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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
Tags: CRM, CRM 2.0, Marketing, Sales, Service, Social CRM

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.

Linkdump: CRM and the demise of GM

June 17, 2009 at 09:14 | In CRM, Customer Experience Management, Linkdump, Sales Force Automation | Leave a Comment
Tags: 2009, automotive, CRM, Linkdump

Check out this interesting article by Dennis Pombriant on CRM in the automotive industry.

GM’s Demise and the Rise of CRM Culture.

Customer loyalty: are loyal customers really profitable?

June 15, 2009 at 09:50 | In CRM, Customer Data, Customer Experience Management, Linkdump | Leave a Comment
Tags: Harvard Conversation Starters, Loyalty Management, Why Loyalty Matters

I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into customer loyalty and customer loyalty programs for a paper I’ve written for the Executive Master of Information Management Programme I’m attending at TiasNimbas Business School. The literature on loyalty and loyal customers seems to suggest that investing in a loyalty management program does provide a company with a source of competitive advantage. In other words: loyal customers help to improve the performance of your company!

I’ve just stumbled upon an interesting blog post by Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy over at Harvard’s Conversation Starters blog. Timothy and Lerzan are working on a book on customer loyalty and outline why customer loyalty can also be a bad thing:

The fly in the ointment is that typically only 20% of a firm’s customers are actually profitable. And many — often most — of a company’s profitable customers are not loyal.

Timothy and Lerzan argue that in the current downturn companies focus too much on lowering prices in order to gain more customer loyalty.

But the simple solution to improving customer loyalty in a down market is to offer price deals. In fact, firms that track their customer loyalty can be guaranteed that loyalty scores will increase with each substantial decrease in price all things being equal.

But that’s a bad loyalty strategy. No, this doesn’t mean we should not find ways to be more efficient so that we can pass cost savings on to our customers. But price-driven loyalty is always the lowest form of loyalty. It means that we aren’t offering differentiated value to our customers.

The key in their argument is the fact that truely loyal customers and profitable loyal customers are created by focussing on providing an added value and differentiated offer for your customers. Only then do you get a competitive advantage from loyalty management.

Be sure to check out Timothy and Lerzan’s book Why Loyalty Matters and read their full blog post.

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?

CRM in a downturn (1) – links

March 12, 2009 at 20:52 | In CRM, CRM Daily, Customer Data, Customer Experience Management, Customer Service, Linkdump, Paul Greenberg, Predictions, Sales Force Automation, Series | Leave a Comment

Most of the western world is suffering the economic effects of the credit crunch, which has turned into a full blown recession for most countries in Western Europe and the US. It seems that most CRM efforts are now focussed on customer retention, rather then improving service or acquiring new customers. This post provides links to a number of blog postings and articles that focus on CRM in a recession.

Paul Greenberg – Customer experience, recession – fan friendly?

CRM Daily – Beyond survival, winning in a global recession

Jim Berkowitz - Business Value and Getting More Bang for the Buck Will be Important CRM Trends in 2009

Jim Berkowitz - How Leading Companies are Optimizing Sales Through Data Integration and Analytics

and finally an interesting post by Dave Kurlan, on what really matters.

I’ve probably left out a whole lot of posts that deal with the same topic and provide interesting inside information. So, what should I add to this list?

On solving the customer service puzzle (or CRM is a business strategy, NOT software!)

October 7, 2008 at 12:02 | In CRM, Customer Experience Management, Customer Service | 1 Comment

Or atleast, one view on how the pieces of the puzzle can be made to fit. Drew stevens recently wrote an article on the customer service puzzle, which was brought to my attention
by Jim Berkowitz . The focal points of Drew’s article are ensuring the whole company focusses on providing an excellent service or product to your customer and ensuring you regularly interact with your customers. Something we can all agree with.

Drew also outlines one point I disagree with: ‘refrain from CRM’. Like many others Drew mistakenly views CRM as ’software systems’. CRM is not a piece of software or a system, but a business strategy. The business strategy that should force companies to focus on providing added value to customers. In other words, CRM is the ‘focus on the customer throughout the whole company’ that Drew is referring to. Paul Greenberg’s definition of CRM systems says it best:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a system and a
technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment”.

CRM systems, like Oracle’s Siebel CRM, SAP CRM and salesforce.com are valuable enablers to help companies achieve their customer focussed business goals, if implemented in the right manner. CRM and CRM software implementation should be about your business goals,
and not because some IT guy wants to try out a new piece of fancy software. So Drew, I agree with your points, but I think that implementing a CRM application with your other points in mind will only help a company to solve the customer service puzzle.

On the advent of the chief customer officer

March 14, 2008 at 08:15 | In CRM 2.0, Customer Experience Management, CustomerThink, Service Effectiveness | Leave a Comment

After the rise (and subsequent decline) of the CMO, a new CXO type role seems to be emerging. As companies devote more attention to Customer Experience Management, some companies are moving to appoint a Chief Customer Officer, or Chief Customer Experience Officer. The main responsibility of the CCO is to ensure a consitent customer experience and to counter negative outings in (on social) media outlets. An article on CustomerThink outlines the rationale behind the CCO.