Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with Virtuous Cycle

A Social CRM Manifesto:
How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

By Bob Warfield, Helpstream CEO

Table of Contents

e World Changed While CRM Slept… 1
e New Social CRM World Order 6
e Social Media Big Picture for Business 8
You Already Know How to Be Social 10
e Social CRM Virtuous Cycle 12
Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service 16
Social CRM Strategies for Marketing 19
Social CRM Strategies for Sales 23
Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started 26

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield i

The World Changed While CRM Slept…
Is Social CRM a paradigm shi or just another channel like email, chat, KB, kiosks, and the like?
If it’s just another channel, we can continue business as usual by just plugging that channel in
without any major change in our strategy for engagement. If it’s a paradigm shi, we need to
re-evaluate our overall strategy. Understanding this distinction is critical in laying our plans to
deal with our Social Customers.
Since it’s always good to begin with definitions, here is mine (hat tip to Wikipedia): a paradigm shi
is a change in a fundamental model.
Let’s look at a brief history of the CRM world and see if we can spot any paradigm shis:
CRM originally came into being with a bent towards “Command and
Control.” It was all about ensuring that sales people were doing (and
reporting) on their jobs via Sales Force Automation (SFA), and ensuring
that customers’ problems were actually being tracked and dealt with via
Case Management. As these systems were coming into being, we had
what I will call the “Dinosaur” era of the customer.
In this era, most of the power belonged to the manufacturers, hence my
reference to Henry Ford’s original concept of not giving the customer
any choices at all on the color of their motorcars. e customers them-
selves were docile and thick-skinned creatures. e big ones could let
out a mighty roar, but they seldom operated in groups and most ac-
cepted whatever fates were dealt out to them by customer service. Aer
all, there weren’t too many manufacturers, and if you needed the prod-
uct you needed it.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 1

CRM originally came into being e friction of information exchange about the consumer experience was at an all time high during
this era. Most of the information available to consumers was essentially the company’s marketing.
with a bent towards “Command e press was reluctant ever to bash a vendor too deeply, because they relied on the advertising dollars
from said vendors. Customers themselves had virtually no mechanism to spread the word, whether
and Control.” It was all about good or bad. Companies invested fortunes in one way broadcasting of advertising to build brands.
Inter-consumer communication was largely limited to brand signaling. “is is a good brand,” or
ensuring that sales people were perhaps, “is brand is cheaply made or unreliable.”
Knowledge Bases were introduced during this era as a means of equipping agents with more (ahem)
doing (and reporting) on their jobs knowledge with which to dispatch their cases (e.g. customer questions). Later on, the idea of self-
service came to forefront. If Customer Service organizations were going to hire agents who were so
via Sales Force Automation (SFA), ill-informed that all they could do was parrot their Knowledge Base, perhaps the customer themselves
could be prevailed on to answer their own questions by searching that same KB.
and ensuring that customers’
Note that self-service represented a major paradigm shi and is not just another channel:
problems were actually being u Users were helping themselves. e participants went from a 1:1 agent to customer, to 0:1.

tracked and dealt with via Case u e economics of customer service were radically affected.
u e customer experience was (obviously) radically affected. When self-service is working well
Management. and the customer gets an immediate answer back that is correct, it’s a beautiful thing.
u e organizational support and infrastructure were similarly radically affected. Having a customer
friendly KB required a different approach than just letting the agents si through a private KB filled
with all sorts of garbage and old cases that might contain confidential information.
Organizing these KB’s is a whole discipline in and of itself.
u Self-service introduced a radically different strategy for how customer service was approached.
e goal became to avoid the phone call and all other channels, a strategy that came to be called
“deflection.”
Let’s stop for a minute and compare and contrast that to an alternate channel: E-mail. Does email
really radically change the rules of the game, or is it simply carrying on a conversation much as you
would on the phone (where it all started)? While email feels different to the customer certainly than a
phone call, it doesn’t seem to me that it rises to the level of difference that the self-service KB did. In
particular, it did not affect the economics, strategy, or organizational support and infrastructure in
nearly the way that self-service did. As such, it was an incremental benefit.


The World Wide Web exploded Towards the end of the Dinosaur Customer era and the beginning of the Neanderthal era a new
paradigm shi started to be born called “Soware as a Service” or SaaS. I’ve talked at length about
onto the scene and E-commerce why SaaS is a paradigm shi (it’s a major theme of mine!) as have many others, so I won’t belabor
that point. What’s interesting about the Neanderthal era is the shi in power from manufacturing to
via the Internet was the ultimate distribution. Companies like Dell and Wal-Mart were happily disintermediating manufacturers from
their customers. e World Wide Web exploded onto the scene and E-commerce via the Internet was
extension of all this. A lot of the ultimate extension of all this. Suddenly, Customers had a lot more choices. Comparison shopping
could be done from the comfort of one’s own home. Competition over price and features were essen-
information about price and tial dimensions of the consumer experience. A lot of information about price and features was deliv-
ered over the web, but we still lacked credible ways for consumers to communicate. ey simply had
features was delivered over more professionally-prepared content about products and more distribution possibilities to enable
them to purchase more easily. is is a time when CRM really did go to sleep for quite a while. As
the web, but we still lacked good as SaaS is, it is ironic that it appeared in the distribution era and is essentially a new means of dis-
tribution.
credible ways for consumers e next era was the era of Guitar Man, so named in jest over the man whose guitar was damaged by
United Airlines. is is the era of the Social Web, and all things 2.0. is is an era where the very
to communicate. dynamics of the relationship between customers and their vendors has changed radically. Finally, the
customer really is always right. Worse (from the vendor’s perspective), that customer is now equipped
with a mighty megaphone with which to tell everyone who is interested in hearing what they like or
dislike about their Customer Experience. at’s right, not just about the products, but about their
whole experience:
u How was their experience finding the product?
u What was it like to purchase (the part I hate about buying cars)?
u Was it everything they hoped for once they got it into their hands?
u How well has it held up?
u And most importantly for this discussion, how was the service?
We’ve gone from Command and Control, to a situation where the customer is firmly in control,
at least insofar as their ability to damage the vendor’s reputation out of all proportion to the
revenues received by the vendor. As I put it in a recent post, the Web makes even little ice cubes
into dangerous icebergs.
As Paul Greenberg has so eloquently put it: Social CRM is: “e company’s response to the
customer’s control of the conversation.”


