Social Media to Social CRM: Reinvent Your Social Strategies

As a business owner, you want your customers to know who you are and why they should trust you. Social media platforms give you that opportunity to connect with your customers, personify your brand and solidify customer relationship. Social engagement has become an integral part of maintaining brand name and building long-lasting customer relationships. But there has been a paradigm shift in the way social media can be used by businesses. Rather than social media being used as a space for delivering brand’s marketing messages, it has become a meaningful point of engagement and a powerful way to manage customer relations – which is now known as ‘Social CRM.’

Social customer relationship management (CRM) means using social media technology to engage with customers and manage brand-customer relationship. If you’re leveraging the social platforms to just communicate with customers, then it’s time to reinvent your social strategies & use social CRM strategy. Here’s how you can do it in three steps:

• Get the right resources: Social is an important platform to deliver great service, but it is also a potential source of customer complaint forum. Your social media management team should be well equipped to solve customer problems and deal with negative feedback. You need to keep your sales-driven marketing approach & marketing professionals behind the wheel, and hire expert online reputation management experts to do the task for you.
• Create a customer-defined process: Previously, communication on social media was company driven, but now it is customer driven. Your social communication process should be solely based on your customers/prospects where they will reach your company as and when they want. Make your brand more humane by engaging in more personalized conversations. Your social CRM process should be real-time because customers want immediate response for their queries or complaints. Be pro-active and respond instantaneously to every query.
• Track conversations on customer-driven channels: Gone are the days when companies used to select customer contact points. Today, the number of possible channels for engaging with customers has increased many folds & customers choose channels to do conversation with your brand. Some of them are managed by your company, while there are variety of channels that your business neither owns nor controls. Track, monitor and respond to social inquiries on customer-driven channels that include wikis, blogs, forums and all web-based communities, along with social platforms managed by your brand.

Social CRM is not a new concept that has replaced the traditional CRM process, it is an evolution of the CRM and extension of social media management strategy. To build loyal customers on social media, you have no choice but to become a social brand. To make your brand social, use social CRM strategy, and not the CRM process.

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