Social CRM has increasingly gained momentum and has changed the way people and businesses communicate. Companies are taking advantage of social media and social networking for marketing and increasing their customer service level. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Myspace, allow companies to not only attract new customers to their products or services, but also maintain relationships with existing customers.
However, according to a Forbes article by Jeremiah Owyang, companies face a major problem with using social media. Through social media sites, information is communicated in a rapid amount of time and therefore marketers have a hard time keeping up with the information and responding to consumers. Simply hiring more employees is not the answer to this problem.
To respond to this problem, a new trend is emerging of integrating traditional CRM systems such as SAP, salesforce.com, and other software with social media sites. This allows companies to easily track the discussions on Facebook or Twitter by identifying keywords that might show that customers are happy or dissatisfied with a particular product or even show prospective customers that are interested in making a purchase. Companies are then better able to respond to customer needs in a faster amount of time.
Generally, when customers have a problem with a product, rather than calling the company’s customer support line, they would complain on the social media sites. The news is shared with millions of people, which gives the company a negative reputation and thus affects consumer purchase decisions in a negative way. According to a New York Times article, Comcast tackles this issue by using Salesforce to search for particular keywords in Twitter. The company then responds with a Twitter message to resolve the particular problem at hand. Many companies are taking advantage of the benefits offered by Salesforce to respond to customer needs in the online social media.
Social CRM has become a necessary tool for a company to succeed. Customers also use these social media sites to inquire about a company’s reputation and read product reviews before making a purchase. Therefore, it’s very important to effectively maintain customer relationships on social networking sites.
Sources:
Owyang, Jeremiah. “Social CRM: Not Your Father’s CRM.” http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/09/facebook-twitter-social-media-crm-dell-comcast-cmo-network-jeremiah-owyang.html
“Customer Support via Twitter? Salesforce.com Makes It Legit” http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/customer-support-via-twitter-salesforcecom-makes-it-legit/?scp=2&sq=social%20CRM&st=cse
No comments:
Post a Comment