We’ve gone from Command and How can a response to something as game changing as the Customer taking control be any less than a
paradigm shi? No mere new channel can regain that control. It used to be said that a customer told
Control, to a situation where the 1.8 friends, and an unhappy customer told 10. No longer. Guitar Man told over 5 million about his
unhappy experience. at is so many orders of magnitude in change that we have to look at it as a
customer is firmly in control, at true paradigm shi.
Let’s look at what all has changed in the Social CRM era:
least insofar as their ability to
u e players: Customers now communicate frictionlessly with each other. ese communications
damage the vendor’s reputation are not 1:1, they are Many:Many.
u e playing field: ese communications may go on in arenas completely outside the vendor’s
out of all proportion to the control such as Twitter or Facebook. It is in the vendor’s best interests to sponsor venues of their
own as well as to visit these outside venues.
revenues received by the vendor.
u e qualitative nature of the conversation: Social is as much about collaboration as it is
communication. Traditional CRM in all of its guises until now had largely been communicative.
Social Collaboration involves much more sophisticated signaling mechanisms, such as the
elaborate expertise scoring and voting capabilities in these products.
u e concerns: Any loss of control brings tremendous concerns to the vendors, fear even.
u e economics: I have customers at Helpstream who say their agents are able to handle 3x as
many customers aer installing our Social CRM suite as they could before with ordinary Case
Management and Self-Service. ose are paradigm-shiing economics right there.
u e opportunity: At last, we are shed of command and control and we can really start to have a
customer relationship to manage with our Customer Relationship Management system. We can
quit simply recording what happened aer it is already to late to change and actually do something
about it.
u e strategies: Clearly, with so many other changes, the strategies have to be changed to deal
with the rest. Deflection was the watchword in the prior era. Systems and strategies were erected
that isolated vendors from their customers behind walls of IVR menu trees on the telephones,
call centers in far away nations, multiple tiers of tech support agents (so you had to escalate to
get someone who could actually answer a question), and self-service KB’s whose aim was to
avoid talking to you at all.


Imagine being in a large audito- e new era demands engagement. Try being silent in a social situation the next you find yourself in
one. Imagine being in a large auditorium filled with your customers. You are up on a stage. ere are
rium filled with your customers. bright spotlights focused on you. Everyone in the audience has a microphone. Some of them are very
unhappy. Can you be silent when they speak? Can you fob them oﬀ on someone who doesn’t have any
You are up on a stage. There are answers while the rest watch? Of course not!
Given all that, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet folks, one has to conclude that Social CRM is the biggest
bright spotlights focused on you. paradigm shi the CRM world has ever seen. Do not try to look at it as just one more tool in the
toolbox that you can take or leave.
Everyone in the audience has a
Welcome to the age of Guitar Man!
microphone. Some of them are

very unhappy. Can you be silent

when they speak?


The New Social CRM World Order
Having awakened from a dearth of CRM innovation to discover the landscape radically changed
and worse, to discover that as vendors our customers now control the conversation, we’re behind
the eight ball!
e CRM world is in the middle of not one but two massive paradigm shis:
ose two paradigm shis are the shi to SaaS, already well under
way, and new massive shi to Social. e amazing thing about the
second shi is that our customers have already made the shi.
Many companies think of Social as the new shiny thing. Meanwhile,
their customers have been using Social for a long time now, and
they’re wondering why their vendors still can’t manage to connect
in the way that they’re already well accustomed to connecting with
friends and family.
Customer ink released a startling survey in June that said 2/3’s of
US consumers are ready to engage with Social Media for service and
support right NOW! Gartner says Web 2.0 will have transformative
impact (their most impactful category) on the mainstream within two
years. Let me say again, that is massive impact on the mainstream,
not some bunch of Early Adopters still in the experimentation stage,
within two years.
Some of the people hearing this asked me whether “Revolution” wasn’t
the more appropriate term than “Retooling.” My problem is we’re past
the Revolution. e Revolution ended and our Customers won the war. ey’re waiting on us to catch
up and give them what they think of as table stakes these days. It’s a retooling problem in the same
sense that manufacturing plants retool when they are no longer competitive with the old tools. I’ll go
on record right here and now saying I can’t imagine any company that uses CRM today not having an
active Social CRM program in place within the next 5 years. It will become a matter of survival.
Your customers won’t tolerate anything less.


No matter what you do sell— At the same time the web is driving a subtle shi in how we think about products. Everything is
becoming a service. It has to be when you look at the ramifications of frictionless communication
product or service—engage like among customers. e old Product ink had us engaging up until the point of sale, and once we had
the customer’s money, engagement became optional. It was an exception handling mechanism for that
you’re selling a service. Think very small (we hoped) portion of the customer base that did not have a normal happy experience.
Customer Service was a cost center, and that cost was to be minimized in every way we could.
about the emotional response Mechanisms ranging from much higher quality control (so they wouldn’t have a problem in the first
place) to various means of deflection so customers would self-service and not make an expensive
customers will have to your call to an agent were tried. Companies got further and further from their customers, ultimately
entrusting that engagement far oﬀshore and outsourced to entirely diﬀerent companies.
service. Figure out how to use Today we have to reverse that trend of isolating ourselves from customers. No matter what you do
sell—product or service—engage like you’re selling a service. ink about the emotional response
Social Media to facilitate and customers will have to your service. Figure out how to use Social Media to facilitate and personalize
that engagement.
personalize that engagement.
Related Articles
What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?


