Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Social CRM Use Cases for

Medium-Sized Companies
Coffee Bean Technology
By Marcio Saito
September 2010

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 2
Social CRM is the Future of CRM 2
What is the “Social” in Social CRM? 3

The Use Cases for Social CRM in Mid-Sized Companies 4

1. Sales and Marketing Insights 4
2. Social Media Monitoring and Social Lead Generation 5
3. Customer Advocacy and Social Customer Service 6
4. Internal Collaboration 7

Conclusion 8

About Coffee Bean Technology 9

About the Author 9

About the Coffee Bean System 9

References 10

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Executive Summary

As a leader in a small or mid-sized company, you are focused on running

and growing the business. Any action and investment in process or tools
needs to have a direct impact on the bottom line.

At the same time, you have heard about how business is changing (1) as a result
of the adoption of social technologies and the emergence of the “Digital
Generation” as consumers and business decision makers.

The Digital Generation refers to children born and raised in a digital world
that are creating change in the workplace.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is evolving towards Social CRM in

response to those changes. But how is Social CRM different from classic CRM?
How can it help to increase the performance of my company? Is Social CRM
only for the enterprise? How does Social Media affect my business?

This document proposes to answer those questions. It is not about the theory of
CRM, it is about the pragmatic effects of its adoption by mid-sized companies.

As a business leader, you know transition is going to take years to complete. We

acknowledge that as well but will present the case that the time to invest in
research and find the right partners for the journey ahead is now.

Social CRM is the Future of CRM

CRM is a set of processes (and associated tools) meant to manage the
relationships of a company with their customers. It affects more directly the areas

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

interacting with external partners and customers (typically sales, marketing,

customer service).

Social CRM seeks to address the same scope of problems as Classic CRM.

Why do we need a new name for the same solution? Because there are
significant changes in the business environment and CRM is evolving in response
to them. Until that evolution consolidates, “Social CRM” is the future of CRM.

But what are those changes?

• Changes in the business environment. Customers have gained access to

information through the Internet. They connect and interact with their
peers, and are empowered and in control.

• Emergence of New Technology. In the past decade social technologies

have decreased the friction and cost of collaboration. The adoption of
those technologies by businesses promises to scale personal touch and
change engagement with customers.

• Generational changes. The digital generation born after the 1980’s grew
up using the Internet and are now consumers and workers. They operate
differently than most of the business leaders and will force companies to
adapt.

If you see those changes driving business in the next decade and agree that
they will require adaptation in processes and tools, read on.

What is the “Social” in Social CRM?

CRM has excelled in capturing the transactional aspects of a company

operation (e.g. contact information, leads and opportunity data), enforcing and
automating process to obtain quality (e.g. workflows, reminders and events),
and providing management visibility (reports, dashboards).

But Classical CRM has not been very successful in helping sales and customer
service representatives in customer engagement. Sales people will tell you how
CRM feels like a chore instead of a tool most of the time.

Why is that?

The “last mile” of customer engagement has always been social. You have
heard this before: “Sales is based on relationship”. ”People buy from people”.
“The most important factor in a buy decision is peer recommendation”. The sales
process is not linear and cannot be captured in a linear workflow.

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Business have already recognized that by, for example, building Customer Cases
as a mechanism of peer-influence and using business lunches or golf outings to
establish personal relationships. But those are expensive and difficult methods to
scale.

Classical CRM tools are built around databases, forms and workflows. Those are
excellent technologies to model structured processes and reports for
management. But they cannot effectively model conversations and
relationships.

Social CRM tools leverage Social Media and Technologies (sometimes referred to
as Web 2.0, including Streams, wikis, unstructured search, social filtering,
reputation metrics, tagging, bookmarking, etc) that emerged first on the
consumer web and promise to help scale human touch so that companies can
better engage with customers and provide a satisfying customer experience.

The same techniques can also be used to promote internal communication and
collaboration so that customers see one company and have a seamless
experience even if their point of contact moves across different departments
over their lifecycles.

The Use Cases for Social CRM in Mid-Sized Companies

CRM is both about the processes and tools. For an in-depth exploration of Social
CRM methodologies, we recommend the book “CRM at the Speed of Light” (2)
by Paul Greenberg.

The market reference for selection of Social CRM tools is Altimeter Group’s report
“The 18 use cases of Social CRM” (3), which is freely available as a reference.
Here we will focus on the ones that are most immediately relevant to medium-
sized companies.

Social CRM intends to solve all problems currently addressed by Classic CRM
tools, but it also leverage social technologies to better address certain use cases.

1. Sales and Marketing Insights

With traditional media, companies can broadcast their message (publish papers,
post advertisement, etc) but listening is really difficult. Corporations have been
using anecdotal face-to-face interactions and tools such as surveys, focus
groups, customer advisory boards to collect market input.

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Social CRM tools leverage social media to allow companies to listen to what
their customers, prospects, partners, and competitors are already publishing.

Most business people have a LinkedIn profile and that is the first place they
announce any change in their job status. Many also post updates about their
current activities and interests on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.

