Social CRM: Where Social Media Meets Customer Engagement
Once upon a time, customer relationship management (CRM) was an esoteric set of tools that could certainly help a sales team succeed provided they were willing to eat a pretty steep learning curve. No more. Popular tools like FreshSales and HubSpot CRM have made ease of use their top priority, and it shows. But now that the technology is easier to deploy, you've got to ask yourself: Is it enough?
CRM is all about creating interactions between customers and the company. These should be pleasant for the customer and fruitful because the CRM squeezes every drop of information and opportunity out of every touchpoint. Lately, that's meant using lots of automation software and cloud-based solutions that make CRM interactions faster, more intuitive, and ubiquitous in terms of salesperson's user experience. And that experience should extend across any device from a desktop to a smartphone. That's a lofty set of goals that most CRMs work hard to achieve. But alone, a CRM is primarily a database with a really smart front end. Creating as many customer touchpoints as possible will make them fulfill their potential, which means building integrations with other technologies. Front and center in that department is social media.
The concept of Social CRM has been around for years, the tech appearing as far back as 2010. The basic idea is for businesses to build a more personal relationship with customers by monitoring them on services like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, or any of the myriad other social networks towards which your customer base might gravitate. The customer information found on social media is invaluable data for businesses—as long as they're sticking to the information users choose to make
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