The Social Media Big Picture for Business
Ok, from our first two chapters it’s clear that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are ready
to engage socially with their vendors, and vendors should understand they need to get on with that en-
gagement and do it well. But there is still a bit more groundwork to be laid before we dive in to how
that is going to work.
Presumably you’re out reading everything you can get your hands on about Social Media. It’s important
to provide some context and understanding at a big picture level about how it all fits together. For
example, what is the diﬀerence between Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Social CRM?
Here is a handy reference to make the distinctions clearer:
Social Media started out in the broad web among consumers.
e term Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1996. She wrote:
e Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially
static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come.
While DiNucci’s concern was largely with Web design and aesthetics, I
find her commentary an interesting parallel to the discussion of how
Customers have insisted on increasing control. Back in the day, the
Web was a one-way trip from content creator/owner to the content
consumer.
e Web 2.0 term really took oﬀ in 2004 when O’Reilly Media hosted
the first Web 2.0 conference and the description of the term started to
get even closer to the parallel I have drawn. Consider Tim O’Reilly’s
comment:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by
the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand
the rules for success on that new platform.


The stage is set for Social CRM. Understanding the rules of the new Social CRM platform is what we’re all about with this series of blog
posts. In 2006, TIME magazine made the masses of users participating in content creation on the web
If we’re going to be having the “Person of the Year”:
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.
conversations, one of the highest
Of course any force this powerful is one that business will try to harness to create value, and so
value areas for conversation is Enterprise 2.0 was born.
ere are actually two diﬀerent classic definitions of E2.0. One has it as any use of Social Media by
with our Customers, potential business. e second popular definition of E2.0, and the one I’ll use here is that of Social Media
used by business for internal collaboration among employees. I like that second definition better
Customers (e.g. Leads), and for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it fits better with the story being told. It’s nothing to
be dogmatic about, just be aware that people may mean one of two things when using the term.
Influencers.
Business using Social Media to collaborate on producing content was a very logical extension of
the original Web 2.0 movement. Content was becoming cheaper and more plentiful almost by the
minute as this movement flourished both inside and outside the walls of Business. But at the same
time, something else interesting was happening.
e view that Social Media is about producing content was the original concept, but this was largely a
result of projecting paper and television content into the web medium. In fact, the web medium is ca-
pable of much more. It’s not just a place to broadcast created content more cheaply. It is a place where
it is possible to hold a two way conversation. We don’t need to watch passively. We can be Social, and
in fact the user of the Social terms is much more recent than the older concepts.
Once a two way exchange becomes possible, and indeed may be more critical than creating content for
the masses in many ways, a lot changes. e stage is set for Social CRM. If we’re going to be having
conversations, one of the highest value areas for conversation is with our Customers, potential Cus-
tomers (e.g. Leads), and Influencers. Yes, we can continue beaming content at them, but if we can en-
gage them in conversation, we’re much more likely to have a successful interaction.
In our next installment, I’ll start talking about how to go about being Social in ways that make those in-
teractions more likely to be successful. It turns out you already know how to be Social, you just have to
draw on that knowledge.


You Already Know How to Be Social
What are you waiting for? Your organization already knows how
to be Social, though you may not realize it.
It’s not a matter of the tools or finding people that are willing to use
them. Market research abounds that shows how pervasive use of Social
Media is. Larry Dignan recently wrote that based on Forrester’s ird
Annual Social Technographics Profile, only 18% of the population is not
using Social Media. at represents a striking up trend that went from
44% in 2007, to 25% in 2008, and now 18% in 2009. Clearly we’re well
past the tipping point. In fact, we’re nearly done with adoption.
Perhaps it’s more about understanding how to think about Social Media.
As we turn in the series away from the Why? of Social CRM and start
working on the How?, that’s the topic for this post. Let’s
get started by looking for analogies in the real world:
Take blogging, which is one of the easiest ways for businesses to get
started being Social. Blogging has a very good physical world analogy.
A blog post is like giving a talk to a group of people where you accept
and answer questions at the end. Pretty simple, right? Your business
would know how to give a talk to a group, and thinking about your blog as a series of such talks is dead
on in terms of informing your strategy and tactics for what to blog about, what sort of tone to use, and
so forth. It’s easy to see how to blog when you start thinking this way.
How about Twitter? For me Twitter is like being at a crowded, noisy, and oh-so-hip club or party.
ere is so much going on that you can barely hear yourself think. You struggle to catch little snatches
of conversations, and they’re all around you. It’s hard to keep them all straight, but you’re constantly
being pulled towards one or another and you chime in with a few words of your own at the most inter-
esting ones.
I liken Facebook to Lunch Room cliques at school or the Water Cooler conversations at work. You’re
with friends telling them what’s going on, laughing together, and generally having a good time. e
pace is a little easier than at that crowded noisy club we call Twitter. It’s less dense but with more depth.
Still, it is the water cooler and you’re not allowed to hang out there for hours at a time getting really
deep, though people do.


