Chapter 3
Overcoming Challenges to Social CRM
- Tapping into social CRM best practices
- Preparing a plan of action
- Setting goals for a social CRM program
Clearly, there are many benefits to using social CRM to gain more information about customers. However, this new information can lead to other challenges that you must be prepared to face.
Adapting to this flood of information can be overwhelming. A company must make organizational, technological, and strategic shifts to fully integrate social CRM into an organization of any size. As a fairly new process for businesses, social CRM guidelines are still being developed. In this chapter, we outline current challenges in social CRM and provide best practices for overcoming these obstacles.
Understanding the Challenges of Social CRM
One of the biggest challenges in social CRM is the speed at which new technology, communication channels, and customers adapt to each other. Social CRM is a major shift in the way companies perceive and interact with customers. Monitoring technology can't always keep up with changes and additions to social media platforms, and we can't always predict customer adoption and use patterns of new social media channels. Frankly, we don't know what we don't know until we experience it personally.
Integrating social CRM into your organization requires flexibility as both businesses and customers adjust and adapt to the social CRM process. Here, we identify some of the most common challenges you may face. Later on, we provide strategies for preparing for and overcoming these challenges.
Here are the top five challenges of social CRM:
- Creating a company-wide shift to customer centricity. If your organization isn't used to focusing on customers, adjusting to social CRM can take some time. This is especially true for larger companies. In the following sections, we outline how to get everyone on board with the social CRM philosophy. In Chapter 13, we will explore how to integrate social CRM into your company's ecosystem.
- Accepting that reaping the benefits of social CRM requires patience. It's easy to get excited about new processes and systems to help grow your business. Just keep in mind that as with most things, social CRM isn't a quick fix or overnight system shift. It takes time to collect data, train employees, and help customers adjust to a new way of interacting with your organization. Have patience and faith that you'll see the benefits of social CRM soon — just not the very first day you implement it.
- Sifting through the overload of information generated in social media. Social CRM provides more data than most organizations could ever want or need, and that isn't necessarily a good thing. Knowledge is power, but only if you can easily access it and know what to do with it. Determining what's valuable enough to add to a social CRM system and what you can ignore presents a challenge to many organizations. We cover this briefly in this chapter, as well as more in-depth in Chapter 14.
- Meeting customers in media that your company doesn't own. Most executives have to adjust their thinking to adjust to utilizing communication channels outside of their company's own online real estate. Company websites and toll-free numbers are safer, but that isn't necessarily where your customers are. They're using Facebook, Twitter, and whatever the next social media technology may be. For social CRM to be successful, you need to go where the customers are.
- Adjusting brand-speak to actual conversations. Customers don't respond well to industry and company jargon. Many brands struggle to speak to customers in a language that customers understand, but corporate speak won't fly on Facebook. A conversational tone is key when you're communicating through social media, where customers also chat with their friends.
Establishing Best Practices and Guidelines
Every customer or group of customers is unique. Couple that with the fact that each brand approaches social media differently, and it becomes difficult to define hard-set best practices for all businesses. This can be frustrating for business leaders who have long loved sets of rules that can apply to all. In social CRM, those ideas are thrown aside, leaving brand leaders grasping for examples of mapped success.
What worked for one brand or business may not work for the next in social strategies. To establish best practices, you must know your brand's audience. This means understanding the following about your audience:
- Preference for communication
- Threshold for humor
- Motivations for interaction with a brand
For example, both Arizona Iced Tea and Red Bull are canned, caffeinated, and nonalcoholic beverages. Though a small segment of both brand's audience overlaps, each has customers that vary greatly. Attempting to apply social media strategies that work well for Red Bull's rowdy, energetic customers probably would turn off many of Arizona Iced Tea's loyal drinkers. Each brand's customers require different messages to get them to engage with a brand. The technology is often the same between many audiences — most people use Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs, and so on. However, the strategy and messaging must vary greatly. Blanketed messaging is doomed to fail.
As you develop the best practices and guidelines that suit your customers, remember that the end result has to be quality conversations with social consumers, not a transaction. Social CRM best practices are based on listening to customers' preferences and then adjusting brand messages to better reach them — and then listening again. For more help with developing internal policies for engagement, flip to Chapter 13.
Building a Social CRM Team
Before drawing out a plan on paper, take stock of what you have available to dedicate to implementing a plan of social CRM attack. What resources — such as personnel, budget, and existing technologies — do you have available to tackle establishing an integrated social CRM strategy and plan? Your plan can be as small or large scale as you want it, limited (of course) by your resources. You can also adjust and expand it as you dig into how the social CRM philosophy will affect your day-to-day business. The important thing is that you make a start.
