Providing Social Customer Care: Combining best practices of CRM and Social CRM
by admin
Social media is the topic of the day promising better customer engagement, enhanced brand awareness and (although sometimes difficult to measure) improved ROI. As corporations have become more comfortable with using social networks for traditional marketing, branding and public relations purposes, we are now seeing companies expand into using social media for customer care and technical support (for example, on Twitter see Best Buy’s Twelpforce – “tech advice in Tweet form” or Comcast’s widely followed Comcastcares). These emerging social care channels are forcing companies to re-evaluate their customer relationship management (CRM) strategies in an attempt to combine best practices of CRM with the newly emerging concept of Social CRM.
CRM vs. Social CRM
Broadly defined, CRM is a business strategy that covers how a company delivers the right products to the right customers backed by the right customer service to cultivate long-term customer relationships. CRM is not a technology—it is not dependent on systems. Rather, CRM is about people interacting with other people.
Traditional CRM has attempted to execute to its name and ‘manage’ the client relationship; however social media channels are empowering customers in a way that limits the effectiveness of these traditional CRM strategies. By the time a traditional CRM approach has its hands on a dissatisfied customer, they may have Tweeted and blogged about their experiences several times. These negative posts, no matter how accurate or inaccurate, are now a permanent part of the social network record, forever available to existing or potential customers as they search your brand on the Internet. Unless also solved openly in social channels, a reactive call to the customer or an 11th hour discount to save the day is completely lost on the broader audience. You may have managed the customer’s concerns but, unless the newly satisfied customer starts to Tweet or blog your praises, it’s a challenge to build up the brand from the original comments that pulled it down.
Social CRM can thus be viewed as an extension of CRM based on the idea that businesses today do not own, nor can they fully manage, social conversations about or with their company. Companies can, however, attempt to influence conversations and respond to inaccuracies, making the need to combine traditional CRM with Social CRM important.
Implications for IT
From an IT perspective, social networks are entering every organization at a rapid pace whether IT wants it or not. The problem is that these empowered technologies (social, mobile, video and cloud) make it very easy for the business and employees to bypass IT completely. Rather than playing catch up, there is real opportunity for IT to work closely with marketing and customer support to demonstrate leadership and understanding of these emerging social tools and their business impacts on people, processes and technology within the organization.
As companies move to integrate social care in their contact centers, it is wise to step back and consider how to best integrate traditional CRM and Social CRM to optimize the customer experience. Below are a few things for IT executives to consider:
Choose appropriate social networks:
With more companies looking to provide social care to their customers via Twitter, Facebook, community forums and even rich media channels like YouTube, it’s important to select the social networks most appropriate for the desired customer experience. For example, should troubleshooting issues be answered in a Facebook group or in 140-character Tweets that redirect the customer to more information on a corporate website? What about the best way to handle transactions that involve sensitive data like account details or credit card information? At the same time, best practices indicate that you should attempt to serve customers in their original, preferred communications channel rather than push them to email or 1.800 support. This not only benefits the customer, but the rest of the network could potentially benefit from the open dialogue as well. If a transfer to another channel is required, is the process and technology in place to make it appear seamless to the customer?
Prepare to give up some control:
Although extremely convenient, easy to set up and low cost (mostly free), social networks are not owned by your company. You do not own the content or the platform. Conversations are now very public; no longer one-to-one but one-to-many. At the same time, social networks can also go down. Most Twitter users are very familiar with the “Fail Whale” that appears when the system is overloaded and Tweeting comes to a halt. This means your customers cannot get through and you cannot reply back. From an “always on” customer service perspective, what is your back-up plan? This lack of control will lead traditional and entrenched information security and privacy control functions in the organization to approach a social strategy with scepticism and roadblocks—another good reason to include IT and corporate security from the very beginning to enhance CRM and Social CRM success.
Refine measurement over time:
Contact centers are based on measuring everything like average handle times (AHT), first call resolution, (FCR) customer satisfaction (CSAT) and so on. It’s all about metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). Can this same science and rigor be applied to measuring social media channels when in reality, best practices for social customer care are still in the making? Like the early days of the consolidated and integrated customer care centers, it’s now the “Wild West” for social customer care. Many companies are struggling to define whether there is truly a reduced cost of using Social CRM for customer support but they are doing it anyways. Proof of concept and piloting are the typical and appropriate starting points. Start small with limited investment in people and technology to prove the value and build a case for ROI.
Commit both time and people:
Social is not 9 to 5. The highly online demographic that are the major users of these channels have expectations of instant response. Gone are the days of waiting until Monday morning to call support. Many customers interact with companies at off hours and/or weekends. If a company is selling online, or their retail outlets are selling on the weekend, then support should also be available. How do you potentially staff for never ending social care? And what is the ROI for doing so? Also, how transferable are traditional contact center agent skill sets to social care? Most likely, Social CRM requires a special skill set to manage customer interactions. Unlike traditional phone or email support, scripting social care agents may actually make a situation worse. Customer care reps need to be trained on when and how to respond in social networks, many times unscripted, while still adhering to the corporate policies for response.
Integration into the contact center:
The social tools used to monitor, track and respond should be integrated into existing CRM systems. Empowered social agents need to be able to access customer information and previous interaction histories to best serve customers. Social agents can quickly erode customer trust if they don’t have access to the same CRM knowledgebases to provide accurate company and product information.
There are a number of emerging technologies that allow you to integrate legacy CRM systems and gather data related to the effectiveness and efficiency of the Social CRM. At the same time, legacy call center technology providers are starting to add functions and reporting to support social contact channels. History tells us that the next few years will bring consolidation in this space with a handful of industry accepted solutions emerging. There is certainly risk today in making material capital investments in social care, however, many of the solutions are SaaS based, thus mitigating some of the risk. The IT function can and should play a leadership role in the assessment and integration of CRM systems and knowledgebases to support social agents.
There are many clear benefits to Social CRM when it comes to improving customer satisfaction, retention and likelihood of repeat business; however the emerging nature of the channel and the processes and systems that exploit it mean that defining a clear ROI is difficult today. Starting small and proving value is the likely starting point. What is clear is that Social CRM cannot operate in its own silo. Social channels must integrate into the overall CRM business strategy to provide a consistent multi-channel customer service experience.
About The Author: Paul Egger is VP of Business Transformation & Technology Operations at TELUS International, a provider of contact center outsourcing solutions to global companies.
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