Table of Contents
What is CRM?
Business people are no longer creating one-size-fits all campaigns. That’s because customer relationship management (CRM) systems provide accurate and specific data about each customer. This enables you to market to individual customers based on their needs. And when you tailor offers, your conversion-to-sales rates increase.
But CRM goes beyond this. It includes:
- Lead, prospect, and opportunity management
- Service request management
- Mail and marketing solutions
- Knowledge management
- Account, contact, and activity management
- Social enterprise
- Data quality management
- Partner relationship management
Understanding Social CRM
While CRM is about how you manage your customer, social CRM is about how you engage with your customers.
Therefore, social CRM not a replacement, rather an extension, of CRM. Social CRM is an effective use of social networking channels using technology which enables you to control your customer engagement process. It addresses not only social customers and their demands, but also enables enterprises to interact and engage independent bloggers and analysts with opinions regarding brands.
Social CRM offers many applications in sales, customer service, and marketing. Some key applications are as follows.
Peer- to-Peer Support
Peer-to-peer support allows customers to solve their issues by helping themselves. Social CRM cloud-based solutions are scalable and provide rich features.
Idea Management
Idea management is a way to manage and organize ideas across an enterprise. For a company with 25 employees, it’s an easy task to collect and manage ideas, but it’s a big deal for a company with 25,000 employees. There has to be a way to submit ideas, select the best ones, and manage the budget and resources for transforming ideas into reality. This can be achieved successfully by implementing Social CRM.
Product Launches
Successful product launches are a critical business success factor. They consume a large part of company resources and require launch goals, priorities, strategies, and the measurement of results. Social CRM solution enables enterprises to plan, manage, execute, and create further avenues to achieve successful product launches.
Brand Reputation Management
Social CRM can help with brand reputation management – the practice of understanding and influencing business reputation on social media and more.
Social CRM—Critical for Business Success
Social media has significantly changed the way businesses connect with customers because it enables customers to share their opinions and feedback through social networks. Social customers are well-informed, and often make purchase decisions based on advice from their peers and other unbiased advisers. Thus, catering to the social customer is a critical business success factor.