Work with what you have and what you can comfortably add to the mix. Here are some organizational questions to ask before developing a central plan and procedures:
- Who will lead the social CRM implementation?
- How many additional team members can we add to the team?
- How many hours can each team member commit each week to the new project?
- Who will communicate the new procedures to the whole organization, departments, and individual team members?
- Which departments are the main internal stakeholders for social CRM strategies?
Building an infrastructure to implement and manage a social CRM strategy will pay off greatly in the long run. Also, identifying an owner for the social CRM implementation and maintenance will help to create urgency, accountability, and follow-up for updates and analysis. Approaching this new social business philosophy requires patience and long-term planning. You need to put procedures in place throughout each department to support the overall organizational goal of becoming a truly social business, embracing new technologies.
Training Your Employees
It's extremely important that all employees understand the purpose of implementing social CRM within their systems and daily procedures. The social aspect of customer communication is the key to the future of the business. Getting everyone on board to shift the focus to social business will take training.
Social CRM is all about the customer. We'll remind you of that again and probably again a few more times. Your employees are your internal customer when it comes to social CRM. Providing them with clear benefits for a social CRM system may limit the resistance you meet.
The challenging part about training employees on a new social CRM system is that it's two-part training:
- Understanding the social customer: Employees must know the social customer to engage the social customer. Learning consumers' communication preferences is vital to social CRM success, and you must train employees well in this area.
- Embracing the new technology: Inevitably, some individuals resist social media monitoring. Getting your employees to buy into social business is key to convincing them to embrace the software solution you choose. As with any data system, what you get out of it is only as good as what you put into it. It's crucial that your staff is universally trained on expectations for data entry and the like.
We dig deeper into employee training in Chapter 13, but it's important to begin thinking about who should manage your social CRM now. Keep them in mind as you read through this book.
Prioritizing Activities and Resources
In order to build a sustainable and scalable social CRM program, you must prioritize activities with dedicated resources in mind. We've talked a lot about the philosophy of social CRM, social business, and the social customer. Also, we've reiterated that an approach to this new philosophy requires patience for long-term outcomes. You're building relationships, not just grabbing for transactions.
Implementing a social CRM system doesn't have to overwhelm your organization's resources or budget. It requires some prioritizing in order to start. Determine the best place to spend your time and money by considering what your customers are showing you. The following questions can help you start prioritizing tasks associated with implementing your social CRM plan:
- What are the top five social media channels that reach your audience? It isn't possible to actively engage on every social media site, so take stock of where the majority of your customers already are, and follow them there. This will likely include well-known sites like Twitter and Facebook, but you may be surprised to find other niche networks as well. Don't be afraid to join these, even if they aren't mainstream — they could end up being a better fit for your brand.
- When do your customers interact most regularly throughout the day? You might think that your customers check social media first thing in the morning, but step back and get inside their heads for a moment. Are they at work? Driving kids to school? They may prefer to engage with your brand in off hours. Experiment with different times to publish content, and don't feel confined to traditional office hours.
- Within your organization, who interacts the most with your customers? If it isn't the same team responsible for social CRM, find these people. Talk to them. Chances are that they'll have great customer insight. Knowing the most common questions they're asked can help you better prepare the social team.
- Where have you identified a need to expand your social media strategies? Look at what competitors are doing, as well as brands you'd like to emulate, and then make sure that you have a real need to take on a new task or expand into a certain site — don't go there just because it's what everyone else is doing. For instance, if you primarily create text-heavy white papers, Instagram or other photo sites may not be for you.
- Are niche social networking sites reaching your ideal customer? Smaller, targeted sites can be great, but only if your customers are actually on them. Beware of sites that are too niche. Sometimes, Facebook really is the best place to be based on sheer numbers alone.
- How are your customers engaging socially? Notice whether they're asking questions or perhaps commenting on a particular type of content more often?
For instance, if you discover that your photographs attract more interactions than other types of content, dedicate staff who can capture more, interesting photos. Or perhaps your audience engages with product updates or how-tos. Begin analyzing your current social media content to look for patterns of response and engagement, and build on what you find. Adapt to your customers' desires by providing more of the content they engage with or share, and phasing out posts that don't elicit a response.
