Social Media and CRM

CRM is about managing and maximizing customer engagement. And as social media are playing an increasingly important role in everyone’s life, it is crucial to have a social CRM solution. Read below to find out a few tips that may help you take full advantage of your Social CRM solution.

Goals and targeting

The main issue with social media is that they generate a lot of noise and can take up a lot of your time, if you’re not careful enough. In reality, what applies for people using Facebook is also true for businesses using a CRM system. Therefore, it is important to have clear goals regarding the data you want to collect and how you can leverage this data to the benefit of your customers, before you actually start using your CRM for this purpose. The biggest -and most common- issue in this case, is that most businesses hyper-focus on driving engagement or extending their reach, without actually knowing how such increased engagement or extended reach can turn into positive results in the long run.

Holistic approach vs. silos

Every single business department needs to engage with customers, either this is Customer Service, Sales, Marketing or Product Development. Taking advantage of a social CRM system requires the participation of all involved parties; the so-called departmental silos need to be avoided at any cost.

Failing to implement a unified and holistic approach equals a lost opportunity. CRM systems are most effective when they can unify marketing, sales and service, and thus ensure complete information availability.

Adjusting to modern needs

If there is one constant in social media, this is constant change: new communities and technologies are always emerging, and policies are constantly changing. As a result, the social CRM landscape is anything but static. For a system to remain successful, continuous readjustment and experimentation is required. It is simply not possible for operational processes and CRM to run on autopilot.

As new social channels are created, it is important to improve your processes, so that you can gain true value from your CRM in today’s omnichannel world.

The value of metrics

Although 80% of small businesses are using social media, only 44% of them have ever tried to measure their efficiency. On the contrary, big enterprises take a more… scientific approach to this matter. Whatever the size of your business though, knowing what works and what doesn’t, is an important criterion for the success of your social CRM solution. In simple terms, it is imperative that you pay attention to the metrics indicating whether social media are actually meeting your defined goals.