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Previous NextAUGUST 2012
The CustomerIn Social Media,
Really Comes FirstSocial media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here’s how to listen and react. >>By Debra Donston-Miller
PLUS Spackling over rough edges of social business architecture >>
August 2012 2
For our cover story, we went looking for com-panies that have done an exceptional job inte-grating social media with sales and marketing.We ended up with more-provisional successstories about companies that are social medialeaders but also are still figuring things out.And they’re not alone. These companies say
their technology vendors are still figuring outthe best way to mind meld the social feed withthe customer record. Citibank’s Frank Eliason,who gained fame as of the inventor of social cus-tomer service (as the original voice of @Com-castCares when he worked there), says the CRMvendors are just starting to get a handle on thereal enterprise requirements for social. Theyought to be getting there, he says, given the ac-quisitions we’re seeing, with Salesforce.com buy-ing Radian6 and Buddy Media, among others,and Oracle picking up Vitrue and Involver.I wonder, though, if the complete suite will
ever arrive. The major vendors will continue tobuild or buy the missing pieces, but this is a puz-zle where the pieces keep multiplying. Justwhen we thought we had Facebook and Twitter
activity streams figured out, Pinterest comes outof nowhere. So how well does that text analyt-ics/sent i ment analysis tool you just bought doat understanding that a straight line in the text,combined with a goofy image, adds up to a sar-castic statement rather than a positive one?As gaps open, niche vendors will pop up to
fill them. The big players will buy some ofthem. In other cases, businesses will bolt themon to their existing CRM infrastructure.
The Chatter StrategySalesforce has been particularly smart with
Chatter. Many of the elements of the Salesforcesocial business portfolio came from acquisi-tions. Chatter enterprise social collaboration isthe exception; it’s the piece Salesforce built.Work on Chatter started in 2009, when the
pivot toward social business began, says RossPiper, senior VP of enterprise strategy at Sales-force. With studies showing social media use out-pacing email, Salesforce decided to stop imitat-ing Amazon.com as the paragon of Web usability. “The companies redefining experience and
user expectations were Facebook and YouTubeand Twitter,” Piper says. Rather than make Chat-ter a thin overlay, Salesforce built it “right intothe heart of the platform,” he says. That tookmore resources and also was a risk “because itmeant we took developers and people off ourcore product to make that shift,” he says.Chatter gives Salesforce a way to bring the
niche vendors it acquires into a social conver-sation that includes references to objects fromthe CRM platform, like opportunities and cus-tomers. As these products get more deeply in-tegrated, they add to the platform’s richness.And when all the pieces don’t fit together
perfectly, Chatter can be the duct tape andspackle to smooth over the rough edges inthe social business architecture. Or maybe it’sthe WD-40, to make things slide easier?The lesson for business strategy, as well as
technical integration: Internal collaboration isintegral to outward success.
David F. Carr is editor of The BrainYard. Write to him [email protected].
Spackle And Duct Tape In The Social Media World
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August 2012 3
The CustomerIn Social Media,
Really Comes FirstSocial media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here’s how to listen and react.
he customer is always right. Anyorganization that has paid only lipservice to that adage will find itself
at a distinct disadvantage as social networkingplatforms give customers not only a louder
voice, but also one that can be heard far and widein a matter of seconds.Real-time compliments, complaints, questions,
leads, support … Welcome to the age of social CRM.We know of conventional CRM as the use of tech-
nologies and business practices to align and inte-
[COVER STORY]Previous Next
T
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By Debra Donston-Miller
August 2012 4
grate marketing, sales, customer service, andhelp desk to attract new customers and retainand maximize relationships with existing ones.Social CRM is, well, exactly the same thing, butit uses the data and interactions from socialplatforms. Social CRM is challenging compa-nies to be more open with their customer en-gagement initiatives, as well as to integrateand update traditional CRM systems with newsocial networking tools and processes.“We don’t see social CRM as being separate
from the overall imperative to improve andmanage customer relationships,” says ForresterResearch analyst William Band. “Social tech-nologies that are associated with social engage-ment are really a subset of CRM technologies.”(See diagram, p. 6.)
