Jacada Blog

The Long Term Future of Social CRM

This is my last post for this session with Jacada.  I want to really thank them for giving me the platform, I think it was an awesome series (did I mention this will be turned into an eBook in the next few days? You can then download the entire series and relive it anytime, anywhere – way cool!).

Last time I talked about the near-term, two-to-three year's horizon, for Social CRM.  This time I want to go a little bit further, focus on what happens after it reaches critical mass and is widely adopted.

But first, a little debunking.

Social CRM cannot do anything by itself.  

There is no software, magic motion, silver bullet, or Hogwarts' spell that will make it work and be useful as a stand-alone solution.  Actually, I don't even know what it means to do Social CRM as a stand-alone solution – are we talking about setting up a Twitter account? Creating a community? Either way, what I mean is that the only way you get some value of Social CRM is to realize that it is a part of a business – much like CRM was is. And ERP. And SCM. And…you get the idea.

So, how does the future look for Social CRM?

Fantastic, there are three things that will happen to Social CRM going forward:

1. Social CRM will integrate with CRM very well.  Your customers, partners, employees, entities-you-deal-with, etc, don't change who they are, or how they relate with you, just because you added new social Channels.  Social CRM (the ability to bring in those social channels, their data, and their value to CRM) has to work in harmony with your existing CRM solution.  If this integration does not happen, you merely implemented Social Media – added some new channels and their management tools, but have no idea what to do with them.
2. Social CRM becomes part of the Social Business evolution. Let's face it, the term as shiny, new, and cute as it may be really means nothing without being part of business.  Same as it happened with CRM.  Remember when CRM was a four-letter word? I do, I even wrote at that time that if you wanted to get CRM approved in your organization, you had to call it something else (Sally or John are popular names).  Bottom line, Social CRM is one core component of a Social Business – it will evolve to join forces with Enterprise 2.0 implementations (no, not the real ones – the internal collaboration as Enterprise 2.0 ones) and become the basis for a Social Business – organizations collaborating with customers, suppliers, partners, employees and others – in preparation for...
3. Social CRM disappears, as it became part of the Collaborative Enterprise. Look at this chart (figure 1), the evolution of Social X – I wrote about it before many times, this is all interim steps as we learn what it means to collaborate, to work together towards better organizations.  The collaborative enterprise model is about destroying the barriers between people and let whoever needs to collaborate in any situation freely do so.  It is about leveraging expertise and knowledge and data regardless of where it lives and what it is.  There is limited, at best, future for Social CRM as there was for electronic CRM, mobile CRM, and many others in the past.  It is not about adding a letter or word to CRM to make it better – it is about making CRM, Social CRM, Electronic CRM, and the many other flavors work better for the business.

I know all the reactions – this is going to take forever to do, there are no guarantees, it is just an opinion, etc.  

Actually, this is not just an opinion – this is the direction we are taking today's world.  The more customers, consumers, partners, suppliers and others that get exposed to what it means to “go social,” the more pressure there will be on organizations – all organizations – to become social businesses.

And later, collaborative enterprises.

What do you think? Am I off?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

The Near Term Future for Social CRM

I have enjoyed writing about Social CRM in this Jacada series, albeit it's coming to end (got just this one and one more to talk about the long-term future of Social CRM – next week).  Always happy to talk about what's coming – you know me, all about models and frameworks and visions and futures.

But first, shameless plug time... We are doing a webinar covering the material in all these posts; it is this Thursday, October 7th, at 11:00 AM EST.  You can sign up here.  Would love to have you there and discuss the content in this series in more detail.

Back to the clairvoyance business...

Social CRM is just beginning to be implemented, how can we talk about the future? Well, it is by focusing on what's coming that we can do a good job of planning and deploying the better today.  

Where is Social CRM headed in the near future?  In the next two to three years Social CRM will experience the following three phases:

1. Get Defined – no, I am no talking about restarting the war of the definitions, to me that is settled – Social CRM is likely to mean different things to different organizations, in the same way that CRM means different things to different organizations. However, we have a standard and accepted CRM definition (it is not just technology, has three core components, takes time to do well, etc.) that we use when we talk about managing the relationships with the customer. We also have them for other enterprise software applications—and we will get one for Social CRM.
2. Get Understood –We are going to start answering the key questions about Social CRM – not just the "what" of getting defined properly, but also the "how" to implement it properly; the "when" is the best time for any organization to adopt Social CRM; the "why" should be considered by the organization; the "where" in the organization the decisions and implementations reside; and the most important part – the "who" can help or "who" is responsible for the solution being deployed (hint: it is not a single person or group). This period will also allows us to start documenting recommendations, best practices, frameworks, and plans for Social CRM to answer those questions – repeatedly.
3. Get Adopted – In spite of the hype surrounding Social CRM today, there are fewer than five percent of organization that have adopted it and deployed it in their organization. Even that number may be too high for now. We define critical mass as the moment when an enterprise application moves from being used only by early adopters to being used by mainstream organizations. Critical mass is the moment when fast growth of the market ends (that explosive moment at the beginning akin to the Gold Rush of 1848 in San Francisco), and the market begins to get settled. Critical Mass is defined as around thirty percent of the potential market having deployed the solution. We shall reach Critical Mass for Social CRM towards the end of this two-to-three year period.

Sounds good?

Well, depends on who you are and what you are looking for.  In three years time, your organization will be able to follow a methodology to:

1. Prepare a Social CRM Strategy
2. Plan the Change Management for the shift in culture
3. Implement Business Process Management to supervise the changes in how functions get done
4. Select a vendor to help with the technology needs
5. Choose a Measurement Initiative to support Social Business, and
6. Embrace the necessary changes in Governance and Administration

In other words, you will have taken the first steps to becoming a Social Business – where Social CRM is just one more cog on the wheel.

Now you are asking – what comes after that? What happens after Critical Mass? Ah, that is when the fun starts.  And that is what we are going to cover next week in this space – and in the webinar on Thursday.

Are you ready?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

 

Success Stories for Social CRM

If you read my previous two entries on the need for Social CRM and how to plan a strategy for Social CRM you know that I am not a stickler for definitions and prefer to focus my writing on observations from real life.  I am going to do the same for Success Stories I have seen for Social CRM.

I am going to have to admit from the start: there are no success stories for Social CRM. However, before you start the hair-pulling and apocalypse talk, let me explain what I mean.

If you look at Social CRM as the intersection of Social and CRM (I know, quite simplistic) or even as the company's response to the rise of the Social Customer – the success of a Social CRM implementation is how well the organization can adapt an end-to-end CRM process to Social channels. That, we have not yet seen. We have seen organizations succeed at adapting or integrating Social Channels for specific CRM functions – but none that have adapted the use of Social channels across the CRM spectrum of functions.

However, focusing on Social CRM and expecting a success story from that this early in the game is naïve. Regardless of whom you read and believe CRM had no stories of successful deployments for at least five-to-twelve years after CRM was introduced.  Even today, we still see few end-to-end CRM success stories; most of them are single-function (sales, marketing, and customer service) and single-channel at best.

There is a modicum of Social CRM success if you are going to measure it as a single channel, single function implementation. Most of the well-advertised and known case studies: Ford doing Social Marketing for the Ford Fiesta's introduction; Dell using Twitter to implement social Sales; Comcast implementing Social Service via Twitter – are more focused on the successful use of the Social Channels than on the valuable data and analysis that may have accompanied deploying and managing Social interactions.

However, the success of Social CRM at this early stage is not to replicate CRM deployments via Social Channels and prove that they can work (some of them have, some of them haven't) but it is more about making Social CRM a recognized key system in the Social (r)evolution and the business march to becoming a Social Business.

Indeed adapting some of the CRM functions, even incompletely, to work in Social Channels is considered a success in this early stage, as in the following examples:

Social Service – Widgetbox leveraged the power of their community – realizing their customers were social media savvy, technical oriented, community-focused by seeing them share information with each other in other communities – and gave them the space to implement a focused community, took it one step further by integrating it with their helpdesk ticketing system. Not only did this help them to make sure that tickets that were closed were documented as such, but also gave customers an incentive to use that community versus an external one – their support cases could be tracked and accessed at any time. This also allowed Widgetbox agents and subject matter experts to participate in the community, fully knowing that their efforts were part of their commitment to their customers as well as their company.

Social Sales – Best Buy, often considered a case study for social service by leveraging their employees into a twitter-based support group called Twelpforce, recently stepped in one of the most complete and early example of crossing boundaries between CRM functions.  They noticed that when helping employees in their communities to find the right products, or to solve specific issues, they often had to recommend additional products, or a better solution, or even make a recommendation for someone looking to buy.  They extended their social service implementation to accommodate the ability to tap into their catalog, automate searching for specific recommendations, and automatically placing links to those products in the forums. They not only placed links to products, but also provided reviews, space for commentaries, and links to related products. By allowing their customers and consumers to not only get an answer, but find a link to the product that solved their problem increasing their sales and delivering extra support to the customer.

