Slideshare: building a B2B social media business case

February 7, 2010 at 20:58 | In B2B, CRM 2.0, Social CRM | 1 Comment
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About two years ago I chaired a workshop on B2B social media, for Marketing Majors of the Rotterdam School of Management. The workshop was aimed exploring B2B opportunities for social media and social crm. The students I that attended the workshop had a clear vision on how to use Social Media in a B2C context, but found it hard to apply the same principles to B2B marketing. Recently I stumbled across a slideshare presentation by Christina Kerley that lists 10 clear benefits that can be used to build a B2B social media business case. Well worth a read!

On the application of Social CRM (2) – Videos

July 21, 2009 at 20:11 | In CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM | Leave a Comment

I used a Dutch based website (Yubby) to collect a number of interesting videos on the concept of Social CRM, the applications that can be used to implement Social CRM and some statements from users of Social CRM applications. Enjoy!

Watch the Social CRM channel on Yubby

Linkdump – time to put a stake in the ground on social crm

July 7, 2009 at 18:52 | In CEM, CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Linkdump, Social CRM, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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Great post by Paul Greenberg on what Social CRM is. An attempt to move forward from talking about the definition of social CRM to actually using Social CRM to engage customers in conversations.

Next step: applying social crm and measuring social crm success.

On the applications of social crm – introduction

July 2, 2009 at 10:18 | In CRM, CRM 2.0, Customer Experience Management, Customer Service, Enterprise 2.0 | 1 Comment
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so what is social crm? Essentially Social CRM is using social media, such as facebook, twitter and wikipedia to start conversations with customers, or join conversations that have been started by your customers. Social CRM has also been called CRM 2.0. CRM 2.0 is defined as:

CRM 2.0 is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

on the crm 2.0 wiki

The keywords in the above definition are collaborative conversation, mutually benificial value and in a trusted & transparant business environment.

So Social CRM is not a replacement of traditional crm, but a new way of communicating with customers, through new media, and allows companies to join in conversations that customers have started about your company or your products / services. I’ve read through numerous blogpost and articles describing that Social CRM is a hype and that Social CRM will never replace existing CRM or Customer Experience Management processes. Of course it won’t and it’s not intended to replace them, it’s just a new way of communicating. Mike Schneider posted the following insights on Social CRM on his blog:

The fact is that there are applications for Social Media across the enterprise. Look. Social (essentially) means communication. Media is a medium of conveyance. So Social Media is a fancy name for a communication tool. The organization needs to communicate in order to succeed. Your team or functional area does not need to be the Superfriends of Social Media, locking down the technology at the Halls of Social Media Justice. It is one thing to be a trail blazer and another to construct a fortress around the perimeter of a trail to ensure that no one else can even see the trail.

His comment also highlights that your company’s social media efforts need not be driven from either a special department within your customer services department, or by the IT guys because they know all about social media. I think that incorporating social media as a communication tool for marketing, sales or service should become an integral part of your CRM strategy, if you are in the Business 2 consumer market.

In the coming weeks I hope to be able to devote some time to post on the different elements of social CRM or CRM 2.0: the collaborative conversation, mutually benificial value and trust & transparancy.

CRM in a downturn (2) – a poll on CRM focus

March 12, 2009 at 20:57 | In CRM, CRM 2.0, Customer Experience Management, Customer Service, Investment, Marketing, Predictions, Survey | Leave a Comment

The current economic crisis is having a significant effect on investments in enterprise wide CRM process reengineering and implementations of CRM technology. What is your view on where companies are most likely to invest, when it comes to CRM?

On 2009 – the year of sustainability

December 28, 2008 at 13:50 | In CRM, CRM 2.0, Contact Center, Customer Service, Predictions, Service Effectiveness, Success | 1 Comment
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a sustainable world

a sustainable world

The new year is approaching, 2008 is ending with  some of us feeling the consequences of the credit  crunch. It’s time to look towards the future. Every new  day and new year opens a wealth of new opportunities,  even in a crisis. 2008 ends with a starting recession,  many business are facing tough times. I do not have a crystal ball and am not much of a fortune teller either, nonetheless I would like to offer my views on 2009, from a CRM perspective that is.

