Social CRM involves integrating social media channels into customer relationship management platforms. This allows customers to interact with businesses through their preferred social media channels. Social CRM provides benefits like better customer service, insight into customer sentiment from social media data, and two-way engagement with customers. It enables businesses to communicate with customers through multiple channels, gather insights from interactions, and improve customer service, marketing and sales.

1. Social CRM connecting with customers through
social networks
BY
JITHI ISOW GEORGE
JISHNU J

2. Social CRM or social customer relationship management
Social CRM or social customer relationship management is the integration of social media
channels into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms. Increasingly, CRM platforms
support social media alongside traditional channels so customers can interact with businesses via
their preferred channels. This means better customer service and greater marketing in sight gathered
from customer social media data.
Why do businesses need social CRM?
Social CRM makes it possible for a business to communicate with customers
using the channel of their choice—whether by phone, text, chat, email or social
media (e.g. Facebookor Twitter). Off the back of these interactions, a social CRM
system helps businesses gather richer, actionable insight about customer sentiment
on their company, their brand, and specific products orservices.
The bestCRM system are able to take this dynamic customer profile and put it to
good use by disseminating that information across different teams, including
customer service, marketing and sales.
Using social CRM for customer service
Social CRM is used by businesses looking to optimise service levels and the
multi-channel customer experience. It can help businesses get the basics of

3. customer service right, responding seamlessly in the way that suits the customer
best.
Today’s consumerexpects the same great service from a business regardless of
channel.
Customer expectations are rising
Consumers expect to be able to move easily between channels of communication
and for the business to respond promptly and personally in any of them. If the
business can remember them so they don’thave to explain themselves again, even
better.
This is especially important as customers increasingly see social media as the
easiest way to raise a service query—telecoms giant BT says that 40% of their
feedback from customers originates on Twitter, for example.
With social CRM, when a customer chooses to contact a business via a social
channel, that interaction can be tracked and managed in as much detail as a
traditional CRM system can track a telephone or email enquiry.
The business benefit
Businesses are able to act more quickly, respond better, and even anticipate
customers' upcoming needs. By enabling businesses to track social interactions
with customers using the same sophisticated tools as they use for other
touchpoints, companies can deliver faster, more complete resolutions to customer
service cases from across the whole business, resulting in happier customers.
Social interactions take place on a one-to-one-to-many basis, meaning the way in
which the interaction is resolved can impact directly on brand sentiment.
A customer service agent dealing directly with a customer on Facebookis
engaging in a personal interaction with a public audience. It’s easy and logical for
customers to want to share socially about their service experience afterward, too.
Using social CRM for marketing
Social CRM helps businesses make customer engagement a two-way street.
Instead of a passive audience, customers becomeactive participants in the story of
a brand, and in turn, they get to see a brand value them as a customer.

4. A marketing team may be producing great content – blogs, Facebookposts,
YouTube videos, Instagram accounts and snappy tweets – but that part of the
conversation is one-way. By using monitoring and tracking tools to see who’s
engaging in conversation with the business, social CRM can help businesses to
identify and reward brand advocates and influencers, encouraging them to spread
the word still further.
What are the benefits of social CRM?
For the marketing, sales and customer service departments, social CRM can help
generate more leads that turn into happier, satisfied customers who go on to
become brand ambassadors foran organisation. It can change the understanding of
brand reach and perception while providing access to a raft of new information
about customer behaviour and opinions.
Key benefits of socialCRM are that it enables a business to:
 Deliver customer supportin the online platforms customers use
 Interact and engage with customers in real time
 Resolve issues speedily by monitoring social media for complaints
 Find and reward brand advocates and customers who help others
 Get greater exposure in the places where audiences spend their time
 Increase engagement and deepen relationships with customers
The business case for social CRM
Social CRM has the potential to deliver returns across and between several core
business functions:
Customer service
By tracking and managing customer contacts across channels and business
functions, customer service teams can deliver dramatically better service and
markedly improve resolution times.
Some 79% of Salesforce customers reported improved customer service, and 63%
increased customer retention – demonstrating that social CRM delivers real
commercial benefits.

5. Sales
Track each prospect’sprogress and location within the sales funnel using a social
CRM. Sales teams can create a personalised experience for specialised users, rather
than using the traditional CRM blanket approach.
Beyond individualisation, sales teams can expect to see an improvement in
retained and referred business as customers become recommenders and advocates;
and that leads to increased revenue. In a survey of Salesforce customers, 55%
reported increased customer loyalty and 54% increased sales revenues.
Marketing
Increased reach and visibility, lower costs. Marketers can use social CRM to
increase reach while improving customer tracking and measurement. This can feed
back into other marketing tactics and help drive lead generation and sales.
In one Social Media Examiner survey, 89% of respondents said social media
increased their brand’s exposure, while nearly half reported that spending just 6
hours a week on social media activity reduced overall marketing costs.
Problem: Chordiant, an enterprise software company, needed to find a better way
to coordinate the needs and desires of the individuals involved in the product
requirements process.
Solution: They created Chordiant Mesh, and online community powered by Jive's
Clearspace, where employees, developers, customers and partners can collaborate
about productdevelopment. The feedback was very positive, resulting 15
successfulcollaborative productreleases.
Problem: Linksys, a Cisco division that provides VoIP and networking solutions
to consumers and small businesses, needed to reduce supportcosts while
upholding high levels of customer support.
Solution: The company partnered with Lithium, an early leader in social CRM, to
create an online supportcommunity. The deployment of the community increased
self-service participation, which reduced the need on costly phone support. Linksys
reported savings in the millions.

6. Problem: Enterasys Networks, a data-networking company, has hundreds of
employees stationed around the globe. They required a social networking tool that
would eliminated geographical boundaries and let their employees communicate in
real time.
Solution: They decided to deploy Salesforce.com's Chatter application. The
company experienced improved service performance, thanks to real time
collaboration on service issues. Additionally, the sales team was able to work more
closely together and close a record number of deals in the first quarter after
implementing Chatter.
Problem: H&R Block, the tax preparation experts, wanted to find a way to see
what their customers were talking about in order to anticipate problems before they
arose.
Solution: The company decided to use Radian6's social monitoring technology to
achieve this goal. The trend analysis tool allowed the company to drill down into
community conversations and see which topics were creating the most buzz. This
gave them better insight, enabling H&R Block to be more proactive in their
customer service.
Problem: Pepperdine University's business schoolwas looking for a better way to
encourage collaboration among students, staff and faculty.
Solution: They partnered with Yammer to create a Twitter-like environment where
users could interact and communicate in real-time and with more transparency.
They saw an increase in community participation, due to the familiar UI, which has
helped to enhance the learning and teaching process.
Because it is still in its fledgling stage, Social CRM still has a few kinks that need
to be worked out. However, these case studies stand as a testament to the potential
of this new market segment. It will be interesting to see its growth and maturation
of the coming years.