After considering these questions, brainstorm and ask numerous questions to determine how your resources will be best put to use in social CRM.
Establishing Your Social CRM Goals
Even though we keep saying that you'll see social CRM's benefits over time, not overnight, you should still establish goals for a long-term strategy.
Here's the main question: Why do you want a social media and social CRM strategy?
Your strategy will vary drastically depending on how you answer that question, and your answer might lean toward one of these two approaches to social media:
- Relational: If your answer is something like this, “We want to improve our communication with our customer and enhance our support offerings,” you have more of a relational approach to social media.
- Transactional: If your answer is something like this, “We want to leverage social media as a marketing tool to drive more business,” you have more of a transactional approach to social media.
We believe that social CRM is about interactions — relationships more so than transactions. If you make improving customer communication a priority, transactional business objectives will naturally follow. Lead with customer service goals, and sales will follow. With social CRM, customer support and marketing go hand in hand. If you lean toward the transactional approach, keep that in mind as you read this book and think about how you can shift your focus.
Keep in mind that social CRM is still evolving. Take time to plan out your goals, using what you've learned from past marketing initiatives and business strategies, and don't set yourself up for disappointment with unrealistic goals. The goals that follow provide a good starting point, and we clarify them further throughout this book.
- Get employees on board. Inspiring your employees with your new social business model should be your first priority. Take the time to provide proper training, and make sure your employees fully understand the value of social CRM and what it means for the organization. They should view social CRM as an exciting new opportunity, not a chore they must perform. Chapter 12 can also help with this.
- Listen to customer feedback. Make sure you're really listening to your customers' feedback, not just monitoring conversations. Set goals about what you want to do with the information you collect. Think about how you will use it to improve your organization and customers' interactions with you, both online and off. Chapter 4 explores this in greater detail.
- Start social conversations. Don't just wait for customers to come to you. Strike up conversations with them first! This can greatly improve customer perception and interaction with your brand. The more conversations you start, the more you have, which means more data for you to learn from. Chapter 7 includes many ideas for starting and building social conversations.
- Collect social data. One of the great benefits of social CRM is that it helps you segment your audience. You can easily identify who opens e-mails, clicks your Facebook ads, replies to your tweets, and comments on your blog posts. Collect, filter, and apply that data to better reach your customers where and how they want to be reached. In Chapter 14, we explain data collection and measurement in greater detail.
These are all realistic goals initially. As you learn your own best practices, you can then establish more goals. Just keep in mind that in order to establish clear goals, you need a full picture of your audience. Start with basic goals to gather this information, and refine from there.
Keep your goals flexible. You may find that they change as social media platforms evolve or your business grows. Create goals you can build on. For instance, a goal of replying to 25 percent of social conversations may be a great starting point, but you should revisit it periodically and aim for higher percentages. Let your goals grow with your organization, and with social media as a whole.
The social CRM process of a business consultant extraordinaire
Brian Vellmure, principal and cofounder of management consulting firm Initium, outlines his process for creating a customer-centric social CRM and the opportunities it presents. (Chapters 4 and 9 expand on his ideas.) Social CRM is a five-step process, as follows:
- Understand who your customers are, what they value, who they interact with. Segmentation plays a key role here.
- Find out how they interact and set a plan to engage with them in the context of their preferred communication channel(s).
- Focus on communicating with them in a way that is relevant and helpful in assisting them to achieve their goals.
- Present and/or create or co-create new products or services that help them accomplish (or do better) the jobs they are trying to do.
- And finally, deepen the value of your relationship over time by repeating the cycle over and over again.
This basic process should be at the core of any customer-focused strategy. Social media doesn't change these ideas. However, here are five ways that your organization can leverage social technologies during this process:
- Use social analytics and social network analysis to better understand your customers and prospects. Aggregate demographic, psychographic, and socialgraphic data.
- Use listening and monitoring tools to extend reach beyond where and how you've been able to listen and engage before. Add social as an additional interaction channel.
- Capitalize on new social media platforms by being the first to try out new sites. This allows you to communicate in new and/or more relevant ways with your customers. Align your business with emerging social media sites before your competitors do.
- Utilize internal communications systems within your organization to streamline information, product developments, and service developments to all employees. This could be through a company newsletter, closed social media site, or other messaging platform your company chooses to use. For more ideas, turn to Chapter 13.
- Increase engagement with existing customers on new channels in a way for the world to watch and observe. Be everywhere your customers are and enable them to share what they love (or don't love) about you to their networks.