 

2009 – the year of sustainability
In 2007 and 2008 we’ve been able to see a new trend rise, sustainability and environmental awareness. We’ve come to realise that we need to use the earth scarce resources wisely. Sustainability can also be applied as an economic and not environment term however. Wikipedia lists the following for the term sustainability:

Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely.

(src: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability)

So sustainability can also be applied to your business as the capacity to remain operating and to remain in business. How could one survice the current economic crisis and what does sustainability in crisis mean?

  1. Sustainable operating model
  2. Sustainable customer base
  3. Sustainable investments

A sustainable operating model
The first thing companies focus on in a crisis is operational excellence. Reducing expenditure and increasing efficiency. Cut out unnecessary costs and focus on the core of your companies operation. This could mean divesting or closing retail outlets and changing your channel partner strategy. Perhaps others are better at selling and marketing your products than you are. Operation Excellence also marks a path to lower cost channels, such a self service internet channels as opposed to contact centers or an on-site repair man. In other words, I believe that 2009 will lead to companies employing self service more and more, as a means to both improve customer service (24/7 access) and reduce cost.

Sustainable customer base
During a boom companies typicall focus on Sales & Marketing when it comes to their CRM investments, trying to get a piece of an ever increasing pie. In a crisis the pie usually stays the same size or gets a bit smaller. Unless you provide an innovative product or service for which a whole new pie exists, you will try to have to make do with getting a bigger piece of the existing pie. The focus, in my view, should be to focus on preserving your existing customer base through excellent service, and gaining new market share through word-of-mouth marketing. Spending heavily on marketing campaigns for a .05 percent marketshare increase is nonsense if your existing customers are leaving. So keep your current customers, provide excellent service, preferably better than your competitors, and gain marketshare that way. After all, the cost of acquiring a new customer is 5 times higher than keeping your existing customers and convincing them to spend a bit more with your company.
 
Sustainable investments
Due to the credit crunch most companies are no longer able to draw unlimited financing from either the stock market, or the credit market, one has to invest wisely. Invest in improving your current products or services, products or services that are complimentary to your current portfolio and invest in customer service. Secondly make sure you invest in a way that is environmentally sustainable and use that as a marketing tool.
 

Sustainability and CRM?
So what does this mean for your CRM efforts. I feel that 2009 will see an increase in spending on improved customer service, through more possibilities for self service, increased spending on cost-efficient call centers (through products such as Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere) and increased spending on loyalty management applications. Loyalty management spending will be directed at keeping existing market share and growing the existing customer base through word-of-mouth marketing.

I’m looking forward to another interesting year in CRM, CRM Applications and IT.

On social CRM II

December 2, 2008 at 20:29 | In CRM 2.0, Social CRM, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment

One of my former colleagues at Deloitte, Fabio Cipriani, the author of the blog cooperativo, shared a presentation on slideshare about Social CRM, how it extends CRM 1.0 and what the potential benifits are. Definitely worth taking a look at.

 

Social CRM
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: marketing strategy)

On the first steps of Social CRM

November 30, 2008 at 19:42 | In CRM 2.0, Social CRM, Social Networking, VRM | 1 Comment
Traditional CRM is about gathering data and knowing all about your customer. Gaining insight into your customer and his or her behavior traditionally allows a company to better respond to it’s customer needs, provide better quality service and generally leads to market succes. Over the last 10 years companies have invested in CRM systems for Sales, Marketing and Service and gather quite a lot of data on their customers and customer behavior. Much of this data has been put to good use, it is a lot easier to get high value services from the companies you do business with and companies or government insitutions are able to adapt quickly to the changing needs of their customers / consituents. 
Our behavior as consumers is changing however. They way we interact with companies, make decisions on which products to purchase has changed significantly since the late ’90s. The usage of internet has risen dramatically, using social networking sites like facebook and myspace have become part of our daily routine and do we even remember how we used to find information before Google? When I recently bought a new LCD flat panel HD TV I did most of my research online (but I still bought it at a brick and mortar store). This changed behavior provides companies new possibilities to interact with (potential) customers. The number of possible touchpoints has greatly increased, if a company is able to capitalise on the wealth of opportunities today’s Web 2.0 environment offers. 

