Accenture has released a report on social CRM Report describing the obstacles which need to be overcome when developing an organizational social strategy.
Making social information actionable seems to be resonating with clients, according to Joseph Hughes, a senior executive in Accenture's CRM practice. The practice's report entitled Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service examines such complicated topics as scaling social media to the contact center, and using social to bridge gaps between marketing and sales, and even between service and marketing.
The report states: "Social CRM presents many opportunities to build a distinctive capability that can serve as a building block of high performance: a method to potentially connect more tightly with customers at lower cost and in a way that provides a real differentiation from competitors."
However, it's not something that can or will happen overnight. Accenture's Hughes recommends developing a strategy for getting social. In doing so, companies might encounter a few problems along the road - problems that even social media thought-leaders are grappling with.
Hughes pinpoints three areas that are perhaps not being talked about as much as they should be:
The need for social algorithms
It seems like yesterday that CRM departments identified metrics for e-mail, phone, and even online chat. Now that companies are expected to incorporate social media channels into sales and service, what are the standards for responding to a tweet or a Facebook post? "On the social media channels, we have an advantage of customers answering questions for us," Hughes points out.
In some cases, Hughes says, it doesn't make sense to respond to every customer tweet, comment or post, but there needs to be metrics to determine response priorities. Key influencers can prompt a need for fast responses, for instance. "Sometimes you may want to wait to respond, other times, there's a point when you need to step in," Hughes says.
Merging, understanding, and accessing structured and unstructured data
"The solution to structured data isn't widely talked about," Hughes says, adding that often it gets filed under "data warehousing problems." Accenture reports that 43 percent of consumers think companies should use social media to solve their problems. This being so, the Accenture report depicts a "virtuous loop" knowledge management life-cycle" that includes social media feedback and support conversations into the customer service strategy. "We have to come to new strategy or new standards to come across tools, or companies will come across Web FAQs, and km internally in one tool," Hughes says.
Organizational consulting
In years past, Hughes notes, control over an organization's social media efforts largely rested in the hands of marketers. Marketers, in turn, seem to have the best-developed sense of how to involve social media in the development of their messages.
"Staying in control of your brand is different than it used to be," Hughes says, in large part because any true social media strategy must be developed - and executed - enterprise wide. Most companies, he says, have yet to progress to that level of maturity - and the organizations that believe they have reached that level often have failures to show for their efforts. Today's social media projects are inexorably moving into support, sales, and product development.
This is the year, Hughes says, that the industry will see consulting and tools brought forth from two directions:
- large vendors offering add-on products and services.
- independent companies that are able to sit in the middle, regardless of technology.
(extract from "The 3 Threats to Social CRM," by Lauren McKay, destinationcrm.com, February 16, 2010. Copyright 2000 - 2010, CRM Media, a division of Information Today, Inc.) |