Social CRM Comes of Age

Over the past decade or more, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been the strategic approach that most companies had taken in trying to figure out how to supervise their customers’ behavior. Typically, it was via technology and processes and analytic algorithms that were tied to an often amorphous management strategy. Gathering data about the customer and tracking all customer transactions were the way that CRM was used to ascertain the individual customer’s thinking. Hopefully, the insight it provided about the customer and the effectiveness of the processes put into place led to some kind of increased level of purchasing or decreased costs. Additionally, CRM was (and is) used for making some sales and service processes more effective and for sales and service management tracking the customer facing activities ranging from qualifying a lead to closing a deal to servicing an order to solving an issue. The strategies, technologies, processes and workflows are all operational -focused on the enterprise tracking the customer and capturing data.