Here To ServeCustomer service is the most natural ele-
ment of CRM to take advantage of the socialmodel; it’s where we’re seeing some of themost significant social CRM impact today. After some early, rudimentary steps into the
provision of service and support on Twitterand Facebook, online men’s fashion retailerBonobos saw that customers were eager toengage on social media platforms—more sothan by email or phone. The company deter-
mined it needed to be where its customerswere, says John Rote, VP of customer experi-ence at Bonobos.“We were early advertisers on Facebook and
a number of [employees] had Twitter ac-counts, but for a while we were a little afraidof taking full advantage of social, even from amarketing and advertising point of view,”
Rote says. “But with a lot of customers, oncewe started engaging with them on social me-dia, we realized we had never had a call fromthis guy or an email from this guy, but here weare, and he’s bringing his friends into the con-versation on Twitter, he’s very active on Face-book. Turns out there are a lot of people forwhom the bar to engagement is pretty low
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Does your company have an official or unofficial presence on these external social networking sites, or is use blocked?
51% 15% 24%
41% 12% 25%
35% 27% 15%
16% 12% 18%
7% 9% 38%
2% 7% 26%
2% 8% 25%
7% 1% 26%
Official presence Unofficial presence Blocked
Other companies’ community sites for end users
MySpace
Jigsaw
ZoomInfo
Manta
Data: InformationWeek 2012 Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey of 394 business technology professionals at companies using one or more internal social networking systems, October 2011
R
To Network Or Not To Network
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for social media. They’re really happy to be-come excited brand advocates. You just haveto meet them on their own terms, which for alot of people means Twitter and Facebook.”Bonobos’ social customer service efforts be-
gan with just him and one other person, Rotesays. The two would print out screens show-ing customer interactions and manually tickoff which ones each had responded to. As
Bonobos delegated more time and resourcesto social efforts, its need for more robust man-agement technology also increased. Insteadof relying on shared printouts, Bonobos nowuses Desk.com (a Salesforce.com service) toroute service inquiries and customer cases tomake sure they’re all getting addressed by theright people and that the information can bearchived and used moving forward.
Bonobos also discovered a kind of continu-ous loop between customer service and brandpromotion. “What we saw was that the moreengagement we had, from a service point ofview, the more participation we had from apromotions and marketing point of view,” Rotesays, “and it was just this reinforcing kind of cy-cle, where we have people come in and do re-ferrals over social media—that type of thing.”
The Next Stage In Social BusinessOrganizations large and small have gotten
their heads around the use of social network-ing platforms such as Twitter, Facebook,Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest as a way topromote brands, products, and personalities.But the conversation is often a one-way street.The next stage is increased and more mean-ingful customer engagement across socialplatforms. It’s a challenge few companies aremeeting effectively, due in no small part toimmature software tools, according to expertswho spoke with The BrainYard. According to InformationWeek research,
marketing is the No. 1 driver of external socialmedia efforts. Thirty-eight percent of respon-dents to our recent Social Networking in theEnterprise Survey said their company’s approach to external social media is based
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2012 2010
What’s The Primary Factor Driving Your Approach To External Social Networking?
Marketing-driven based on branding and promotion efforts
Support-driven based on a desire to better address customer issues
Sales-driven based on a desire to increase sales
Integrated plan that brought marketing, sales, and support together
No primary driver; pet project of a small group
We have no official presence on external social networking sites
Data: InformationWeek Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey of 394 business technology professionals in October 2011 and 624 in August 2010 at companies using one or more internal social networking systems
38%28%
11%11%
7%8%
5%7%
9%12%
27%29%
August 2012 6
mostly on branding and promotion; 11% saidit’s support-driven, based on a desire to ad-dress customer problems better; and 5% saidit’s sales-driven. Only 7% of respondents saidtheir social efforts integrated marketing, sales,and support functions. (See chart, p. 5)When it comes to marketing, “this is basi-
cally using social channels to reach out andcommunicate to customers as you wouldthrough any other channel to make yourselfknown to them,” says Forrester’s Band. “Whatwe see evolving there is the notion of creatinggreater engagement in that dialogue, whereyou can have customers respond to you andengage with you in a two-way dialogue. Alsoin the marketing bucket is the ability to listento the voice of the customer and to try to un-derstand the sentiment about brands orproducts. That’s become very important tomany companies, but what’s changing as it re-lates to CRM is more desire for companies totry to take that and turn it into more action—to do something with the information.”
Reaching Underserved CustomersHealth Care Service, owner and operator of
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Texas,Oklahoma, and New Mexico and the nation’sfourth-largest health insurer, discovered that
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• Product life-cycle management (PLM)
• Enterprise marketing management(EMM)
• E-commerce
• Social media and networks
• Sales-force automation(SFA)• Partner relationshipmanagement (PRM)
• Ratings and reviews
• Configure, price,and quote (CPQ)
• Revenue and pricingmanagement (RPM)
• Order management• Contract life-cyclemanagement (CLM)
• Electronic billpresentment andpayment (EBPP)
• IVR and speech portals
• Contact center infrastructure
• Field service management(FSM)
• Customer service and support (CSS)
• Customer loyalty management (CL)
• Customer forums (CF)
• Customer communityplatforms (CCP)
• Enterprise feedback management (EFM)• Customer business intelligence (CBI)• Customer data management (CDM)• Listening platforms
Customer insight
Customer targeting
Customercollaboration
Customer retention
Customeracquisition
In the emerging extended customer management business process and solution ecosystem, social computing is being used to engage and collaborate with customers in each of the elements of the customer-interaction process, according to Forrester Research.
