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Social customer relationship management (CRM) is a marketing technique that uses social media to manage customer relations, offering an enriched experience or service. It's a powerful tool, but needs to be understood properly and industrialised for maximum impact.
An additional channel
The world has evolved and so have the ways to communicate with customers. Mail, phone or emails are not the only way to deal with queries, get feedback or offer additional services.
Social media is the ideal communication channel, especially since its usage is high in the Middle East. According to Mideastmedia.org, its use has surpassed other activities on the internet. People use social media far more than they look for news (55 percent daily) or download or stream videos (40 percent daily).
Hence, social media offers the opportunity to create and manage online communities, send alerts, interact though live Q&As - and gather lots of useful data along the way. Social CRM has simply become indispensable in a world where the customer is king.
In the Middle East and Africa, social CRM is expected to boom. MicromarketMonitor forecasts the CRM and social CRM market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3.9 percent until 2019 when it will reach U.S.$0.8bn, primarily driven by the increasing number of SMEs that are adopting these CRM solutions.
"Various countries such as Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are using CRM in the banking and financial services market and in the telecom sector to get a deep insight about their customers, which is driving the revenues for the CRM market in this region," notes the research firm.
Collaborative communication
So what's changed with the advent of social media?
"Today the relationship with the customer is based on trust whereas previously there was a notion of dependence," explains Charlotte Nizieux, marketing director for EMEA at Dynatrace, an application performance management software company.
"Ten years ago, brands would communicate well-crafted messages created by a marketing team through adverts, the press and other traditional channels."
However, nowadays the power is in the hands of the customer, courtesy of social media, and firms have to redouble their efforts to catch their attention.
But companies, large and small, simply do not pay enough attention to how customers are communicating on social media. According to Satmetrix, 39 percent of companies do not track their social media responses, and 55 percent of companies ignore all customer feedback on Twitter and Facebook.
Yet social CRM can increase revenues, Nizieux says. Its impact is on three main levels: First, at the marketing level, because firms can listen to their customers' conversations on social media.
"It allows brands to better understand their customers' needs, what satisfies them but also what their problems and grievances are."
Secondly, during the sales phase, social CRM allows firms to enrich their databases by collecting qualitative information to understand their customers better.
Finally, social CRM allows brands to better support customers and to be more proactive, she says. For instance, SMEs can answer their customers' questions directly on Twitter.
No room for improvisation
So how do you go on implementing social CRM?
"Social CRM is a strategy, not a tool," insists Nizieux. She therefore recommends using specialists to harness its power.
"SMEs can use external experts - community managers or data specialists in order to implement the right strategy and properly set and record KPIs."
A social CRM strategy needs to be industrialised to work, she says. This means creating proper processes. "Every employee is now potentially a brand ambassador as they have a voice on social media and therefore should be included in social media communication."
This means that employees have to be trained to communicate on social media and a new mindset has to be created within the firm. "With regards to content, it's important to find the right tone, wording and understand the community's codes. You need to do some research beforehand," she adds.
Nizieux says that like any marketing activity, social CRM has to generate a return on attention (ROA). To track ROA, performance indicators include: traffic and conversion rates originating from social networks; the number of likes and followers, which allows comparisons with competitors; and participation and interaction, or how much the content is shared.
"It is therefore important to take the time to invest or to put together the right financial and human resources required for a successful social media CRM strategy," Nizieux says.
© Accelerate SME 2017