That’s what Social CRM is all Paul Greenberg gave me a great one along these lines, and that is Yelp. My family loves Yelp,
because it helps us to discover interesting new restaurants wherever we go. But Yelp also has a
about, providing an extremely Social Review aspect. Paul says that Yelp’s Social Reviews are like being at a restaurant and hearing
about your company from a conversation over at the next table. It’s an awkward moment. ey’re
leveraged many-to-many online not really talking to the company, they’re talking to each other. It’s hard to respond directly to the
individual, because all you can do is post your own review (e.g. talk about the business at your own
experience that can do the sorts table and hope they overhear you).
It gets you thinking, doesn’t it?
of things you’d never be able to
What about Social CRM, which is really what we’re here to talk about?
get to with one-to-one calls or
e best face to face analogy I know of for Social CRM is that it’s like a User Conference that goes on
face to face meetings. 24x7. Any business that has ever had a successful User Conference knows the tremendous value they
have. Customers get a chance to rub shoulders with one another and with your experts to learn how to
get more value from your products. Contacts are made. A good deal of fun is had and comraderie
develops. Companies that invite their best prospects to the user conference will see the likelihood the
prospects buy go way up as they are immersed in your customer culture and get to meet people just like
them who are getting tremendous value from your products.
ere are unhappy people too, who came to the conference looking for answers. But you’ve got such a
powerful confluence of happy customers and readily available expertise (both from your business and
your successful customers) that they usually don’t stay unhappy for very long. It’s not uncommon to
see total transformations in attitude take place.
at’s what Social CRM is all about, providing an extremely leveraged many-to-many online
experience that can do the sorts of things you’d never be able to get to with one-to-one calls or
face to face meetings.
I hope you’ve been able to see by now that you really do already know how to be Social in productive
ways. Now the question is how to be really good at it and how to maximize your eﬀectiveness. To do
that, you just need a Vision, Some Tools, and a Strategy. Our next chapter will talk about the Vision.


The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle
In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning
from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” to think
about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream
developed a concept we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:
e Virtuous Cycle is all about how to convert Social CRM interaction
into a variety of benefits that touch every part of the organization
concerned with customers and prospects. It all starts with Customer
Service, and it is a cycle that repeats and grows in strength with each
iteration around the circle.

Why start with Customer Service?
I wrote in my blog “You Already Know How to Be Social” that a lot of
what you need to know to be successfully Social on the web comes
from a basic knowledge of how to interact with people. at applies
here too. If you need to be massively Social, meet as many new people
as you can, and influence them, do you try to do all that alone? No, of
course not. You surround yourself with your friends and activate your
network to help out. You could view that as simply mobilizing all of
your employees, but in a world where people trust their peers and not their vendors, your eﬀorts will
be much more likely to succeed if you start with your Customers. To do that, you need to create an
active and vibrant Customer Community, and doing that requires that you deliver a lot of value to
your Customers. What better way than through Customer Service?
Along the way, you’ll discover that Customer Service communities are one of the rare cases that
really are win-win situations. Our customers tell us they increase customer satisfaction, drive
increased eﬃciency, and enable them to Crowdsource help delivering Customer Service by
having Customers help other Customers. JoAnne Ravielli, VP Customer Service & Support at
InfusionSo.com, puts it like this in a Forrester Case Study:


You need to create an active and “Two years ago, we had approximately 1 customer service agent for every 55 customers and a 77% cus-
tomer satisfaction rating. Today that ratio is 1 agent to 172 customers-- and with a 87% customer sat
vibrant Customer Community, rating. Customers love to contact us when it’s convenient for them! And that’s the power of social media.
e answers are there for them 24/7. e net-net? InfusionSo’s social media initiative saved
and doing that requires that you the company millions of dollars in overall support costs and produced a 10% increase in customer
satisfaction.”
deliver a lot of value to your It’s rare for companies to generate so much savings (a 3x increase in Customer Service Rep eﬃciency)
along with a commensurate increase in customer satisfaction, but JoAnne’s story is not unique for
Customers. What better way Helpstream’s customers. ese kind of metrics drive a very successful community adoption around
Customer Service, and that’s why we like to say that Customer Service is the On-Ramp for Social CRM.
than through Customer Service?
Having established a successful Customer Service On-Ramp, organizations are ready to take the next
step on the Virtuous Cycle to Marketing. Once again, there are tremendous benefits to be had from So-
cial CRM with a comprehensive strategy. ey range from getting the word of mouth going around the
Brand to hearing the Voice of the Customer in various ways to getting down to the bottom line
impact of being able to generate more leads and nurture them eﬀectively. Let’s look at each one of
these a little more closely.

Understanding Your Customers and the Marketplace
Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented
opportunity to hear what’s being said both within your own Customer Community and on the broader
web through Social Monitoring tools. Hearing is the first crucial step, but Understanding doesn’t stop
with Listening and Hearing. Social is all about Engagement and 2-way Conversations. What better way
to Understand than to engage in those Conversations? Listen first, and then verify and refine what
you’ve heard through Engagement and Conversation until you achieve resonance.


Getting the word out is always Getting the Word Out
Getting the word out is always high on the Marketing agenda, and Social CRM is a helpful vehicle
high on the Marketing agenda,
for doing that. Word of mouth starts with your Customers and making sure Marketing is delivering the
right words to the right mouths starts with your Customer Community, which is built on the
and Social CRM is a helpful
Customer Service Experience. If your Customers can’t tell your story, you’re lost. Also, don’t underesti-
mate the value of your customers in shaping and refining your story before you try to sell it to strangers.
vehicle for doing that.
It’s part of the Understanding feedback loop. Your Customers will tell you whether your messaging res-
onates with their experiences and they’ll give you real life stories (like JoAnne’s above) to put meat on
the bones of your pitch.

Translating it to Leads
OK, you’ve got your messaging all tuned up so it is potent. You’ve gotten some word of mouth going
through your Customers. How does all that translate to leads? e answer is that you can’t limit your
efforts at Understanding and Getting the Word Out to your Customers.
Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your Community. Invite them to
join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to
those audiences. A proper Social Platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized
experience that differs for Customers, Prospects, Influencers, and even Competitors and other
naysayers, so you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides.

On to Sales
Once you’ve got leads visiting your Community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly
configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until
they’re ready to be sold to. It’s a process of monitoring their activities in the Community and across
your other Marketing vehicles until they’ve exhibited clear signs of interest before reaching out.