Social Media In The CRM Landscape
Data: “Defining Social CRM” report, Forrester Research
August 2012 7
social media could help it reach customerswho may have been underserved.Lynde O’Brien, social media director at
HCSC, likens the evolution of offering cus-tomer service via social to the time the in-surer started providing service over the Web.It’s a matter of being where the customersare, she says.“We began by monitoring [social media
platforms] using Radian6, and we were seeingthat members were talking about their expe-riences with Blue Cross,” O’Brien says. “Theyhad questions, they had complaints, and byand large the people who were reaching outto us via Twitter at the time were people whohadn’t called our full-service units and ourcustomer advocates, had not yet been to ourwebsite. Sure enough, by being out there, wecould actually serve a whole new demo-graphic of our membership.”The idea of monitoring—or listening to—
customers is key, experts say. “That’s one of the hard things with social
media: Companies want to push their mes-sage,” says Frank Eliason, senior VP of socialmedia at Citibank. “As most companies arefinding out as they enter this social space, thecustomers do want to talk.”Customers not only want to talk, but they
also want you to listen and respond. That dy-namic has always been at the core of cus-tomer service and management, of course,but the difference with social is that conver-sations are happening across more channels,in real time, and in the wild. Bonobos is mon-itoring social media for any mention of itsname or products and then engaging cus-tomers and potential customers. “We wentfrom a defensive, ‘let’s tag things as service-
related and assign them a tracking number’mindset to popping into conversations,”Rote says. “If anyone is mentioning Bonobos,chances are they are at least open to the ideaof being contacted by us. Maybe not always,but if that’s not what somebody wants, it’spretty easy to ignore someone on Twitter.” HCSC’s O’Brien says about one-third of peo-
ple are surprised (in most cases pleasantly, sheadds) when the company unexpectedly con-
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Asurvey by Constellation Researchof more than 200 CRM decision-makers shows organizations taking
one of four different paths with their CRMsystems.
1. Stay with the status quo. Most organi-zations in this category have either verystrong adoption or have overbought andbarely taken advantage of existing systemcapabilities. There’s little advantage in mak-ing changes.
2. Move to a new CRM system. Organiza-tions in this category either use a new sys-tem from an existing vendor, in order to
avoid major new training and implementa-tion costs, or they rip and replace.
3. Consolidate CRM systems and aug-ment with best-of-breed apps. Software-as-a-service and other CRM point productsnow play a key role in system extensibility.
4. Upgrade CRM and surround with bestof breed. CRM deployments typically lastfive to seven years. Many line-of-business ex-ecutives want to upgrade their departments’core CRM system and then add best-of-breed apps. This approach appeals to com-panies with dynamic, rapidly changing businesses. —Debra Donston-Miller
4 Approaches To Next-Stage CRMWHAT NEXT?
August 2012 8
tacts them after a social mention. “A lot oftimes when people have a customer servicequestion, they might not know that we’re onTwitter,” she says. “In fact, a lot of times wefind that when we reply and say, ‘Hey! We sawyour tweet and thought we might be able tohelp you. Would you like a call from customerservice?’ they say, ‘Wow!’ ”We’re not at the point yet where most social
media denizens expect to be contacted afterthey complain about or compliment a com-pany, says Ray Wang, principal analyst andCEO of Constellation Research. People, hesays, tend to respond in one of two ways: “It’screepy but I’m excited, or it’s creepy and I’mannoyed.” Companies should remember oneimportant rule: “If you can’t resolve the prob-lem, don’t contact the person,” Wang says.Companies must also take into account con-
versations that customers are having with oneanother, says Forrester’s Band.