Social marketing – probably the most famous cases for social marketing can be ascribed to Groupon – a collective coupon model that brings the ability to do social marketing to small and mid-size organizations at the local level cheaply and efficiently.  Groupon signs up their own followers for a specific city, and offers them a daily coupon featuring a local business.  Customers get notified of new and exciting businesses every day, and the businesses get to spread the word cheaply and effectively.

The above are three simple cases to highlight what works in Social CRM: making sure that the new social channels are included as part of business.  There is no fast rule for success in Social CRM beyond that.  

Always remember, to ensure success – it is all about measuring and tracking the right data to show success.  

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

Key Elements of a Social CRM Strategy

I have been mulling this post for quite some time now as I did not want to turn it into another silly discussion on whether or not this is a "real" strategy, or even how to define strategy.  To cut that short – this is based on my experience and what worked for my customers in the past.

There are two camps when it comes to enterprise applications strategy.  First, there are the ones that say you cannot succeed without it, that you have to undertake it before you even consider implementing a solution and that without it, its not even possible to have a successful implementation (OK, there is always luck – but luck is not a strategy).

Second, you have those that say, "oh, just go ahead and do it – you can learn as you go and fix what is not working along the way."

Guess which one I am siding with on this one?  Yeah, you need a strategy.  No question about it...problem is, what is a strategy and how does it apply to Social CRM?

Excellent questions- let me see if I can help with the answer...

A strategy has four parts: Mission, Vision, Goals and Objectives.  

Let's explore it in some detail:

Mission – What business need are you trying to fulfill? Are you undertaking this project to generate more revenue? To save money? To generate goodwill and peace for humankind? That is your mission, which is the reason you are starting this project.

Vision – If you ever been to sales training, you know what a vision is: if I give you a magic wand (or a billion dollars or a magic genie) and you get to wish for the perfect solution, what does it look like? How does it work? Who works with it, and how do they benefit?  Your vision is no more than the end stage, what are you trying to accomplish?

Goals – What numbers you are going to show at the end? If your vision comes true, what is the numeric proof that you succeeded?  There is no place here for intangibles, feel good, vanity metrics or anything like it; we are talking hard core numbers.  We will see $1,000,000 more revenue.  We will save $150,000 per day.  Those are goals, the rest are objectives.

Objectives – Let's say that you have no way to generate numbers for your goals.  Or, there are several variables that you know are going to make the goals a guess at best.  There's got to be an end result to what you are setting out to do.  If the vision is the picture of how things are going to work, the objectives are the specific items you are going to accomplish by implementing the vision. We can reduce the time to process and make customers happier.  We can make it simple for customers to shop on our site and reduce the abandoned cart ratio.  These are objectives, which you will then turn into goals for your next iteration (when you have better metrics to benchmark).

How complex and detailed does it need to be? If you can simply produce the answers to the questions above, and make it a story that makes sense and can be executed, complexity and length of the answer does not matter.  Southwest's vision was put on a cocktail napkin and their business plan on two typewritten pages – now they are one of the most successful companies in the world.  It is not about complexity and length; it is about knowing what you want to do, and how you are going to know you did it.

Alas, this series is about SCRM – not about generalized business issues. So, let's focus the four items above to Social CRM (somewhat – always remember that Strategies are personalized and mileage definitely does vary – if you adopt the following examples as your strategy without changes, get ready for the failure that is coming your way).

Setting the four basic tenets of a Strategy for Social CRM goes something like this (the following is a very simple example, not your answer):

Mission – We are going to create a Social platform to allow our organization to interact better with customers, partners and consumers through social channels and enable us to get on the road to becoming a social business.

Vision – All the departments and business units in the organization will have the ability to use any social channel of their choice, for any purpose, and measure the performance of the same. The integration with existing systems will allow those same business units to make these social interactions part of their daily operations as they do today with any other channel.

Goals – We know that we lose close to $1,000,000 per year due to churn in our customer base from unsatisfied customers.  A recent survey showed that 30% of our customers are either dissatisfied or mildly satisfied with our social initiatives.  We expect that we can retain at least 50% of those unhappy customers by deploying a social platform (which should add to the bottom line).

