In the video Social CRM Fundamentals, Megan Adams walks us through the importance of social media through a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform.   She highlights that a social CRM engages with customers in a more meaningful way when compared to more traditional business methods.

Getting Started

We should probably begin with, what is Social CRM? Megan provides the following definition “A strategy-supported by social media, online tools, and technology-that enables organizations to better engage with their customers” (Adams, 2018)

She begins by recommending that a social CRM must be added to a company’s strategy.  She defines the following areas of focus: (Adams, 2018)

1. Marketing: Social listening to learn about your online audiences behaviours
2. Sales: understand where prospects are online and what they’re discussing
3. Customer service and support:  Real-time, multi-channel support
4. Customer experience: understanding what your customers’ needs and wants are and creating an exceptional, unique experience for them

Social CRM uses marketing, customer service, support and a company’s organizational sales process.  It also uses a social engagement and social service to support customer service in a more holistic way.  You can also add connections to your CRM to track and follow customer engagements, like Twitter and Facebook, the same way you would be able to track and record a phone call or an email.

Times have changed.  Today the social customer can chose their preferred form of engagement.  For example, instead of being forced to use traditional communication platforms like email.  A customer can chose to use Twitter to ask a question or Facebook to send a message or even Yelp to leave a bad review. 

A social CRM can collect and house all customer engagements in all communication channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter) in one central place.  All the social data collected from customers are added to their CRM profiles to better observe and manage their behavior well on line. (Adams, 2018)

Some of the benefits of Social CRM include:

1. More meaningful engagement (Adams, 2018)
2. Creation of brand advocates (Adams, 2018)
3. Collection of important customer (user) data (Adams, 2018)

Megan recommends that we understand our customers better by monitoring their behaviour online.  This can be accomplished by using programs like sproutsocial.com.  Programs like this will help a company understand a customers purchasing behaviour to be able to recommend other products to purchase.

Social media has revolutionized how customer service is executed.  Customer are now able to engage with companies on public platforms.  A social CRM strategy allows a company to engage with their customers in a real-time, multi-channel way to ensure that they are responding quickly and effectively (Adams, 2018).

Choosing a CRM Platform:

Three reasons to use a CRM platform:

1. Sales: boost sales (Adams, 2018)
2. Marketing: looking to streamline finding and engaging with customers/prospects (Adams, 2018)
3. Customer Service and Support: looking to deliver outstanding and responsive customer support (Adams, 2018)

Criteria for selecting a CRM:

1. Business size: can they support the company size?  Is the company growing?
2. Ease of use: consider training employees, site navigation
3. Features: sales, marketing, customer support
4. Integrations: can it integrate with other programs?
5. Total cost: include set up and additional user fees
6. Security: can it protect the company and customer information?
7. Customer support: when are they available to support you?
8. Social media platforms: can they integrate with social media platforms?
9. Do they have brand monitoring? Can they tell you when your company name is referenced online?
10. What level of CRM analytics do they have?

Develop your Strategy:

To begin, Megan provides us with the definition of brand, as follows:

“Brand: an overall impression-resulting from communication and marketing methods-pf a product or company that distinguishes it from competitors” (Adams, 2018)

An organization’s brand is the personality and persona that customers associate with a company.  When branding, Megan states that there are two fundamental concepts that must be adopted. 

Humanization: having an easy to connect with personality opposed to being a faceless entity and Personalization: allowing customers to choose and shape their own experiences (Adams, 2018). This provides personality and the ability to really connect with your customers.  Social media tools allows a company to track conversations that they were mentioned in and ultimately have the chance to participate in the conversation.

A company should set out the standards expected when engaging in social media on behalf of a brand.  For example, tone and personality (how you interact with customers), the development of a standard response for specific situations and the process when personalizing responses.  There should also be rules to deal with company-wide announcements.

Make sure you provide hours of support so your customers know when they can engage to receive a response.  With the move to inline communication customers expect responses quickly.  Timeliness to responses shows that you are on top of things and that customer satisfaction is important.

Social Media Monitoring Tool: helps with brand consistency, quantifying brand sentiment and helps to mitigate/avoid negative reputation. Megan provides an example program called Keyhole.co.  This technology allows a company to search by hashtag, account, keyword, mention or URL.

A great way to humanize the conversation is to let people know that they are talking to a real person.  Megan suggests doing this by adding the agents initials to the tweet.  This shows that the customer is speaking to a human instead of a robot.

Feedback is also important to address problems that may exist.  Customers are the best place for honest feedback.

