Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have generated considerable hype and this seems to have given CRM Product Managers an opportunity to produce new ideas, not without reason.
Not only the number of users, but also the average amount of time spent per user on social networking sites has climbed substantially in the past year. So it is not surprising that Social CRM is being pushed as one of the top ten technologies for 2010! We have however seen a number of hypes which have not had the expected results, so let’s look at the situation more carefully.
What is Social CRM? Certainly nothing new, since Customer Relationships have always been relationships whether based on person to person contacts, on telephone calls or print media. What we do have is a new set of tools, though unfortunately no-one in the CRM Software industry seems to know how they should be used.
There are two ways of looking at the situation, one from the point of view of a sales organization looking for information on prospects or customers and one from the point of view of the prospects and customers. For B2C sales and marketing, the relevance of social media is self evident, here I am more concerned with B2B.
Sales people will be interested in gathering information on the contacts they know or in finding new contacts. A surprising amount of information is out there to be found in facebook, xing, youtube etc., so it is to be hoped that CRM software will soon offer tools which gather information from these sites more or less automatically. Ideally this information will include any posts relevant to the suppliers products or services.
To quote from Siebel (http://blogs.oracle.com/socialcrm/)
Sales users are able to get a quick view of activities in their social networks such as recently published content and posting from other members
Prospects and customers will (hopefully) wish to have access to product and other information. Whether or not suppliers provide this information by their web site, in blogs or other social sites is in my opinion not an issue for CRM software. The software should provide however for capturing any access to this information for lead generation.
To quote from Siebel ()
To date, the number of qualified leads coming from social media seems to be low, but this will change as the new media come to be used for more than chat and self-expression.
CRM Auswahl
12./13.10.2010