Who Is the Social Customer?
- The social customer consumes information in a different way, and learns about breaking news through Twitter and Facebook, favoring what their network has curated and surfaced as important information.
- The social customer learns about new products and brands through social channels and trusts their social network to provide honest feedback about it, as opposed to a brand’s one-way advertising message.
- The social customer is savvy, doesn’t respond well to unsolicited SPAM in their social networks or overly promotional tweets, but is open to relevant information that meets their needs at that particular moment.
- The social customer expects brands to be present and active in the same social venues where they hang out, listening to their feedback, whether it’s negative or positive.
- The social customer expects you to listen and engage with them, not only when it coincides with an e-mail blast or new feature release, but rather when they need you. And you better respond fast, in real-time, or they will either move on to a competitor, or tell their friends about their bad experiences.
Because the social customer can talk to a brand through many channels at the same time, they expect everyone they talk to from your company to have the same background on the issue. For example, if I complain about an airline on Twitter, I want the representative who engages me there to know my itinerary and the full history of our interaction through various channels.
Bottom line: The social customer owns the relationship, and you need to earn their trust.
What Is Social CRM?
Paul Greenberg, an author and leading authority on SCRM, stated that Social CRM is “…designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide a mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company response to the customer’s owning of the relationship.”
Michael Fauschette says: “Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers. The goal is to make the relationship with the customer more intimate and tied to the company by building a public ecosystem to better understand what they want and how they interact with the various company touchpoints like sales, customer service etc…”
In the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what you call Social CRM or how you define it, as long as you understand it and know how to apply it to your organization. It’s all about the execution. At Attensity, for example, they developed the “LARA” framework, which addresses the end-to-end process of Social CRM:
- Listen to customer conversations
- Analyze those conversations
- Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
- Act on those customer conversations
(source)
(img source)
Like this:
Like Loading...
