The future of social CRM has arrived

For a while now there has been a real gap in the market for true social customer relationship management. While many companies are practising this through training up their customer service team in social media for example, there hasn’t been an accessible tool that allows companies to effectively run social CRM through apps. Salesforce showed some movement in this area, when they acquired Radian 6, but a new player on the market shows how b2c brands can effectively integrate social data from Facebook into their own applications that track customer data. Gateway for Facebook was just launched in full last week, and is already counting some great brands using the service, including Guess and Starwood Hotels.

For companies that really want to make the most of social tools available to learn more about their customers and change the way they interact with them, Gateway for Facebook is a great offering. Though it’s still early days for the app, with difficult features to get around such as the fact that you can only access the social graph of customers that have explicitly allowed the app ( a standard for Facebook), the future looks promising. Essentially through Gateway, you can combine your own customer data with the social data contained within Facebook, allowing you to build up entirely new profiles of your consumers.

Adapting real time

One of the biggest opportunities in social CRM is that companies can stay reactive and can change promotions or offers instantly, based on customer feedback or wider social trends. What Gateway allows you to do for example, is gain a new level of customer insight that is inherently social, reporting on data such as Likes and location. The power of this shouldn’t be underestimated by brands. We’ve seen social technologies affect marketing in this way to a certain extent. If a strategy isn’t working, you simply change it. No costly billboards that have already been printed, you simply adapt the strategy to more effectively meet the business needs. But now we can do this in a very real way, in the way businesses interact with their customers. Instead of something being determined from the start, through smart analysis of consumer interaction, that is affected through social channels, companies can more effectively meet consumer demands.

Of course, with an application like Gateway, it all depends on what you do with the data that will really bring your CRM to life. Through smart analytics you can access insights into your customers that have never been available before, and with this comes a new skillset required to really make the most of this data. You need someone that can read the data but also has an innate understanding of social media, to understand how these trends can affect your strategy or the way you’re interacting with customers. These ‘social analysts’ will become more and more important to companies in the future. if the full potential of social CRM is to be realised.

Is it what customers want?

As an overall industry, social CRM is progressing. The acquisition of Radian 6 by Salesforce showed that there was a real market for combining CRM/business lead tools with social data. What is still a relative unknown, is just how much customers want this approach. If they knew how much social data businesses already had on them, let alone what they could seen have, with the advent of tools like Gateway, they might not necessarily be very comfortable. This is where a certain amount of responsibility falls to the company. While you could use the social data combined with your CRM processes to go in for the hard sell or get overly familiar with your customers, you may be jumping the gun a bit and could risk putting your customers off. What consumers want at the moment is content and offers from brands that is relevant to them, but with a very real divide between ‘friends’ and ‘brands’. As social CRM develops, expectation will change and barriers will come down, but for now there is a certain amount of care needed in the approach by brands that practice social CRM.

Part of this strategy also includes an awareness that sometimes, social CRM might mean not saying or doing anything at all. With the more data that we gather on consumers, it’s tempting to jump in and start utilising this straight away. A large part of social CRM involves full analysis of the data, trends and conversation, before figuring out how your brand can effectively fit in. If you move to early, you risk executing a strategy that is based on half the information available to you and you could be making the wrong move. Building up intelligent profiles of your customers means spending time researching them and their social motivators online, before you then develop a strategy that makes the most of this.