Getting To Know YouWhat makes interacting with a company
memorable? A really bad experience sticks inyour mind, for sure, but so does a really goodone. And for many people, a really good ex-perience is one where their specific needswere taken into account. It’s a natural exten-
sion of traditional CRM platforms and prac-tices, says Citibank’s Eliason.“You start looking at the CRM tools out
there, and what do they do? They listen formentions of your brand and then pull it intoa customer record,” Eliason says. “TraditionalCRM started as a kind of means for salespeo-ple to better know the customer. Social CRM,in my view, is getting to know the customerfor what they want the world to know. Com-
panies get to know customers on a muchmore intimate basis. That information can beused for certain things.”Eliason sees this information being used to
connect like-minded customers and companyrepresentatives. “Banking has always beenabout relationships and community. Socialmedia is about relationships and community,”he says. ”But now, on a scaled basis, I canmuch more effectively build relationships. I
can get to know the customer for what theywant the world to know. And then you can dosome really interesting things. Calls can berouted to someone who has similar intereststo you. Why? Because in the service world, weknow that those are the calls you remember,where a personal connection was built.”It’s all about context, says Esteban Kolsky, a
principal and founder of ThinkJar, an advisoryand research firm. “Social doesn’t work with-out context,” he says. “I need to know whoyou are, who you’re related to, what role youmay have, who you’re tied back to, what timeof day it is, what your interests are. It helps meto have those patterns of recognition.” Eliason says this contextual model will be a
huge shift, and he concedes that it will requirecompanies to do very different things and fortechnology to be designed to accommodatethese very different things.“Social media provides businesses the op-
portunity to know what their customerswant the world to know about them—I referto this as one aspect of ‘scalable intimacy,’ ”he says. “The original concept for CRM wasthe ability of salespeople to take notes of in-teractions. Sometimes the notes were busi-ness-related, such as products a company isinterested in. They were also sometimes
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“It feels like when we weren’t
taking full advantage of social, we
were essentially ignoring a lot of
people who were open to the idea
of engaging with us.”
—John Rote, VP of customer experience at Bonobos
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August 2012 9
more intimate, such as things people in theoffice may like or not like. Social mediamakes it possible to have that same intimacyon a scaled level. “He continues: “As these CRM tools improve,
we will have access to broader informationabout the customer. For example, imaginemarketing material that is more directed atthe interests of the individual as opposed tothe generic message a company may send. Toreach this level, tools will have to be able tohandle the data, and companies will have tomake sure the data is used only in ways thatmake the customer comfortable.”CRM tools are just starting to deliver on
those requirements, Eliason says.Experts who spoke with The BrainYard for
this report agree that traditional CRM vendorshaven’t yet created a system for fully integrat-ing and exploiting the data being generatedacross social media channels, which can in-clude wikis, blogs, and forums. Based on the recent flurry of social media
acquisitions, major enterprise application ven-dors such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, SAP, andIBM have acknowledged the importance ofsocial to the future of their platforms. “Now the key component is how you get it
into the customer record—how do you
broaden it so it’s not about listening for thebrand but about listening for what that cus-tomer is telling you?” Eliason says. “That’s theconnection point that will be the toughest as-pect. That’s a lot of data. At the same time,with these acquisitions you expect to seethese major CRM players achieving that.”
Not Fully EngagedPerhaps once these acquisitions are fully in-
tegrated into traditional CRM systems, we willsee more organizations exploiting social me-dia in their customer engagement and man-agement initiatives. For now, however, Infor-mationWeek’s research, which can be found inthe December 2011 report “Rebooting TheAntisocial Network,” suggests that many or-ganizations have some significant gaps intheir social media efforts. In a survey of organizations using one or
more internal social networking systems, 51%of respondents said they have an official pres-ence on Facebook, 41% on Twitter, and 35%on LinkedIn. However, only 16% of respon-dents said they have more than five full-timeemployees focused on social media, and 24%said they have no full-time employees fo-cused on social media (it’s part of employees’general responsibilities). Perhaps more telling,
32% of respondents said they don’t knowhow many full-time employees at their organ-izations are focused on social media. The survey also showed that only 17% of re-
spondents have a formal process for address-ing customer complaints posted on Face-book. Sixteen percent have such a process forcomplaints posted on e-commerce sites, and12% on Twitter.Indeed, there’s much work to be done be-
fore most companies can say they truly havesocial CRM system in place—from cultural,technical, and business process perspectives.But companies are demonstrating the poten-tial rewards. As Rote, the Bonobos customer experience
VP, puts it: “When people say to me, ‘Are yousure you want to be that active on Twitter oron Facebook? It seems like it’s adding a lot ofwork,’ I say, ‘Maybe we are doing more worknow than we would otherwise, but if peoplewanted to engage with you by phone and itwas ringing, you wouldn’t ignore the phone—you’d pick up the phone.’ It feels like when weweren’t taking full advantage of social, wewere essentially ignoring a lot of people whowere open to the idea of engaging with us.”
Write to us at [email protected] .
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