In this day and age, everyone Remember, you’ve also got the opportunity to sell to your existing Customers, assuming you have
products or services they haven’t yet bought, so it pays to keep an eye on their community activity so
wants References. They won’t you can understand their needs. Towards that end , we use a concept we call “Customer Awareness”
to describe what needs to happen. To oversimplify, imagine if your salespeople could subscribe to
take the vendor’s word for any- something like the Facebook Wall for all of their Accounts and any Opportunities. On this particular
kind of Wall, they’d see what each one is doing in the Community. What kinds of content are they
thing. Immersing prospects in a drawn to? What kinds of questions do they ask? What do they answer in response to other’s
questions? is kind of Awareness is extremely hard to come by in Sales, and very valuable.
Community of happy customers Aside from Awareness, Sales benefits from the three “R”s that Communities can readily oﬀer: Refer-
ences, Referrals, and Repeat Business. It’s easiest to sell an existing Customer, provided they’re happy,
is a fast way to deliver some so Awareness leads to Repeat Business. In this day and age, everyone wants References. ey won’t
take the vendor’s word for anything. Immersing prospects in a Community of happy customers is a fast
informal referencing type benefits. way to deliver some informal referencing type benefits. is is a powerful sales tool if you’re set up to
manage it. Do you know who in your Community will give the best references of this sort? e Net
This is a powerful sales tool if Promoter style surveys are one approach, but Social Platforms can collect all sorts of information that
can tell you in a hurry who the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters really are.
you’re set up to manage it.
Lastly, but far from least, Referrals are also extremely valuable. Do you make it easy for your Customer
Community to give you referrals? Do you incent them to do so in some way, or at least remind them to
think about it?

Conclusion
at’s the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. It starts with Customers, and if you execute well, it ends with
even more Customers, from which to start the next Cycle.
In our next series of posts in the series, we’ll be drilling down with more detail on how each function,
Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales, can extract value from Social CRM.


The prevailing sentiment is that Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service
Social Customer Service is all
I’ve always liked the definition of strategy one of my Board members gave:
about having your customers
Strategy is what you do to make winning easier.
answer each other’s questions Formulating a complete set of strategies for a Customer Service organization to use in Social CRM is a
long topic and one that needs considerable discussion with the organization. In lieu of that, I will out-
so you don’t have to. This is an line the top level considerations and present a few of the real strategies that have worked with our cus-
tomers.
important part of the process, but
Clearly Define Your Metrics
that puts the cart before the horse e first step in defining and choosing a set of strategies for Customer Service is therefore to define
what exactly you mean by “winning?”
and does not tell the whole story
ere are many diﬀerent metrics by which Customer Service organizations are used to measuring
of how to optimize a Social themselves. Some have to do with delivering a better Customer Experience. Some have to do with
managing and increasing the productivity of Service Agents. And some have to do with increasing the
Service process. overall eﬃciency of the Service Organization in terms of costs to deliver the level of service the com-
pany wants to invest in.
In a Social CRM world, we might add metrics around creating a happy and vibrant community of cus-
tomers where they are active participants who choose to help each other and to talk freely about your
products and services. In fact, it will be important to ensure that any metrics surrounding improved
Service Agent productivity do not reinforce behavior that discourages the community from growing.
For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you’re trying to optimize a set of metrics around First
Touch Resolution and minimizing Agent contact through cases or trouble tickets. In other words, we’re
going to try to maximize the self-service characteristics of the community.


Make Sure They Are Measurable
It’s hard to optimize a set of metrics and tell if your strategies have made
it easier for you to win if they’re hard to measure. Try to line up a system
that makes it easy to measure the metrics automatically and in real-time
if possible.
For example, Helpstream’s “waterfall” dashboard displays a number
of useful metrics that might be part of your Social Customer Service
strategy:

Design the Support Experience to Encourage Social
Service as the First Step
One of the first things to look at strategy-wise is how we present the op-
portunity for Social Service. Customers can request service in a number
of diﬀerent ways, some of which are more beneficial than others in terms of maximizing Social Service.
For example, when customers call in for service on a toll free support number, it’s pretty hard to do
good Social Service. We’ve already failed there and will need to file cases for anyone that calls. So we
need to think about how we’re going to communicate to our customers the best way for them to go
about getting service.
is communication should outline a path that emphasizes the Social Service. We’ll want to minimize
phone numbers and move self-service from the web to the forefront of the experience. Another
thought is email. Many organizations have a support@mycompany.com style email account where cus-
tomers can mail support requests. Oen, these emails are directly turned into Cases. More sophisti-
cated Social CRM soware may provide better alternatives. For example, Helpstream makes it easy
to create an email response system that will treat the incoming email as a search of the Knowledge Base
and Community. It will send back an email containing the top 3-5 search results and can include a
link to the online Support Portal. is has been a powerful tool for customers who told us that before
Helpstream they couldn’t get their customers to use a Web Portal. ey insisted on either calling or
emailing cases directly.


Make Sure Self-Service is the Best Possible Service
Now that you’ve created a Support Experience that pushes your
customers to try Social Service, it is important to provide the most
positive possible experience. e Customer Service world pretty
well understands what that takes at a high level: we want our
customers to get great answers as quickly as possible with the
minimum of eﬀort on their part.
ere are a lot of very subtle issues surrounding this area. e
prevailing sentiment is that Social Customer Service is all about
having your customers answer each other’s questions so you don’t
have to. You’ll hear vendors talk at length about how to go about
doing this. At Helpstream, we believe this is an important part of
the process, but that puts the cart before the horse and does not tell
the whole story of how to optimize a Social Service process.
Consider the Service Waterfall in the diagram, which shows the results from the same service
organization as the one above aer an additional set of Social CRM Strategies were implemented
to improve the results.
In a matter of a relatively few months, two huge changes took place:
u e First Touch Resolution through self-service is way up. Issues solved by Existing Content,
whether content in the Knowledge Base or content created by the Community, went from 30% to
79%. For reference, a well functioning KB-only system, without any Social inputs, will typically
peak out at 40%. We can see the “Articles” component, representing KB articles, is 39%. So the extra
performance is the Community content.
u Problems that had to be resolved by agents as cases went down from 56% down to a mere 11%
Clearly that is an account where a set of Social CRM strategies have really made the diﬀerence.
Next week we’ll go over what sorts of strategies led to this kind of improvement in the metrics.


