Social CRM - Business Benefits?

I am trying to collate a quick & dirty laundry list of the business benefits of social CRM so that I can flip it out for folks casting a doubitng glare towards me. May be to only intimidate them. ;) But then, the list should contain genuine benefits so that I can follow through during the course of my discussions with them. :)

Disclaimer - There is no academic or analyst rigour behind this list. This is just a dirty list.

• Customer retention
• Customer advocacy
• Lead generation
  
• Online reputation management
• Social influence marketing
• Realtime microtargeting
• Realtime customer service
• Crowdservice
• Customer co-creation
• Co-created personalized professional services
• Crowdsourcing ideas
• Community based design
• Mass collaboration
• Co-creating experiences

This is by no means exhaustive. So please do feel free to contribute to my dirty list or share your list. ;)

Getting back the "social" in relationships

This is a comment I had posted on Brian Vellmure's post: Unleashing the value of Social CRM: Where to find the biggest return - which has received a LOT of insightful comments from the leading thinkers in social CRM, the #scrm bunch on twitter. So please do read the post AND the comments and THEN read my post below. :)

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We all agree that social CRM is about responding to the customer’s control of the conversation. And the obvious response is to first listen to what they are saying, but that means the business needs to know where they are saying it!

So, we need to first figure out where our customers are talking, about what & then decide who would be the most apt to not just respond but also engage & eventually be able to influence them as the new “social” relationship grows.

But let this not merely be about social media as yet another channel. Don’t get me wrong, social media/networks as another channel works in the current framework & is the transitional step. However the eventual outcome/goal will/may be far different from what any of us can envision. I hope. For the better.

So to take co-creation as one of the possible frontiers (thats the farthest am able to look BTW, others can help me see further), we could be seeing more & more co-created experiences, not just online but offline as well. More personalized services which have been co-created, not just crowdsourced ideation / community based design / mass collaboration.

Does anybody think that the traditional CRM functions marketing, sales or customer service are poised to achieve any of the above ideals in isolation?

And John, beg to differ, social CRM is not merely about the social media/networks. Social CRM had to be framed because of the customers taking control of the conversation, which was in turn made possible by social media/networks. But its not limited to online world. Its about the change we are yet to see in the kind of relationship b/w the firm & the customer – “social” relationship as opposed to the “transactional” relationship.

In a way that would be going back to the basics. Think a century back. Or come to rural India. I refer to the “Family” doctor/ tailor/milkman/cobbler/jeweller, the corner grocer. The professionals who delivered us individualized services &/or bespoke products. They still exist in your world, but not scalable, thus pricey & rather upmarket. Advances in technology (think other than social web, like in manufacturing, miniaturization, 3d desktop printing, RFID, etc.) will allow creating personalised products on scale.

But these don’t belong to marketing/sales/customer service either!

Look at the Coke example Paul Greenberg wrote on his ZDNet blog. Isn’t it about personalized drinks? 100s of drinks out of one machine? One that can give me my "regular"? Who would have thunk!

So fight all you want about where to start & who gets the most benefit, I will not join the debate. Its pointless. The change needs to happen, where ever it is in the organization.

You need a leader & a sponsor. And a team to support them operationally and a tribe to take the message to the rest of the organization. Sorry Esteban, for driving the change we need a passionate tribe, not a community.

Film shooting in our lane

Wonder if there will be too much disturbance today. :( So far so good.

Offshoring Social CRM - what works?

If you did not know already, the term & the definition have been nailed - its Social CRM & is defined in its simplest as "the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation".

A slightly lengthier definition, also given by Paul Greenberg, would be:

"A philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment."

Thanks a lot Paul for ending the recent debate on twitter. :)

Now to the post itself. There is a debate going on about the outsourcing & especially offshoring of an organization's social media initiatives, which if for responding to the customers need to be termed social CRM initiatives.

My twitter pal & Boston based CTO, John F. Moore has posted his thoughts around the idea of offshoring social media campaigns.

John has some great points. There are some very sensible caveats for businesses considering offshoring. Do read it before you read this post further.

Welcome back. :)

What businesses need to understand is that Offshore is not a panacea, nor is it a quick fix.

One cannot just do a soul search, figure out stuff that do not fit core competencies of the business & ship those tasks to a "faceless" offshore. It is a more complex affair than soul searching & offshore has a face too.

Offshoring needs a relationship of trust & intimacy between the business & the offshorer to give the most benefit. Cost arbitrage as the sole reason or even the primary reason for offshoring is dead or should be. Else the business might be, dead that is. By cost arbitrage, I mean siphoning work to the lowest cost provider of human capital. Sweat shops.

John's caveats as well as my agreement above are pretty generic, and not really unknowns for the bigger enterprises who have some experience & maturity with offshoring. One that is new for all is outsourcing/offshoring social media technologies as well as processes. Lets tackle the processes first.

Social Media outsourcing doesn't readily belong in the direct customer interaction aspect of it, and certainly not for the real time/synchronous interactions with the customers - like on Twitter. Asynchronous interactions though could be considered. Most certainly the back end stuff.

What can be outsourced/offshored from the processes itself is the analysis part of the listen-engage-influence cycle while measuring through out. Sentiment Analysis & other NLP techniques have not yet matured enough to replace humans effectively. Think of sentiments like sarcasm. Nor do we have proper infrastructure for semantics to automate the stuff sufficiently. So humans are inevitable in figuring out the signal from the noise on the social web & also, most importantly, routing it to the proper departments/persons responsible for the various types of data coming in. Is it a product/service issue, is someone giving an idea for a product/service, is someone trying to defect to the competition, is someone being sarcastic about our WOM campaign, is it spam/ambush marketing in our hashtag, etc. etc. etc.