Campaigns: Social media allows marketing to be highly targeted and segmented campaigns.  The information collected on the social CRM allows a company to create more focused targeting, meaning the creation of highly individualized and targeted messages that appeal to the customer (Adams, 2018)

Megan explains that segmentation is “aggregating customers or prospects into segments, such as behaviors (recent purchases, opened emails, redeemed coupons, and social activity) (Adams, 2018)

Once you have selected who you would like to contact and segmented them in meaningful groups, you can then begin to focus on personalizing content.  This is the process of tailoring the contact to speak to the customers in a relevant way (Adams, 2018)  Ultimately this will get the customer to follow the link to learn more about your brand, or even purchase the product.  Facebook and Twitter allow you to upload email address to try to link the email address with the profile. You can than serve campaigns specific to the customers that match your address listing. 

Manage Social Media CRM:

What is an influencer?  Megan provides a quote from Jay Baer, as follows:

“True influence drives action, not just awareness”

Jay Baer, social media guru www.jaybaer.com

Influencers are people who are active on social media and have the ability to expose your brand to their large following.  If their network is a fit with your company, they can drive traffic to a business. 

You can identify influencers by looking for first at your audience and advocacy.  

• Relevant: Ensure that they are relevant to your company and brand?
• Reach: how many people can they reach?
• Engagement: how engaged is their network?

Some ways to find influencers are by using social media monitoring, set a Google Alert for your company, identify hashtags, and consider blogger outreach.  Consider number of email subscribers, number of visitors and ranking. (Adams, 2016)

When working with influencers promote content creation.  This will be more engaging to your audience.  An example of this is to allow customers to post photos or videos of them well using the products.  You can also provide an influencers with free products to help them use your products in their daily lives.

Engaging with Prospects: understand where the prospect is in the sales cycle and what previous interactions they have had with the company.  Prospects will often reach a company by using social media to find out more information about a company without the hard sell.  Content must be engaging and this can be achieved by using photos, videos, infographics or blog posts. But ultimately, when engaging with a prospects online, remember to lead with value, not the full pitch. 

Customer Service: social CRM elevates the traditional customer service journey, by facilitating a solution in an environment (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) that the customer feels comfortable in.  Because this is often real-time, the social media platform allows the company to intervene before the issue escalates.

Online customer support is about being proactive.  This can be achieved by brand monitoring.  This will help you understand what is being said, by who and where the conversations are taking place.  Once discovered, a company will have visibility to the problem the customer is facing and contact in real-time to provide a solution. 

Some other best practices include: loyal customers (brand advocates), intelligent relationship routing (customer support team can connect with customers on a one to one basis), handle channel hoppers (people that use multiple channels to communicate).

Your Tool Kit:

Process Documentation: Megan recommends that a company should define their business processes based on the following criteria:

1. Ownership
2. Goals
3. Metrics
4. Interfaces
5. Documentation
6. Integrity
7. Alignment with business vision

She further instructs that a company should start with a roadmap: she recommends to focus on customer relationship optimization through new systems and customer experiences.  She also places significance on building connections through technology to drive human interaction.  And lastly, a company should define channels to create personal communication. (Adams, 2018)

As an off shoot of these new processes, other departments will be effected.  Ensure that you are considering the impacts to the sales, marketing and customer service teams.

Analytics: Analytics and big data can provide a tremendous amount of value to a company.  Megan recommends on starting somewhere and refining as you go. Define what is important to your business.  She provides some examples:

• Customer Feedback: what is being said to your company? What is being said about your company?
• Behavior: social presence, purchasing patterns and online buying behavior
• Psychographic: buyer preferences, tracking customers to where they spend their time

She also provides the following essential analytics concepts:

1. Engagement levels
2. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
3. Customer lifetime value

Conclusion

For many of us, as we scroll through our Instagram feed, we can see influencers popping up between images posted by our personal network.  Often the influencer has some sort of similar quality to things that we have expressed interest in, with the goal to have me engage in the post and ultimately purchase the item.  An example that comes to mind is an influencer named @steffy.  She is an influencer and is very relatable.  She has a significance following and has large sponsors such as Target, Modcloth and Huggies.  I have personally followed many of her posts, and even purchased a dress from Mod Cloth because of one of her styling videos.  Influencers have a great way to humanize a brand.

References

Adams, M. (2018, April 11). Social Media Marketing: Social CRM. Retrieved from LinkedIn Learning : https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/welcome?u=2109516

Birkett, A. (2018, August 16). What is Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)? Retrieved from HubSpot: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-satisfaction-score

Fontanella, C. (2019, November 11). How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value. Retrieved from HubSPot: https://blog.hubspot.com/service/how-to-calculate-customer-lifetime-value

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