Social CRM Strategies for Marketing
In the last chapter, we covered Social CRM strategies for Customer Service. is week will be about
Marketing. ere are a lot of diﬀerent benefits Marketing can gain from Social Media. On our
Virtuous Cycle, we list the following:
u Branding / Word of Mouth: e community can help spread the word about your brand.
Brand is a lot more than just names and logos. It’s a set of values that customers can rely on.
u Voice of the Customer: Social Media will quickly tell you what your customers and others are
saying about your brand. What do they like or dislike?
u Ideation: Ideation is all about asking the community for their suggestions (“Idea Storms”)
about how you can improve the Customer Experience.
u Education: Marketing spends a lot of time educating all sorts of folks about all sorts of subjects.
Enroll the community in helping you to get this valuable word out.
u Lead Generation: Use the Community as a source of leads.
u Lead Nurturing: Use the Community to nurture leads until they’re ready to be contacted.
A lot of these topics have been covered elsewhere. For example, the use of Social Monitoring and
Ideation to understand the Voice of the Customer is widespread. For this post, I want to focus on
Lead Generation and nurturing, which have not been talked about so much.
Lead Generation is the art of finding people who are interested in your story. Old School marketing
relied on PR and Advertising to do the job in various guises. e Social School can bring a couple of
new tools to bear: Social SEO and Social Monitoring.
First up is Social SEO, or Social Search Engine Optimization. e goal is to find people who want to
hear your story based on what they are searching for. As such, you will want to put as much content
as possible up in a format that is susceptible to indexing by the search engines. Content can consist of
both article-types (videos, white papers, Wikis, and so on) and Community-types (discussion threads
about your topics of interest).


The goal of Social SEO is to get Try to avoid being too “slick” in your content. Social Media is all about authenticity, transparency, and
honesty. In fact, given where credibility lies, try to draw on your customers and other well-wishers to
folks to read enough content provide as much content as possible. e best way to attract them is to start with a Customer Service
Community. It’s hard to be a Social Marketer until your own customers are happy and social too. e
in the public portion of your purpose of your content should be to inform and educate, not to sell. Early leads are not ready to be
sold to yet. Use all of your traditional analysis tools to tell what sorts of content are attracting the most
Community that they request incoming search traffic and produce more content along those lines.
e goal of Social SEO is to get folks to read enough content in the public portion of your Community
a full logon to gain access to that they request a full logon to gain access to more content. When they request a logon, you can have
them fill out a questionnaire similar to what many marketers already use before giving folks a white
more content. paper or webinar access. Be sure it’s obvious that they will need to request access, and tell them how to
go about doing that. Popup messages that aren’t too annoying are one approach, as is messaging in the
public part of the community. Give away a significant critical mass of content without requiring signup.
Remember: this is the content driving the SEO traffic to your site!
You’ll quickly find as we have that the opportunity to join a community of your peers that you can ask
questions of about the area you’re trying to learn more about is a powerful inducement. Conversion
rates to get people to request access are much higher than the typical White Paper because it’s a more
potent offer.
OK, that’s Social SEO. Now let’s look at another approach: using Social Monitoring to drive Lead
Generation. Social Monitoring is all about finding people who will be interested in your story based
on what they are already talking about using Social Media. Look for keywords with which to search
for conversations that will reveal those that are compatible with your story. For example, Helpstream
could use “social crm”, “social marketing”, and “customer service.” Cast your net broadly in terms of
which feeds you will monitor. Twitter is a great starting point, but you’re missing out if you stop there.
Having created a series of feeds that are filtered by keywords to ensure a target rich environment
(sounds like TopGun!), it’s time to start converting them to leads. Your goal is to expose them to your
Community content, and hopefully this will serve to invite them back to your Community for deeper
nurturing. I’ll just use Twitter as an example, but you could send individuals whose Tweets seem
promising a response inviting them to take a look at related content within your Community.
Consider also sending them an invitation to join the Community.


Social Monitoring is all about Beware of Spam! ere will be a temptation to overly bombard individuals, whether in an effort to
get them to visit your community or in an effort to send them non-Community marketing messages.
finding people who will be inter- Resist the urge! If your Social CRM strategy is too spammy, it will immediately be noticed and you’ll
be marginalized. You need to be offering valued content on a user-metered basis, not Spam. It’s all
ested in your story based on what about self-service in terms of content consumption. Leave your leads to graze at your Social Content
Buffet at their own pace. Initially, only they know if their projects are near-term or whether this is
they are already talking about just curiosity.
I say “initially”, because there is a way for you to know too, and it is crucial to successful Social
using Social Media. Look for Marketing. e proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in this case, the “pudding” is the leads
propensity to seek more information. Marketing Automation experts will tell you that a typical lead
keywords with which to search needs to touch between 20 and 25 pieces of content before they’re ready to become an opportunity.
at’s a lot more than most people suspect.
for conversations that will reveal
With Helpstream’s Social Marketing module, it’s possible to send this activity stream of content
those that are compatible with touches to your Marketing Automation soware. Using the reports in that soware, you will receive
a holistic view of every bit of contact your leads have with your content, whether that content is by
your story. virtue of marketing landing pages, corporate web site, or Helpstream Community. Marketing
Automation soware applies a concept called “Lead Scoring” to these content touches. Different
content receives different lead scores. For example, looking at a price list shows a greater propensity
towards buying than simply looking at a particular feature description. You can even apply negative
scores, for example, to reduce the scores if the individual goes away for 2 weeks without looking at
anything.
Your ideal candidates will absorb a lot of content in a very short time, indicating they feel a sense of
urgency in coming up to speed on your offerings. Ideally they will ask questions of your community
that will also give you insights into their individual interests. Once their Lead Score reaches critical
mass (you’ll determine that over time based on who buys and who doesn’t), it’s time to step away
from self-service and reach out to the Lead. ere are lots of ways to do this including sending them
email or calling. One particularly smooth option that’s available is to use the Community itself.


