Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

I am left amazed at the level and detail of infor­ma­tion those guys offer. As you know, today the social busi­ness envi­ron­ment is far beyond lis­ten­ing. There is a big shift in the past 1–2 years between online cus­tomer man­age­ment sys­tems and social media lis­ten­ing and engage­ment. After all, social busi­ness is about using social tech­nolo­gies to lower the bar­ri­ers between com­pany and customer.

The Altime­ter Group has released a new report on Social CRM, this report analy­sis is dif­fer­ent as all their oth­ers. The report (PDF 22 pages) is free to down­load, read and share, which reflects the social­iza­tion of infor­ma­tion and the spirit of social media.

After months of study and inter­views with over 100 orga­ni­za­tions, Altime­ter Group iden­ti­fied 18 use cases for Social CRM to help busi­nesses assess, adapt, and cre­ate new pro­grams and processes to social­ize their brands.

As the report notes in the beginning:

Rapid adop­tion of social net­work­ing enables users to con­nect with indi­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties who share mutual inter­ests, increas­ingly leav­ing orga­ni­za­tions out of the conversation.

Sim­ply hir­ing more peo­ple to keep up with social mar­ket­ing, sales, and sup­port will not be suf­fi­cient, as con­sumers and their new chan­nels will always out­num­ber employ­ees. As a result, com­pa­nies need an orga­nized approach using enter­prise soft­ware that con­nects busi­ness units to the social web – giv­ing them the oppor­tu­nity to respond in near-real time, and in a coor­di­nated fashion.

And they’re totally right.

As the report notes, Social CRM does not replace exist­ing CRM efforts, it com­ple­ments it with an out­bound exten­sion to con­nect with the very social bea­cons that shape and steer per­cep­tion – those pre­vi­ously untouched with inbound only infrastructures.

And as the “God­fa­ther of CRM,” Paul Green­berg notes, “We’ve moved from the trans­ac­tion to the inter­ac­tion with cus­tomers, though we haven’t elim­i­nated the trans­ac­tion – or the data asso­ci­ated with it … Social CRM focuses on engag­ing the cus­tomer in a col­lab­o­ra­tive con­ver­sa­tion in order to pro­vide mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial value in a trusted and trans­par­ent busi­ness envi­ron­ment. It’s (i.e. Social CRM is) the company’s response to the customer’s own­er­ship of the con­ver­sa­tion.“

Social CRM: The New Rules of Rela­tion­ship Management