Some aspects like answering to FAQs on forums or live chat could be offshored since there is no risk of "accent" pollution. You could also automate them with bots. Look at the IRC channels used by the Canonical folks for Ubuntu developers & users. Its a crowdsourced model, that doesn't stop them from using bots to help organize as well as help n00bs with FAQs & basic definitions/explanations. People don't RTFM anymore there.

Automation isn't sufficient yet & humans don't scale for cheap. Hence a mix of automation (sentiment analysis, routing, assignment) & offshoring could help.

Further, even if considered for interacting with customers on social media, the issues with "accent" pollution faced in call center offshoring need not enter the equation by restricting the responses from offshore teams to written & asynchrnous content which could go through reviews to reduce errors.

But the real deal with outsourcing &/or offshoring Social CRM is in consulting, redesigning the business processes to incorporate social media into the current customer centric processes (BPX), designing the IT infrastructre/architecture, developing, QA & implementing the various social apps as well as the integrations with the traditional CRM systems, training & documentation, support & maintenance of the apps - the whole bunch with the backend stuff.

Almost all of the aspects of implementing social technologies/apps can be offshored. If you go for private clouds/hosting out of offshore, not even the implementation is onsite! But the business side of the stuff - gathering requirement, strategy development, OCM, etc. - needs to be done onsite. There is never an offshore pure play. Its always a blend. And offshore is never about cheap labor. Its about capabilities. Intellectual arbitrage is the way to go for thinking about offshoring.

Finally, the points written in this old post about CRM & Offshoring can pretty well be extended to Social CRM too. The article is not a rigorous academic or industry report but the success has been demonstrated many times since then over the 6 years & even before, if its validity is to be proven.

N.B.: As already mentioned in the header of this blog, this post contains purely my personal views on this topic & are not to be attributed to my employer, nor to be construed as their position on this matter either, which may or may not agree with my views.

P.S.: I have now added a graphic on some of the aspects of Social CRM offshoring that had been put forth by Gaurav Mishra under Social Media Outsourcing wave. There are a few old blogs that I remembered related to the topic of Social Media Outsourcing:

• Social Media Outsourcing, Part 1: Choosing an Image Maker
  
• Social Media Outsourcing, Part 2: Weighing Risks and Rewards
  
• Social Media Outsourcing (SMO) Leads the Third Wave of Indian Outsourcing
  

Is Social CRM about automated relationship building?

Couple of days back I was presenting (in a teleconference) about Social CRM to a group of business analysts & developers working in the consumer goods industry.

PeopleBrowsr's Campaign Builder for Twitter.

I was introducing them to the concept of Social Media, Social Networks, some statistics as to why businesses should heed them & how the "consumer generated media" (CGM) affects the CRM functions of Sales, Marketing & Customer Service. The presentation was midway when I was interrupted by someone in the audience & was thanked for introducing the concepts. I was informed that there was nothing new in my presentation & that they already knew all about Social Media & had already built a tool for generating reports from the data that their tool grabs from the various social sites.

The group wanted to know if I had any better technology to showcase which could automate the text analytics even more & provide better insights. One another person was also interested in knowing how can social media marketing help him in sending coupons as part of his marketing campaigns. He started to explain about some successful mobile coupon technology value chain they had worked out between the business, the mobile service provider, the coupon distributor and whoever else. He was interested to know if we had any such value chain worked out for disbursing coupons on the social media.

The technologies that these folks were asking for was about more automated & targeted shouting so that their marketing campaigns could generate better hit rates & ROI.

I was dumb founded. Aghast. I did not have any such technology to showcase. Nor did I intend to showcase the technologies, piecemeal, during this session.

I tried to explain to them that they were trying to repeat the same mistake that the businesses have been doing with all the other kinds of media. I tried to explain that social media was not about pushing messages but about listening. I tried to explain that the customers are empowered now & they are baying for revenge, clamoring for blood, for all the marketing they had to endure over the years since industrialization. I wanted to explain that Social CRM is all about building relationships, to build trust & loyalty, to provide better customer experience, to co-create value.

I had to close the call saying that I would like to listen more in detail about their social media monitoring tool & see if I could integrate it with traditional CRM or BI systems.

I do know they have put in great technical knowledge into their tool. However, I doubt the intentions behind such a tool. They got the listening part of Social CRM right but not in the correct context. They wanted to eavesdrop & stalk on their customers talking in the social media and then bury them with more targeted messages, based on inferred knowledge about their customers.

I agree to the better targeting aspect. Businesses can now listen to the voice of each & every individual customer on social media. And thus provide more tailored solutions. But automating & targeting the marketing campaigns to these customers still does not make your business "social". It still does not help you build a "social" relationship with your customer.

The relationship between a business & a customer so far has been one of transactions. The interactions have been skewed to business triggered communications. The predominant case where customers initiate the communication has been to lodge complaints/issues, which should not have happened in the first place if the business is to provide a better customer experience.

But with Social Media & Social Networks its now possible for the businesses to build a relationship slowly over a period of time. Make small talk (no not the computer language) with the customers. Build a "social" relationship. With the permission of the customer, not by stalking them.

I fear that the term Social CRM might get disfigured to mean a set of tools that help businesses to eavesdrop & stalk on their leads, prospects & customers on the social web and thus push more targeted messages to them to lure them into buying more from the business, all the while reducing service costs by crowdsourcing it to the customer communities. The tools would still be the ones we envision, the purpose would be transmogrified. See how easy it would be fake a customer centric culture?

How do you want me to help convert the mindset of such people? What can convince them to see the futility of their pursuit? Or am I the one futilely pursuing utopia?