Tips to succeed with a good strategy in social CRM !

We already know we need to meet your customers on their turf which is social media. But successfully engaging them isn’t as simple as creating an account across every platform and shooting outbound posts into a void. Nowadays, our social media needs to be a customer service nerve center. We need to be aware of every mention of our brand, and need a tool to aggregate data about customers so that we can learn what they really want.

That’s where social customer relationship management comes in. Our social media efforts shouldn’t be detached from our overall customer engagement strategy. Marketing, sales, and support all need to interact with customers on social media. A social CRM strategy will help us organize these interactions so that we can learn from them. With the right tools and savvy execution, we can use branded social media to deepen our understanding of our audience.

Social Customer Relationship Management

A social customer relationship management strategy is a coordinated effort between an organization’s marketing, sales, and customer service departments to better engage with customers and increase brand awareness. Social CRM isn’t just about making  a sale after gathering data. It’s about creating a two-way conversation involving outbound messaging and inbound queries –  a conversation that is mutually beneficial to you and your customers.

Every business tackles social CRM differently. Still, most strategies use social listening and social publishing tools (either standalone or as part of a social media management suite). Popular social networks for organizations to focus on include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, but it may not be necessary to build a strong presence on all platforms. They key is to go where our customers are.

Some suggestions

For some businesses, social media is one item on a checklist of directories and other websites, to make sure people who are already looking for the brand find it. Managing it is often the job of a intern sitting alone in a cubicle somewhere in the marketing department. Even if that social media manager is on top of updating the brand profiles and sharing information periodically, potential opportunities to interact with customers will fly under the radar without a coordinated social CRM strategy.

The first step to success is to view social media not as a “to do,” but as a “what if?” We need to understand the business principles and mindset we need to adopt to succeed.

1. Identify clear problems and goals before you plunge too deep into social media strategizing. Try to understand the challenges facing your customers, and what might be missing from their perspective.
2. We may be tempted to start broad and be everywhere your customers are, but it’s actually more realistic to pilot a CRM strategy on a smaller scale first. Identify the one or two platforms your customers use most frequently. (Facebook and Twitter are good places to start–with more than 1.8 billion active users, Facebook is still the world’s most popular social network, and Twitter’s format allows for quick, brief, and user-friendly communication.).
3. Involve sales support and customer service representatives to determine best practices. As far as social CRM is concerned, social media is not just an offshoot of marketing. We would need to train our social media representatives as customer service representatives.
4. Discuss availability with all team members involved. Quick and friendly responses are the required for social media service support. We need to make sure you can somehow manage interactions at any time of day.
5. It’s important to integrate our social media support with sales support via email, live chat, and/or a call center. Not everything can – or should – be solved in a public forum, therefore you need a more private venue (without a word count limit) to resolve the issue and please the customer. We can always go back to the social media conversation once the issue is taken care of show the people within their sphere of influence that we take care of business with integrity and respect. 
6. Speaking of spheres of influence, once you’ve established goals and guidelines, you can start interacting with customers and identifying your ideal influencers. Every industry, not just the glamorous consumer ones, has influencers – people who are active online and use their accounts to promote brands to their audience. Brand influencers are word-of-mouth marketers for the digital age as they are actual people. Create a tactful strategy for identifying and reaching out to influencers. 
7. Try to stay genuine and personable, and avoid spamming followers with too much promotional content. People find conversation more appealing that ads. Key takeaway: when we are on our customers’ turf, it’s about them, not our brand.
8. We need to train our social media representatives to monitor beyond mentions, likes, and replies. We could also monitor keywords relating to our company, services, or the industry at large to catch comments from users who don’t tag you. That way, we’ll pleasantly surprise people who don’t expect to have their issues resolved, or have chances to boost glowing comments from people who love our brand. We’ll also get a chance to see what people are saying about our competitors. 
9. Monitoring social media at this level requires a sophisticated toolset. Without one, you’re probably under-leveraging your social media presence.

Essentially, having the right tools to track our social interactions alongside other types of interactions and customer data can make a successful social CRM strategy possible. 

Our views

A combination of tools and the right strategy can indeed make us leverage social CRM to the maximum extent in the digital age.