Recently I’ve been working closely with a client, an automobile company, to develop and implement a social CRM strategy. The company wants to utilize the technology to gain a deeper understanding of their potential customers, their tastes and desires, information that will be used to drive product development and marketing strategy.
Social CRM offers businesses a real opportunity to develop what traditional CRM has been attempting for years – a truly dynamic and contextual understanding of the customer community with all of its internal segmentation. The importance of this type of understanding is clear – customer communities are not made up of clones but of a broad range of individuals. However, individuals with common interests can be identified and grouped into segments, with typical personas developed to represent each segment. Once these personas are identified, incentives and product elements can be more closely tailored to speak directly to the needs of each segment.
Moving at the speed of online communication, a well-designed social CRM system will utilize not just passive monitoring of customer interaction but also active engagement tools such as a branded community, surveys, contests, and informational opportunities to find out what customers are thinking. These many touchpoints can provide a much more well-rounded understanding of customer segments and what factors shape each segment’s decision-making. Feedback from these channels can then be used to develop well-defined personas that represent customer types. Because customers are real people with shifting ideas and desires, for these personas to be effective they should also shift to reflect these changes. Social CRM, with its many touchpoints of customer engagement and constant access to customer information, is the greatest tool we have to date to identify these shifts as they occur.
Although we’ll never be able to fully automate such a process, the capabilities of social CRM represent a huge leap in our ability to understand our customers and to allow customer interests to drive the way we do business. Through it, we can make better informed decisions on how to develop a marketing campaign, interact with customers, build customer loyalty and develop improved products and services.
