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Listen to your customers. Move on to Social CRM

Social CRM helps brands solve a larger customer pain point by resolving their complaints filed anywhere on the web--Facebook, Twitter, blogs and beyond

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Soma Tah
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Vishrut Chalsani

Vishrut Chalsani 

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Over the years, customer experience management (CEM), a key constituent of Social CRM is being spoken about more and more, drawing in leaders both from marketing and service delivery.

Service delivery professionals are now becoming more aware about how customer experience is linked to building a brand. Similarly, marketers have started appreciating how difficult it is to do good service delivery or a good job of customer service.

Technologists on their part are trying to help both sides create a good customer experience.

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The reality is that brands need a comprehensive tool to manage their online complaints as these are pegged to grow exponentially. Social CRM helps brands solve a larger customer pain point by resolving their complaints filed anywhere on the web--Facebook, Twitter, blogs and beyond.

What Social CRM can do for the enterprise

The proof lies in the pudding. Here is an anecdote on how an effective Social CRM product can help brands deliver a consistent and positive customer experience:

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A direct to home operator had a long, manual process by which they tracked anything customers said on Facebook or Twitter and finally took action upon it. An API integration - something they did for the first time - tackled this problem for them. It reduced the tracking, escalation, and resolution time by 300 per cent.

API integration is a key requirement from a Social CRM product that strategically makes a lot of sense to do because online customer feedback is a burgeoning area which needs to be integrated with internal tools handling customer relationships.

What’s on the horizon?

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There’s a lot of potential for innovative Social CRM companies to expand their offering to better serve the needs of brands.

Smart Social CRM companies are focusing on the consumer’s chat behaviour on mobile. Looking ahead, this is going to be the best way for a consumer to communicate directly with the brand. It would entail developing Software Development Kits (SDKs) and API’s for brands. There are going to be challenges - one of them being capturing structured information from the chat - as unstructured information makes it difficult for CRM platforms to give a good level of service.

On the consumer side, we believe apps that aggregate all brands for consumers to chat or call directly will be a huge hit. It would include various other intelligent features that will make consumers life easy. This app we believe has a potential to redefine the customer service space.

Social CRM packages that will ultimately lead in the market will be those that will help brands to provide their customers a positive and feel-good experience, on each and any of the latter's chosen touch points.

The author is VP - Enterprise Solutions, Akosha

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