Are you using social media to improve your customer service? Is your current Customer Relationship Management process inefficient? A social customer service strategy increases customer engagement. This week we will about developing a social CRM strategy.
Just about everybody uses social media in their daily lives. Why
not use the online gathering places as an outlet for customer
service? A study found that 43% of branded social media engagement by
consumers ages 18-29 was customer service-related, as opposed to the
23% that was marketing-related.
This means that social media is an even more useful tool for CRM than
it is for marketing!
The Scope of Social CRM
- Marketing: Monitoring, analysis and response of customer conversations through social listening tools.
- Sales: Understanding where prospects are discussing selection of products and services offered by you and competitors and determining the best way to get involved in the conversation to influence sales and generate leads.
- Service and support: Customer self-help through forums provided by you and neutral sites.
- Innovation: Using conversations to foster new product development or enhance online offerings is one of the most exciting forms of social CRM.
- Customer experience: This references the use of social CRM to enhance the customer experience and add value to a brand.
Social CRM Implementation Tools
- Monitoring; Reviewing the method of social listening and deriving insights from these.
- Mapping; Finding relationships between an individual customers or grouped segments using different social platforms, e.g. Facebook and Twitter or email marketing.
- Management; Processes for implementing and reviewing strategy. More detail on campaign management would be helpful here.
- Middleware; The software tools and APIs used to monitor and gather insight.
- Measurement; The measures used to assess social marketing effectiveness and ROI.
While you may have active profiles on each of the major social channels, it's important to designate one platform as your main customer support hub. The one you choose depends on your niche and where your customers are most active. Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks. Facebook is still the largest social network in the world, so naturally it gives you access to the largest audience. You can easily use third-party apps to create customized question and answer pages. LinkedIn is the main hub for professional contacts and B2B marketing. Unfortunately, the only effective way to connect with people on LinkedIn is through active networking. Regardless of which platform you choose, make sure all of your customers and followers know how to contact you for support.
You may not have the time or resources you need to address every single concern. You have to decide how to prioritize customer service issues. If a potential customer has an urgent question? You may have missed to an urgent question of potential customers. Look for comments and questions that indicate an interest in your product or service, especially when your answer could impact a buying decision. Know in advance how you will respond to dissatisfied customers. You do not forget sending to them new product or gifts.