The benefits of Social CRM and the five aspects to consider to make the most of it

All businesses seek new customers and want to maintain long-term relationships with the ones they have worked with in the past. Managing those relationships without the assistance of a specialised tool becomes impossible as the business grows.

The introduction of CRM tools geared toward managing relationships with customers in Spain is really high.  According to the latest data from Eurostat, 28% of Spanish businesses already use CRM solutions; only Cyprus and Holland are ahead of us, while the European average stands at 21%.

What these statistics do not provide, however, is the capacity for innovation that these solutions offer. For some time now, the way of relating to customers has been changing drastically. And the motor driving these interactions is precisely the proliferation of social media.

Using CRM is good, but better if it includes Social CRM

If you want your customers to be active agents of your business processes, you have to maintain closer relationships with each one of them. That relationship is “easier” to channel, precisely with the assistance of social media.

According to the latest sector analysis e-Sme 2017 regarding the implementation of ICT in Spanish businesses prepared by the ONTSI team, in 2017, no fewer than 49.6% of SMEs and large companies already used social media to connect, create or share content online with customers. This is a 6.7% increase over the previous year. And, 31.2% of micro-businesses were also using them in 2017 (+0.8% over 2016).

However, it is not just about being “on” social media, managing processes by hand, although this is also beneficial. Have you decided to integrate those interactions into your management systems, more specifically into your CRM to transform it into a Social CRM?

What are the five aspects you should not overlook?

1. Integration. This is about integrating social media into the way you manage your business, organising internal methods of communication in parallel to the “traditional” management chain and, more importantly, communicating and interacting with customers. If the process is integrated correctly, it will be easier to implement relationship marketing and for customers to be able to influence commercial decisions and help organisations to design and market products and services better.

2. Intelligence.Social CRM consists in incorporating social data to transactions, enhancing CRM by considering the interests, intentions, feelings, geolocation, lifestyle, and other individual aspects of each customer. It is not only about meeting those needs, but predicting behaviour through advanced analytics and intelligence solutions capable of identifying behavioural patterns and, of course, interpreting the social data correctly.

3. New dashboards.Today, immediacy is more important than ever. It is perhaps the time to use new metrics and complete dashboards with innovative details, such as which of your website pages are visited by customers, what they are tweeting about you, or about your competitors, etc. This will speed up decision making to detect new sales opportunities.

4. Privacy.However, beware of the new scope of the European GDPR regarding two key aspects: firstly, the type of data covered (distinguishing between declared and inferred data, which are not voluntarily provided by an individual) and, secondly, the data lifecycle. In other words, whether we comply with the purpose for which the data were granted and the time they can be stored.

5. Commitment and training.We have to implement a corporate culture that encourages all the members of the organisation to be aware of customer-oriented processes, unifying criteria. Being coordinated, enhancing commitment, and working in a more compact manner requires training.

Is your CRM tool ready for all this? And your organisation? At Intelligence Partner we can not only offer you state-of-the-art tools that already include multichannel Social CRM, but we can also provide the training and methods required so that the implementation of these new metrics proves to be a success for the growth of your business. Let’s talk about it!