The Social CRM Playbook

The Social CRM Playbook Chris Bucholtz The Social CRM Playbook Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................................3 Introduction ..............................................................................................................................4 Definitions .................................................................................................................................4 Types of Conversations ...........................................................................................................5 1. One-to-many .........................................................................................................................5 2. One-to-one ............................................................................................................................5 3. One-to-one-to-many ...........................................................................................................5 The Mythology of SCRM Best Practices ................................................................................6 Five Steps to a SCRM Strategy................................................................................................6 Step 1: Learning the Lay of the Land ....................................................................................7 Step 2: Learning the Language ..............................................................................................7 Step 3: Learning to Listen........................................................................................................7 Step 4: Learning to Engage .....................................................................................................8 Step 5: Learning to Make Use of What You Learn ...............................................................9 Refining the Process.................................................................................................................9 Things to Avoid .......................................................................................................................10 Conclusion ...............................................................................................................................11 About the Author ...................................................................................................................12 Copyright © 2011 CRM Outsiders and SugarCRM, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 The Social CRM Playbook This playbook is published by CRM Outsiders, an industry blog on all things CRM and was sponsored by SugarCRM®. Executive Summary Social CRM is the response of businesses to the advent of social media and the eager adoption of the new communications channels by B2B and B2C buyers alike. It creates a new environ- ment for customer conversations, a new opportunity to learn about customers, and a new opportunity to engage, build peer-to-peer relationships and strengthen brand perception. In order to do all of this successfully, however, you need a strategy. That starts with some real- istic goals about social CRM, commitment from your business’s leadership, and a methodical analysis of your resources and of the preferences and behaviors of your customers. It also requires you to listen—which for many businesses is the hardest chasm to cross. This white paper will provide an outline of the broad steps you should take in building a social CRM strategy and a overview of how you can pair that strategy with technology to enable your business to practice real social CRM. But beware: because every group of customers is unique, and because every business approaches the ideas of social media in different ways, there are no best practices for social CRM. The best practices you develop for your business will be almost impossible to transplant into another organization—but that’s an indication of the competitive advantage you can gain from working hard to develop an approach that works for your business. 3 Copyright © 2011 CRM Outsiders and SugarCRM, Inc. All rights reserved. The Social CRM Playbook Introduction Social CRM has been the hot topic of discussion in the CRM space for several years now. The promise it holds makes marketers and sales directors salivate—the sort of information about customers that businesses have worked so hard to discover and collect is now being volunteered by customers through social media channels. The base-level thinking on social CRM goes something like this: “If we can harvest this unstruc- tured data from social media, and add it to the structured data we already know how to capture, we can boost the power of our customer database and thus increase sales, improves service and make our marketing more precise.” All of that is true—but it’s looking at the social media space through a traditional CRM lens. That view is very similar to the practice of viewing CRM strictly as a technology. It’s actually a discipline, facilitated by a technology—and social CRM is in many ways an extension of that discipline in response to how customer behavior is changing. The really revolutionary aspect of social CRM is not that customers are volunteering personal data—it’s that you as a business are now capable of engaging in a two-way conversation with customers. Sure, you ought to be able to glean information from those customer conversations to fill in your records about them, but the emphasis is sliding toward your use of social media to build relationships first. Without those two-way relationships, you will limit your ability to discover customer data—and the customers you seek to sell to will have less of a relationship with you and your business. Definitions Before we get too far into this discussion of Social CRM, it’s important we define some terms. Social CRM (SCRM) is really a strategy, rather than a process or a product. It can encompass several technology plat- forms and customer relationship tools, including a CRM system; in fact, CRM is the foundation of SCRM. SCRM is not a replacement for CRM. Confused yet? Well, you will be soon enough. The accepted definition, which was crowdsourced and then assembled by Paul Greenberg, is this: “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversa- tion in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” That definition doesn’t say anything about what you need to buy, how many people you need to hire, what processes you use or how to measure ROI. The reality is that SCRM has no best practices yet, and that’s almost part of its basic nature; if it’s social, it is not about people interacting with machines or with processes. It’s about people interacting with people, or groups of people. Those groups of people you know as customers have unique traits, unique desires, and unique styles of communication. That’s why your SCRM approach, in order to be successful, will itself be unique. That’s no reason to panic—you already do some social things in the brick-and-mortar world to relate to the unique qualities of your customers. SCRM scales those ideas, and it can do so because of another term we should define: social media. Social media comprises the various online technology tools that enable people to communicate easily via the Internet to share information and resources. Social media can include text, audio, video, images, podcasts, and other multimedia communications. Copyright © 2011 CRM Outsiders and SugarCRM, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 The Social CRM Playbook We can all readily name the large social media channels: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and, increas- ingly, Google+.