Cloud CRM Software Forum

The Social CRM Mandate - and Why Businesses Need to Heed It

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Social CRM for Business Seminar (which has become known as the Social CRM Summit) back in Washington D.C. The weather, as you're probably aware, was a little extreme and the result was that, thanks to the snow, many of us were kept longer than we expected to be there – but that was a very good thing. The one thing the attendees at this event (only 67 of them) are great at is social media and thinking about its use, but the one thing they don't get is face time – that elusive, basic-level relationship building resource that so few of us have enough of.

While there, we talked to five very influential members of that social CRM community. The conversations we had with them – CRM Essentials' Brent Leary, Forrester Research's Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, SugarCRM's Mitch Lieberman, Latin American CRM giant Jesus Hoyos and the CRM man himself, Paul Greenberg – who will appear here on Forecasting Clouds in the near future.

Those conversations – and the entire event – drove home one point: if you have a hard time putting your finger on what Social CRM means for your business, you belong to a very large club. Unlike CRM itself, you can't go to a vendor and simply buy Social CRM; instead it pushes organizations to think about themselves and to think about their customers with a degree of stringency and thoughtfulness that has never before been required. It then requires a solid CRM foundation and the creation of strategies (and, only after all this is complete, the application of technologies) built around how the customer seeks to do business with you.

This is challenging. It requires honesty about yourself, transparency for your customers, and imagination about how the two of you will do business. But it seems to push CRM practitioners in the directions they should have been moving in all along. Building processes around flawed assumptions will kill your business. An aloofness from your customers will drive them toward more open competitors. And a lack of imagination creates a stagnancy that will suffocate customer relationships. Social CRM's rise waves a big warning flag: get these underlying things right and then start to engage customers in new ways, or go backwards as your competitors race forward.

The use of imagination is the essential mandate of Social CRM. It's one of those things that you wish more companies would exercise. Clearly, it takes imagination to visualize how emerging channels of customer communication can be harnessed in cost-effective and revenue-generating ways that mate well to your customers and your company. However, in far too many organizations, imaginative ideas are seen as mere expenses, and as things that can be put off to a future date (a date that, in most cases, will coincide with financially-motivated panic and/or the replacement of the existing executives standing in the way of such ideas). But it requires no imagination to see that the age of the social customer is here. Feel free to plod along managing your customers in the same way you always have - but do so at your own peril.

There were so many ideas at the event in Washington I can't list them here – but I'll explore several of the most important ones in my next few blogs. Stay tuned.