often even a set of solutions—is usually waiting for the customer.
Given that early social CRM providers have focused on only a specific phase of social CRM, it begs the question of the full range of functions that a social CRM solution should have. As with most other aspects of social media, there is now a wide range of social CRM tools, large and small, simple and sophisticated. Therefore, as an organization grows, it will want the option of expanding the nature of the social relationships it maintains with the marketplace, whether marketing, sales, customer service, product development, or other business function. The best social tools aren't overly structured; social media are dynamic and highly fluid, and it's because of this characteristic that so many different outcomes are possible, so tools must be flexible and open-ended to accommodate a wide range of outcomes.
At a minimum, an effective social CRM solution should have four capabilities:
Social CRM will be the primary way that traditional organizations will transform customer relationships in the social business era. However, the biggest barrier to adopting social CRM is not the technology, the tools, or customers: rather, it's the mind-set about what CRM can and should accomplish. Social CRM, the recurring lifecycle of which is shown in Figure 9.1, is not about managing customer records or maintaining e-mail blast schedules. It's about forming a close partnership where the organization retains a leadership role and the use of social media results in the creation of vibrant customer community relationships. The elimination of decades of inadequate channels of customer communication will unleash a sudden tide of opportunities, as well as challenges, in the move to social business.