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.
- 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.
- 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.).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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