How Social CRM can lead to more business?

Social CRM is simply a business strategy that facilitates the shaping of finer, innate and friendlier relationships with customers and prospects. It focuses on customer insight and interactions gathered from the social media, customer forums and communities. This can simply be achieved by a social media integrator with your CRM platform. Nowadays customers use social CRM to generate business insights, leads and services. It is a strategy that is based around customer rendezvous and relations, with dealings being a derivative.

CRM with content marketing techniques have the capability of taking businesses to the next level. This is very closely related to Social media as content marketing need Social platforms to be read, shared and tracked.

Why Social CRM?

It is quite clear from the info-graphics why it is a good idea to integrate Social Media with CRM. Nowadays Social Media websites not only act as platforms to keep in touch with friends, but also a major platform to showcase your products and services. Interpersonal interactions with clients and consumers with the help of their already personalized Social platforms form a strong base for good CRM implementations.

Social CRM is nothing but evolved CRM that bring more clarity of the social presence of the brand and manages customers and their data in a very efficient and process-centric manner. Social CRM cannot be defined as a particular or ruled practice; it is different for different organizations. It focuses on the business problem and solutionizing it in an ordered fashion.

Traditional CRM vs Social CRM

The goal of CRM is to move customers through a pipeline which has an end goal of customer satisfaction and making them come back for more. Traditional CRM largely comprises of the following 3 components –

• Sales
• Marketing &
• Service & Support

Traditional CRM to a great extent revolved around facts and figures that brands could collect on their customers, all of which would go into a CRM system that then allowed the company to improve targeting various customers.

In the last decade we have seen CRM rapidly evolving into Social CRM. It is a complete customer-centric model which allows the customers to have an intuitive experience of the product or service even before they buy it. This is possible with social media integration.

Social CRM runs on a few distinct core principles. Some of the major aspects that form the backbone of Social CRM are:

• Collaboration
• Transparency
• Advocacy
• Mutual value and co-creation

What make Social CRM different?

As discussed above Social CRM is clearly very different from Traditional CRM in a lot of ways. It is an amalgamation of old practices along with the marketing benefits of Social Media.

Below is listed 5 ways in which Social CRM is different and more efficient from its traditional counterpart:

1. Departments

   Traditional CRMs dealt with specific departments when it came to customer relationships or customer management. Whereas in Social CRM everyone in the company is responsible and a inclined to achieve better customer relationships by including social platform participation and more.

2. Business Process

   Previously businesses involving more customer relationships used to encourage company-centric processes which used to bring business to company but most of the time complaining after sales customers remained unattended. Social CRM completely revolves around customers and maintaining relationships with them.

3. Business Channel

   Businesses used to run on pre-defined channels irrespective of the changes and the hurdles with peculiar customers. With the advent of Social CRM came customer defined dynamic channels which were customizable customer-centric business models.

4. Business hours

   In today’s business scenario where customer involvement is on the increase and they expect results (resolved problems) within hours of raising them, Social CRM plays a very important role in changing the response time from business hours to customer set hours.

5. Networking

   The Social CRM business model is purely based on inter-personal interactions among-st customers in Social Media instead of inbound marketing strategies that included mailing and personal messages. This has turned the tables and today customers discussing more about some products or services on Social websites bring more business to companies instead of traditional methods.

Business Case

There are numerous cases in which Social CRM can be used in the real business scenario. Let us discuss about a business case related to Social CRM.

Company A is loyal customer of an IT firm B who has provided many business solutions using open source CRMs. Company A deals with a large spectrum of businesses that revolves around a core business. Now the company decides to expand their business and does extensive marketing around the same. The IT firm B gets an opportunity to look into these expansions using Social Media and contacts A immediately with an optimized solution. This is the power of social media that can change the way businesses are conducted.

Conclusion

Social CRM allows businesses to quickly get information out to users interested in the company´s products, services or promotions. The hoary days of brick and mortar businesses have worn out in how they allocated business operations and customers. Nowadays, these businesses must embrace a social media action plan to persist in the long run. Social media didn’t just face-lifted or revived CRM but really shifted the powers at be.