In an effort to increase sales and improve marketing and customer service, companies are resorting to social applications. In fact, the prediction for 2012 by some industry insiders is that social CRM expenditures will exceed $1 billion. The social CRM boom is clearly on.
According to this Forbes report, an evolutionary product of traditional customer relationship management solutions, social CRM recognizes the place of social media and how it has impacted consumers. Social media is a massive consumer sounding board that has gotten the attention of pretty much any enterprise that wants to remain relevant.
Social CRM and the right amount of mobile care are ways to embrace this evolution.
While the business-to-consumer transactions with social CRM have been the busiest in the past, business-to-business organizations are adopting social CRM at an alarming rate.
A quick look around the market and it seems that everybody is on board with social CRM and mobile care. How effectively they use the solution will determine how long its star will shine. Effective mobile care and its relationship with social CRM is also important to consider. The prolonged success also depends on measureable outcomes that must survive the expectations and evolve with the climate.
So how are these companies using social CRM? The applications are most often used in sales and marketing to record data among users, data that will help show companies how best to get consumers to buy into their brand. Social CRM is used to not only create brand awareness, but to log information and offer ways that companies can improve post-purchase activities.
It’s also not expected that social CRM will replace the tradition CRM in which companies have invested a significant amount of time and money. Putting the two side-by-side, one sees that in the traditional CRM situation, it is designed to do things “to” the consumer. Just as its name indicates, social CRM approaches the situation with more consumer involvement.
Millions of consumers have embraced the social aspects of the online world, which is a positive for social CRM because it wouldn’t really work otherwise. The more a consumer shares in a community of other consumers, the more powerful social CRM becomes. In this way, social CRM is far and above more customer-centric than traditional CRM solutions.
Companies are cautioned to not remain static where their social CRM and mobile care efforts are concerned. Careful monitoring and auditing of the processes involving social CRM and mobile care are essential. The focus of companies engaged in social CRM and mobile care should be on the relationship part of the process.
Edited by Stefanie Mosca