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
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!
Posted in CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM
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Linkdump – time to put a stake in the ground on social crm
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.
Posted in CEM, CRM 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Linkdump, Social CRM, Uncategorized
Tagged CRM, CRM 2.0, Linkdump, Paul Greenberg, Social CRM
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On the applications of social crm – introduction
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.
Posted in CRM, CRM 2.0, Customer Experience Management, Customer Service, Enterprise 2.0
Tagged CRM, CRM 2.0, Marketing, Sales, Service, Social CRM
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On Rockstars of social crm
I attended the Radian6 Rockstars of Social CRM Event in Boston this last wednesday. An interesting panel of Social CRM guys talking about what Social Media can do for your company’s CRM efforts. I shot some video that you can see embedded below.
Radian6 also gave a nice demonstration of their Force.COM social CRM technology, used for webcare and online reputation management. Using Social Media to engage your customers in a conversation sounds great when it comes to Customer Service, and also shows some promise on the Sales side of CRM as well. I’m however still thinking about how Social CRM fits into the CRM process area and will post some more on this later this month. That’s all for now.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged CRM 2.0, Customer Conversations, Radian6, Social CRM, Social Media, Vimeo
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Linkdump: CRM and the demise of GM
Check out this interesting article by Dennis Pombriant on CRM in the automotive industry.
Posted in CRM, Customer Experience Management, Linkdump, Sales Force Automation
Tagged 2009, automotive, CRM, Linkdump
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Customer loyalty: are loyal customers really profitable?
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.