Imagine a Community that monitors Lead Scores based on content
consumption. When the scores reach critical mass (as determined by
real closed sales cycles), the Lead is automatically assigned to a Sales
Rep. at Rep subscribes to the lead’s Activity Stream. ink of the
Activity Stream as being like the Facebook Wall. It tells the Rep what
the person is doing in the community. e idea is to look for a chance
to jump into a Community discussion that the lead is involved in. e
Rep will have considerable insights into the interests and motivations of
the individual by looking at their past history. It will be very natural to
answer a question, identify themselves as being from Sales, and ask
whether a deeper discussion would be helpful.
at’s the full Social Marketing Lead Generation Cycle.


Providing a Social Business Social CRM Strategies for Sales
Process that facilitates the asking
Having implemented your Social CRM Marketing Strategies, it’s time to complete the Virtuous Cycle
by implementing some strategies around Sales. e Marketing to Sales handoff has always involved a
of the questions and the sharing
certain amount of drama in my experience:
of the answers is an excellent VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”
VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”
function for Social CRM.
A lot of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. And no, I’m not going to dive into the
even more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give to
Sales. at’s up to the individual organizations to decide, but unless Sales and Marketing are on the
same page, there’s going to be trouble.
Clearly, Sales is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve
seen that tools like Lead Nurturing Communities with Lead Scoring can help identify that buying
interest before Sales contacts the Lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying
interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from
Marketing to Sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product
or services being sold.
What do I mean by “more personalized information?” e idea of question asking comes readily
to mind, but I am not talking about all questions. Many times leads will ask the same kinds of
questions because the information they seek is not readily available. Answering those questions
that are common across the entire market or at least across vertical markets should more likely
be the purview of Marketing.
But there will be some questions or information needs that are personalized. ey go to the particular
combination of business problems the prospect wants to solve in the context of how they’re thinking
about things. When the need for information becomes sufficiently personalized that the answers are
less and less useful to a broader audience, Sales should take over.
Providing a Social Business Process that facilitates the asking of the questions and the sharing of the
answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRM
for Customer Service come into play for this application. Aer all, you’re trying to efficiently share the
expertise of your best Subject Matter Experts just as in Customer Service.


Imagine a living Social “RFP Imagine a living Social “RFP Answering” Community. What if you took every question that came with
an RFP and put it into your online Community as a question, along with the answer, and the ability for
Answering” Community. What if others to ask more deeply about the question, or to answer and discuss? You’d have a powerful tool in
your Sales and Marketing process! Ideally your prospects and leads could self-service this rich infor-
you took every question that came mation buffet, but even if you’re filling out detailed RFP’s, such a Knowledge Base makes your own peo-
ple that much more efficient at it.
with an RFP and put it into your Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment, others would be the
sorts of things you would make available only aer you validated who was asking very carefully (don’t
online Community as a question, want to give up too much proprietary information), and so on. But being able to rapidly gather and
disseminate the best possible answers would be a rich source of content. We follow similar practices
along with the answer, and the at Helpstream. For example, aer holding our Geoffrey Moore Social CRM Chasm Crossing Webinar,
we published all of the questions asked, including many we didn’t get to answer during the webinar,
ability for others to ask more along with the answers, as part of our HelpExchange Community.

deeply about the question, or to What to do about the more personalized information that doesn’t make sense to go into the
mainstream “RFP Answering” Community? Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our
answer and discuss? You’d have Communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for the
work products of Professional Services engagements and Training. It beats the heck out of email, and
a powerful tool in your Sales and creates a nice personalized information store where each customer shares their Helpstream-specific
knowledge in a way that they can collaborate with us and any participating SI’s.
Marketing process! e same principle can be applied to the Sales process. Imagine delivering RFP’s, Price Quotations,
Professional Services SOW’s, Marketing Collateral, Contact Information for Key Players, and all of
the other materials that make up the personalized responses to a prospect’s information needs.
By gathering such information in one place, it becomes easier for everyone participating in the
buying cycle to share information. When the prospect becomes customer, the same VIP Room
can search for the ongoing needs of private collaboration I’ve already described. e Sales Rep
effectively becomes the coordinator and manager of the VIP Room during the Sales Cycle.
A good Social Platform needs a variety of capabilities to carry off such a vision. At the very least,
it will need very fine grained permission to control who sees what. You don’t want to have to create
full communities for each VIP Room. Rather, these should be easily created (hopefully automatically
provisioned) gated sub-communitees.


Imagine a process that works like this:
u e Lead is nurtured until their lead score reaches a critical mass threshold (a Lead Score) of
buying interest based on the content consumption in the Nurturing Community.
u Once the Lead Score triggers the threshold, a Sales Rep is assigned to that Lead. e Rep is
automatically subscribed to the Activity Stream associated with the Lead so they can see what
they’re doing in the Community. is makes it easy for the Rep to start naturally engaging
right in the Community as needed.
u When the Rep decides through direct observation and interaction that it’s time, the Lead is
promoted to an Opportunity. A VIP Room is automatically provisioned and the Lead is notified
of their new VIP Room.
u Interaction proceeds with all the normal channels—email and phone, but the VIP Room is also
there to facilitate. Ideally, all Slide Decks, Webinar recordings, and other work artifacts go into the
VIP Room for reference by the Prospect.
At Helpstream, we refer to the opportunity for Sales to understand much more context as “Customer
Awareness.” Interaction with a Community brings about an unprecedented opportunity for Customer
Awareness. Used properly, it makes it much easier to understand who is a near term focus for new
business, and who should be nurtured further before engagement. e days of being able to badger
Customers into becoming new business through constant hard selling are drawing to a close. Smart
organizations are helpful, and they certainly ask for the sale, but they never badger.


Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started
rough the previous eight chapters of the Social CRM Manifesto, we’ve covered a lot of ground
including:
u How the world has changed to put the customer in control of the conversation
u e Big Picture for Business of the different types of Social Media
u Gut level ways of thinking about how to be Social
u e Virtuous Cycle and how to start with Customer Service as the On-ramp for Social CRM
u Specific Social CRM strategies for Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales
By now you’re hopefully excited about starting up a Social CRM initiative for your own organization.
How should you go about that?

1) Start With Customer Service; it’s the On-Ramp for Social CRM
You have to make sure your house is in order before inviting guests.
Customer Service is the on-ramp for Social CRM. It will be a lot harder to succeed if your own
customers are not happy and social. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the person your
potential prospects are most likely to trust is “a person like me.” Without the strong backing of your
own customers (those people who are like your prospects), you won’t be maximizing your credibility.
e second consideration is that your own customer base and Customer Service are the easiest
places to drive traffic to your community. Getting strangers to engage leaves you with much lower
engagement rates. e familiar Rule of 10’s says that for such communities, 1 in 100 people will ask a
question, 10 of 100 may answer, and everyone else just watches. At Helpstream, we see engagement
rates 3 to 10x higher for Customer Service communities. Take advantage of this to accelerate the
growth of your early community efforts to get to critical mass.


2) You Need a Community. Don’t bet the farm on Twitter or Facebook.
It’s attractive to think about getting started right now with Twitter or Facebook. So easy to just start
Tweeting or subscribing to feeds of various kinds. But this is not an organized effort that is focused on
producing long term results. It’s just riding on the hype wave those hot properties have going for them.
It’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic. As such, it’s better than nothing, but not much.
I’ve likened Twitter to the crowded bar you may go to in order to meet new people. at’s great, but if
your only relationship with them is in the crowded bar, how deep is it going to be? And don’t forget,
we also talked about starting with your own customers. Why would they want to talk to you about
anything substantive in the crowded bar?

3) Be Conscious About Strategy and Culture:
Social CRM is a lot more than Products and Technologies
Let’s face it, Social Soware is very cool. I love working on it at Helpstream. But soware alone is not
enough for you to succeed. It’s probably not even the first step, although there is an argument to get
started with Social and not spend too much time in a paralysis of analysis.
Ultimately, to succeed, you will need two ingredients just as much as great technology. Your organiza-
tion must have a good idea of what strategies it will pursue with Social, and it must have a culture
that is capable of supporting that execution.
If you have no idea why you are engaging with customers using Social Media, it will be hard for the
engagement to be a successful one. If nobody in your organization wants to engage, or if they’re
terrible at it, it will be equally as hard for the engagement to be a successful one.
ere is one offsetting advantage Social has over conventional CRM: the feedback loop is much
more pronounced. It’s much easier for the old Centralized Command and Control CRM to go on
about its business of droning out messages than it is with Social CRM where the customer controls the
conversation, but it is also a lot less effective.
Social CRM is not a black box. If you poke it, it pokes back. Eventually, it will train your organization
what it needs to know to succeed, or it will convince you to quit poking the box at the very least!
It’s really not that hard to be Social though. Remember the gut level ways in which we already
know how to be Social.


4) Put a Program of Measurement and Continuous Improvement of
Best Practices in Place
It’s very hard to achieve repeatable results, show an ROI, or improve from where you are unless you
have some metrics to steer by. What metrics should you choose? at depends on the business results
you’d like to achieve. Get a clear idea of what those are and then figure out how to measure them.
ere are well-understood methodologies for all of the obvious ones like customer satisfaction or
call center efficiency.
Also, make sure your metrics are layered. Start from the highest possible level metrics. If you want to
improve your call center efficiency, don’t start out defining that with things such as how long agents
spend on the phone. Rather, measure that efficiency at as abstract and high a level as possible, while
still making it measurable. Perhaps something like cost of service per customer is an approach. At
Helpstream, we have customers who have tripled their customer base without adding a single addi-
tional service agent while raising their customer satisfaction at the same time. Obviously they’re doing
something a little different than optimizing call times (for example, they’re persuading their customers
to participate in the community instead of calling at all).
Be true to the highest layers in the metrics hierarchy. In other words, don’t change them oen.
Annually at most is a good guideline. e lower the level of the metric, the more you should be willing
to experiment and even ignore the metric in hopes of identifying new ways to optimize the overall.
Lastly, where metrics are concerned, look for benchmarks. Can your vendor provide you with
benchmarks that give an idea of how others do on various metrics? Can they help you to understand
the Best Practices needed to improve your results relative to the benchmarks? Helpstream answers
“yes” to both.

5) Your Social Platform Needs Business Process
A number of vendors talk about Business Process capabilities, but few deliver. You will need Business
Process to optimize your results, and in many cases, even to successfully collect the metrics you’ll want.
Business Process means control over your workflows, data (custom fields and custom objects), and
business logic. Integration with your existing CRM systems is another important consideration.
Without Business Process and deep CRM Integration, your Social CRM project will wind up a
siloed island. It will help, but it will never deliver optimal results because you’ll have too little
control over the user’s experience where it really matters.


Conclusion
So that’s it then: 5 steps to getting started down the path to Social CRM. It’s actually not all that hard,
but it does take a certain amount of determination and a sense of where you would like to get to.
We’ve tried to fill in as many of the details as we could in this Social CRM Manifesto. I’m sure you
have a lot more questions, and we’d be happy to answer them. Let me suggest you start by joining
our HelpExchange Community, which is our place for talking about Social CRM at a high level and
disseminating our thoughts on Best Practices. You’ll get a chance to ask your own questions there as
well as learn from what others are saying. When you’re ready, get in touch with Helpstream.
We’d love to help you with a successful Social CRM project.


Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with Virtuous Cycle

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