Objectives – In addition to reducing the churn ratio we can use the higher satisfaction ratings and the improved customer service platform for social channels to attract more consumers and grow our customer base – however, we don't have sufficient data to quantify these claims yet.  We want to make sure we have a complete platform that allows our organization to be highly competitive in the market and can meet or exceed customers' expectations to facilitate the new customer acquisition and be able to properly measure and monitor those metrics.

What do you think? Have I oversimplified? Is this something you can do? Would love to hear what you have done, or any other method you use to set your strategy...let me know!

(This is part two of a five-part series I am writing with Jacada.  Check out the first post here)

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.

The Need for Social CRM

First, this is not about definitions.

Social CRM has been well and poorly defined elsewhere – not getting into that debate. From my perspective we are talking about extending CRM into the new Social Channels, if you want to call it something else or look at something different – be my guest. For the purpose of this series, we are talking about making CRM more powerful by extending it to the Social Channels.

What, what – series?

Yes, thanks to Jacada I have been giving a forum to express my thoughts in regards to Social CRM that will last five posts.  This is part of an ongoing project they are doing where they introduce a series of Experts (and me) through their blog.  I am the third one to attempt this, Penny Reynolds and Bruce Temkin preceded me talking about Call Center Best Practices and Customer Experience.

And now, I am talking about Social CRM.  I won't, as I was saying, cover the what of Social CRM – but the need for it. Why would an organization feel compelled to extend their CRM implementation into the Social Channels?

Many have attempted to label Social CRM in many ways and give different reason why you MUST or HAVE TO do it.  To me is a lot simpler than what anybody else may have said. It is about actionable insights.  It is about doing something with the feedback you collect from your customers.  It is, finally, about being able to understand your customers' expectations, and being able to meet or exceed them.  It gives any organization the power they did not have before, to really understand their customers and to really make them satisfied.

Am I implying that we did not know what they wanted before? No, I am not implying it. I am saying it.

You see, in the past organizations did not (at first) care about what their customers wanted or needed. Sure, they had Focus Groups and Research Efforts, but those were mild at best and not always designed to find what customers wanted – more like telling them what the organization was doing and expecting praise on return.  Don't believe me? Think about Coke II.

Later they thought it would be simpler to do surveys, mostly online, and the world of Enteprise Feedback Management was thrust upon us. What I call the "Denny's Effect" soon exploded: everyone was asking for your opinion from the gas station to the automobile dealer.  The amount of feedback collected was staggering.  A company that had 80 million customers and conducted over 2 billion transactions a year was able to store almost 2 TeraBytes of survey responses.

Alas, all that data is useless – or almost useless for two reasons: first, most people did not know what they were trying to ask and the questions were, at best, biased and did not have a lot of value. Of course, there is the also the problem that people lie in surveys.  Well, lie is a very strong word – let's say that they are usually biased towards the entity asking the questions.  At the end, 90% or more of those surveys we produced and distributed are biased, incomplete answers to questions never asked.

Or utter garbage.

Do you really want to use that data to make decisions for your business?

One thing we have known all along was that people tend to be honest in their relationships and recommendations to peers. Enter Social Networks.  

These new Social Worlds gave us the ability to tap, almost eavesdrop if you may, into these peer-to-peer relationships.  Those of us in Feedback Management have said for many years that the structured feedback (the surveys, focus groups, and other market research activities) represented at best 5-10% of the available feedback.  Now, thanks to the Social Networks we span, we can access that other 90-95% -- the truer, more honest feedback.

And as we access that data, this is where Social CRM becomes ever so powerful – and needed. For any organization with clients, the value of feedback increases exponentially as you merge it with existing customer, transactional, and operational data.  The ability to analyze that data in that context is what Social CRM brings to the table – and the reason you need it.

Actionable Insights can only exist in this context, and can only bring value to compensate for the work it takes to compile them if they are used in that matter.

And that is the need for Social CRM – aggregate true feedback collected from Social Channels with data from Customers Systems of Record and Transactional Systems(CRM and front office), Operational Systems (ERP and back office) and bring it all together into an analytics engine, analyze it within the context of specific processes or functions, and create an actionable insight.

In other words, use the true Voice of the Customer to create better products, services, and experiences to over-deliver to the customer's expectations.

Any questions?

Esteban Kolsky - Principal and Founder of ThinkJar

Note: Esteban Kolsky has been retained by Jacada to participate in the Customer Service 2.0: Access the Experts speakers series. The opinions shared herein reflect the views of the author, and not necessarily Jacada or its employees.