5 Key Lessons Social CRM can learn from CRM

5 Key Lessons Social CRM can Learn from CRM

by

Harish Kotadia, Ph.D.

Twitter: @HKotadiahttp://HKotadia.com/

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Lesson 1: Social CRM is a Strategy

• Social CRM is a business strategy, it is not technology, tools or platform. It can be defined as the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty.

• Strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Social CRM is a plan of action to build Trust and Loyalty. Calling Social CRM “technology”, “system” and “processes” is a misnomer. While executing Social CRM (strategy), technological tools will be used to achieve the goal, but tools are different from plan.

• It is important to have clearly defined and objective goals before selecting tools and technology. Not other way around, else limitation of tools will become limitation of your goals and strategy.

2© Harish Kotadia, 2011 Twitter: @HKotadia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_(goal)

Lesson 2: Optimize Business Processes

• Reason why many of the CRM implementations failed over the last decade is that the underlying CRM related business processes were not re-engineered or optimized for the CRM system.

• As a result, CRM systems became more of a drag on the employees using it. And to force them to use it, many of the companies resorted to “carrot and stick” policy to force employees to enter information in the CRM system. Naturally, the word “CRM” quickly became unpopular. This could have been avoided had the underlying business processes been re-engineered or optimized before implementing CRM solution.


Lesson 3: Data Quality is Very Important

• Any information system is only as good as data in it. We have all heard of the phrase “Garbage in, Garbage out” and this aptly describes why some of the CRM implementations failed. Not enough care was taken to ensure data quality.

• Quality is critically important for both, transactional and non-transactional data. This is especially true for Social CRM as the volume of data emanating from Social Networks can be huge and as people use multiple accounts & profiles on Social Media channels. It is very important to have data governance framework and best practices in place before implementing a Social CRM solution.


Lesson 4: Leverage Analytics

• Another key lesson we can learn is to leverage analytics. Thanks to their CRM systems, organizations were able to collect vast amount of data and have 360 degree view of their customers, but the same data could have been used much more effectively by applying Predictive Analytics.

• Before implementing Social CRM solution, we should have a clear idea of how we are going to use the information collected and how we can apply advanced analytics not only to analyze the past, but also predict the future consumer behavior and fix problems before they become crisis.


Lesson 5: Project Ownership and Leadership

• In any large and complex project with multiple stake-holders, it is very important to have a clearly identified “owner” and an effective “leader” who will be responsible for the success of the project.

• Absence of “clear” ownership and “effective” leadership is a recipe for disaster. This is all the more important for Social CRM as multiple stake-holders like Marketing, PR, IT, Legal are involved.

• It is very important to clearly highlight roles and responsibilities, procedure and protocols for each involved department/person before implementing a Social CRM solution.


Thank You

© Harish Kotadia, Ph.D.June 2011

Twitter: @HKotadiahttp://HKotadia.com/



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