What is social customer relationship management (CRM)?

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

What is social customer relationship management (CRM)?

Social customer relationship management is a strategy supported by social media, online tools, and technology in order to enable organizations to better engage with their customers. Basically, it's a new, more social way of marketing. Social CRM adds a social dimension to the way you think about your customers and your relationships with them. Don't let the social part of social CRM fool you. CRM is still a major part of the strategy, and is a back-end process and system for managing customer relationships and data in an efficient and usable way.

Different organizations will use social CRM in different ways. The key is to determine your specific business challenge and solve it using a social CRM strategy. Social CRM applies to marketing, customer service, and your organization sales process. It can help with social engagement. For example, it can help your organization better engage with your customers by listening to their sentiments about your products or services. It also helps with social customer service.

So the ownership of social media is shifting away from marketing as engagement is increasing related to inbound customer service-based topics. So for example, how your business manages customer complaints and requests coming in via social channels like Twitter. This is a huge opportunity to support your customer base in a more holistic, social way. So until now, a person's social media activity wasn't trackable. But with social CRM, that's all changed. By adding critical social media channels to your existing CRM systems, you can combine everything you know about a lead.

So that means that customer prospect and lead come with all this information about their social media and online activity. So when a customer chooses to say, contact you via Twitter or Facebook, you can track and manage that conversation in as much detail as you would typically for a phone or email inquiry. You'll be able to act faster, respond better, and anticipate your customers' needs Social CRM now enables organizations to engage with their customers, really creating a culture of collaboration and advocacy.

So this then in turn empowers their customers to shape their own experiences with that organization. Here's an example. The social customer now chooses their preferred channels of communication and engagement with an organization. So they may go to Twitter to ask a question and Yelp to leave a poor review. Perhaps they even send a Facebook message to that organization's page and then begin an online chat with a customer service agent.

Your social CRM process will help your organization determine how quickly to respond, while tracking this entire process along with adding the customer data in one customer record. Sound complicated? Well, with the right set of social CRM tools and strategy in place, all of this information can in turn empower your organization, and empowering it to establish meaningful and transparent relationships with your customers.


https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/what-is-social-customer-relationship-management-crm