About Social CRM

Social CRM  with the Use of social Media Services, Techniques and Technology

Social CRM is critical to your success in today’s multi-connected environment. Social CRM  increases your sales and revenues through the use of social networks as a CRM tool. It helps you understand your customers’ needs,  sense their satisfaction and draw new customers.

This is all done through a direct communication with customers and aggregating valuable information about customers through the use of social media; customer updates its profile, you get a notice over the social media, analyze it and get back to him or her with an appropriate offer.

This is a part of a conceptual idea that includes social networking websites, blogs, wikis and discussion forums. I will try to explain what social CRM all about is and how does it work through memberships in communities such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Goal of CRM

Let us for a start remind ourselves what the goal of a CRM software is: Operation of marketing, sales and service and support in order to reach effectively customers and keep them coming back to buy more and more.

This we achieve while gathering information about the customer and distributing it to different parties in our organization. These parties than use this information in order to generate more revenues.  We can maintain a CRM system that centralizes and automates the processes but we still operate it in the traditional way.

For example the Amazon sales platform suggests you constantly products according to your profile that Amazon gathered on you. This is the traditional way. But never the less– Amazon is the master of CRM.

Social CRM changes the Strategy

Today this is a fact – customers trust their friend and colleagues more than they trust the advertiser. Recommendation from a friend on Facebook or Twitter is ten times more worth than an impression of a banner.

The traffic on these social platforms is increasing daily and with it the conversation and exchange of experiences. The users post pictures, videos and posts. They tell each other what they are doing and what their plans are for the next ten minutes.

Thus social CRM may be under certain circumstances the right strategy for you. With social CRM, also known as SCRM, the goal and strategy are changed; you build meaningful relationships with your customers through the use if social media. And so instead of pushing information to the customer you engage directly with the customers in a transparent way and initiate a conversation.

In this conversation you identify problems and suggest solutions. On Facebook for example the customer is your friend and might click LIKE to your posts or even products.

And that is the great advantage of the model and structure of the social CRM – it has no traditional end users. The circle of the social CRM never closes and the information, when is qualitative or relevant, is forwarded to the next member of the social network. The disadvantage is that your competitors are exposed to this information as well.