social media

I was browsing the internet for articles on social media/social crm. Social CRM is the next big thing in CRM technologies that has already taken off 2 yrs. Recent studies show that most net savvy customers follow their brands on the social media sites like the twitter and facebook. It is the not the yuppie generation anymore, but ‘Generation N’ i.e. Generation NOW is here, and it is here to stay, making customer service KPIs harder for the industry.

Age old research has proven that it takes a fraction of investment to keep the customer happy, as opposed to always attract new customers. We system integrators (at our client sites) very well know that. My personal experience over the last 5 yrs has shown me the extent customer service has changed especially with the advent of the social media sites. Creating a customer service request is no longer JUST calling a 1800 number, it is also facebooking or tweeting on the merchant’s pages. I have done that couple of times to get the best of service.

A plethora of radio signals often appear chaotic to the bystander, but ask the telegraph operator to what he is “listening”. Same analogy I apply to the art (changing science to art here 🙂 )of listening to the chaos on a facebook page or to tweets and then parsing the data to get actionable intelligence, which is – information that can enhance customer service or open another opportunity for cross sell.

Participation in the social media conversation(again love to use the phrase – “involve the customer” 🙂 ) provides at-least the following, and much more:

1. Competitor information
2. Leads, that can be transformed into Oppty
a. Sales Lead
b. New Product/Service to be launched lead
c. Enhanced Service Lead
3. Praises from existing customers – can be used as testimonies
4. Complaints – service Requests, and issues that can be channelized to product/service marketing

Conversations can be online events, deals on social media sites, games, apps released, surveys that can gauge the customer and a prospective customer.

Social media is the young “sales/service/marketing channel” to gain/engage/service the customer that is here to stay and augment the traditional channels, if not replace in the short term.

One of the major social media monitoring software makers, Radian6 has a lot of interesting reading material to make usher few words of knowledge into our minds about social crm.

Read this on how to make a case for social media – http://www.radian6.com/products/applications/make-a-case-for-social-media/