Image courtesy of Brent Leary (http://www.brentleary.com)
Not only are consumers searching for information about your company or your products or services online, web 2.0, communities, blogs and other tools offer companies a wealth of information on your consumers as well. As the graph above indicates social media users believe that companies should engage the customer in a conversation on Social Media sites.  The challenge however is to use social media in a non intrusive way. No one wants to be ‘friended’ by a company on facebook, I however would like to have the opportunity to contact companies for service regarding their product online, possibly through branded communities. I would also applaud VRM like applications that would allow me to inform all the companies that I do business with of an address change online (perhaps through something as simple as Plaxo). Social Media also offers the possibility to research your clients and determine how to best serve or contact them. Using Social Media for CRM is far from mature, Oracle has started offering plugins for popular social media tools in it’s Siebel CRM application and others are sure to follow. We are on the verge of a new development in CRM and we’ll see loads of tools popping up that will allow companies and consumers alike to engage in mutually benificial conversations with each other. The future holds a lot of promise, let’s see what will happen in 2009.

On the rise of IP based Contact Centers

September 10, 2008 at 09:17 | In CRM, CRM 2.0, CRM Daily, Contact Center, SaaS | Leave a Comment

A few interesting points from a recent article on CRM daily: IP Systems have come of age. The need for truly integrated call centers, lower cost infrastructure and the lower costs of IP based systems are leading to a rise in the implementation of IP based Contact Center systems. Fully integrated systems that can handle multiple channels (Voice, Chat, E-mail and Fax) in a single queue and over different locations, instead of the loosely integrated, old, copperwire based PBX and TDM systems.

some interesting quotes from this article.

“That cut-over to having a majority of contact center seats IP-enabled could occur in the next few years. This trend, say analysts and suppliers, is being driven by legacy switch replacement cycles, adoption of IP by small/midsized contact centers, new sites, remote agents and informal contact centers, and by customer migration to text and e-mail from voice.”

These IP based systems are not always implemented as a replacement for TDM based systems, but sometimes serve as an addition, enabeling quick deployment of new call and contact centers.

“Raun Kilgo, Director of Product Management, Aspect reports that while there has been increased IP adoption among his firm’s customers it has not been, in most instances, as replacements for TDM. “

“Most of our customers have already invested in and are comfortable with TDM applications for their mission-critical inbound and outbound work and would need
a compelling event to rip and replace their existing infrastructure ,” reports
Kilgo. “Alternatively, IP is the ideal solution for companies implementing new
contact centers or deploying remote or at-home agents.”

Remote agents or the possibility to quickly scale up a call center in the event of an adverse event are benefits an IP based solution offers.

“Another advantage IP provides is reduced facilities and IT expenses through less wiring and no need for separate phone rooms: calls are increasingly handled via integrated, centralized and often off-site data centers. That also means faster, easier, and less costly expansion. New contact centers can be up and running in weeks, with no more sometimes lengthy waits for the telcos to install the lines.”

The real advantage of having an IP based solution, in my view, is something which could be dubbed the pervasive contact center. All your employees can virtually become part of the call center, so that experts are able to answer your customers inquiries, when an agent is not able to. Providing a correct and direct answer to a question, without the hated call back request is something should enable you to quickly increase customer satisfaction.

Call escalations, especially support calls to outside experts at regional or head offices or who are mobile or at home are easier to set up and have greater functionality with IP, provided it is coupled with unified communications.

In other words, IP based contact center systems hold a lot of promise for the present and the future, when combined with On Premise or On Demand based CRM applications can enable you to better serve your customers and achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.

On Socialized CRM – Linkdump

September 5, 2008 at 09:52 | In CRM 2.0, DestinationCRM, Social Networking | Leave a Comment

A quote from an article on DestinationCRM.com:

User adoption has long been a major problem bedeviling enterprise CRM deployments and, while this might sound somewhat simplistic, the key reason for this is pretty straightforward: CRM suites, for the most part, have not been designed with benefits to the individual salesperson top-of-mind. Social-networking functions are, by design, aimed specifically at individuals—and can therefore help turn the paradigm of CRM adoption on its head: Users who see the benefits of using a tool are more likely to use it.

Interesting, will the combination of CRM tools and Social Networks aid user adoption? Read the full article here.

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