Social CRM is the addition of social media services to your customer relationship management strategy. Social CRM strategy is fundamentally focused on engagements and interactions with both customers and employees by managing relationships and data efficiently. Each business will have its own social engagement and CRM processes. Most commonly, a business may look to use Social CRM to improve customer service levels or use it as a sales and marketing tool.
Do you need Social CRM?
Social CRM enables an organisation to add a customer’s social media profile to its CRM system. Businesses can then use this information to gather further information on its customers’ social media activity to improve profiling.
It allows a business to react quickly to any customer service issues that may arise and facilitates conversations for marketing purposes.
Knowing where your customers are having conversations about your business and joining in the conversation helps to drive company revenue. Any interaction received from a customer or prospect through a social media platform such as Twitter or Facebook can be tracked and recorded, helping you to remarket your products or services in the future.
It may be time for you to explore Social CRM if you are seeing the following:
- You don’t know what your customers are saying about you on social media
- Customer service is slow to respond and resolve issues
- Your customer service team has difficulty in identifying when and how to interact with a customer online, over email or over the telephone
- If you can’t identify how customers and prospects are interacting or engaging with your brand
- You have disjointed sales, marketing and customer service processes and communication
- If your customers don’t know how and when to reach you
Social CRM and Customer Service
Customer service teams can use social media monitoring to react and respond to customers quickly and efficiently. It provides the opportunity to easily identify potential issues and resolve them there and then. If the complaint or question needs further investigation there is an opportunity to take the conversation offline.
Responding and resolving issues quickly will reduce inbound call volume and associated costs, whilst providing you with content customers. Social CRM increases the opportunity to reward brand advocates, or privately issue discount codes. Common advantages of using social CRM for customer service include:
- React and resolve issues quickly and efficiently
- Ability to interact with customers in real-time
- Easily track interactions to monitor customer service levels
- Helps to identify processes and strategies that need improvement
- Increase employee productivity
What are the benefits of Social CRM?
Social CRM integration provides you with the opportunity to monitor and track communication and engagement with prospects and customers and can improve internal processes between departments.
Social CRM doesn’t restrict your customers with communicating with you through email or the telephone. Instead they can contact you through the platform that they choose. Communication tracking is improved, issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently by providing you with details on each customer engagement.
Because Social CRM helps the business to have a bigger view of its customers’ requirements and interests, communication between sales, marketing and customer service departments will improve.
Common benefits achieved through Social CRM include:
- Improved sales, marketing and customer service cross-department communication and collaboration
- Reduced customer service response times
- Improved customer relationships
- Increased employee productivity
- Greater insight into customer interests and marketing efforts
For more information on how you can improve customer relationship management processes with an online CRM application , download the brochure below, or call us on +44 (0) 330 99 88 700.