If, for example, you sell IT equipment and your contact at BigCompany
announces a promotion to VP of Data Center Infrastructure on LinkedIn, that is
probably a good time for you to call her both to congratulate on the job
promotion and learn about her plans in the new role.

News about your business customers are available both from their own social
media presence, as well as from industry news sources.

You probably don’t need to follow every news item for every customer, but you
do want to know about certain events (change in management, merges and
acquisitions, opening of new offices, etc) that might trigger an action from you.
On the other hand, right before you pick up the phone, you want to know what
are the most current announcements of any kind related to both the company
and person you are calling.

Social CRM tools actively connect to Internet resources (be it LinkedIn, Google
Maps, Twitter, company websites, news sources) to bring you sales and
marketing insights when you need it and in the context of your business
operation.

So it is not about spending all day watching Twitter or Facebook feeds, but
having a system that brings that information at the right time, in context of the
business task so that social information is an empowering tool, not a distraction.

Figure 1 - Social CRM can bring external insight in context

2. Social Media Monitoring and Social Lead Generation

Traditional methods of lead generation rely on broadcasting to a large list

compiled by and rented from media companies and hoping that a very small
number reacts to it and become leads.

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

That statistical reliance on serendipity (catching the “suspect” at the exact time
she is sensitive to the message) is not enough and cannot sustain a medium-sized
business in a competitive space.

The new “funnel” is not in static lists, but in online communities, where prospects
can give out the signals of readiness without depending on statistical
coincidence. Social CRM tools allow the monitoring of those social venues and
detection at the exact right time (both for the seller and the buyer) to establish
sales contact.

As an experiment, if you have not tried Twitter yet, go to the their site and type
the name of your company (or another well-known company, maybe the leader
in the space you are in) in the search box. Spend a couple of minutes studying
the results. If you are lucky, you will see posts from users that look like this “Hi, I am
considering buying the X solution from BigCompany but looking for alternatives.
Any suggestions?”.

Don’t you think that looks like a lead? With Social CRM, you don’t need to be
lucky, the tool will help you to engage with the relevant communities so that you
don’t miss those “signals of readiness”.

Figure 2 - Social CRM can help to prospect using Social Media

3. Customer Advocacy and Social Customer Service

Any sales person know that one of the most powerful tools to convince prospects
are credible case studies. Marketers have studied it. Psychologists have studied
it. They all agree. People feel more comfortable buying what their peers are
buying.

Why is it that companies are always struggling to get happy reference customers
to influence their peers? Why do we bring non-disclosure agreements into that
process? Because companies would like to control peer-to-peer influence.

Social CRM tools assume customers empowered by the Internet and Social
Media will connect and communicate with their peers whether we like it or not. If
we cannot control, we better at least participate in the conversation.

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

Social CRM tools help you to cultivate communities and connect happy
customers so that they can influence, help, and nurture each other. They also
connect you with unhappy customers, so that you can react fast and make it
right. Satisfaction surveys are no longer enough, you need to detect and fix
problems in real time, so that you make your customer happy before they start
talking to peers about a bad experience.

Leveraging Social CRM tools for real-time response will require changes in the
culture of companies, with increased openness and transparency. But the
benefits are rewarding.

Figure 3 - Social CRM allows the inclusion of customers in conversations.

4. Internal Collaboration

Companies have increasingly segmented work to achieve efficiency. We have

been taught that the best way to run a business is to break big tasks into
“independent” smaller ones until they can be assigned to functional areas and
people and tied to an MBO scheme.

For example: Marketing broadcast messages and capture leads, Sales close
deals and capture revenues, Customer Service deal with after-purchase issues.

Two side-effects of excessive segmentation are that the company does not offer
a consistent customer experience (which affects its competitiveness) and many
opportunities are lost for lack of engagement. If we believe peer
recommendation is a major source of leads and purchase influence, then
marketing, sales and customer service should be tightly integrated.

Segmentation can work relatively well in some environments, and has worked
particularly well in sales, but we have seen many deals lost for lack of it. Social
tools lower the cost of collaboration and enable people to work together
without losing efficiency, but gaining in effectiveness.

Product Managers and Customer Service representatives know things that can
make or break a deal. Look at your organization. Does information flow well

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

between functional areas? When I prepare to call a contact, I would like to

have new marketing information from product management, upcoming
software updates from engineering, status of customer service calls all on my
screen so that I can provide the best possible service to my customer.

Does that happen in a typical organization, even small ones? No.

Social CRM tools bridge the gaps between functional areas. This is not about
deploying SharePoint and hoping people will browse static file repositories. It is
about bringing the right up-to-date information to the right person when it is
needed and in context. That is usually done using a collaborative platform that
leverages the use of intelligent information Streams.

Figure 4 - Social CRM allows people from different areas to collaborate.

Conclusion

The shift from Classic CRM to Social CRM will happen over the next several
years, but the time to invest in research and select the right partners for
the journey ahead is now.

If we convinced you of that, we hope you will share this information with others
and consider partnering with Coffee Bean Technology, one of the first
companies to design a Social CRM platform from the ground up.

As mentioned before, Social CRM is the evolution of CRM and no vendor has the
perfect solution for everyone. We believe the use cases above can serve as a
good starting point for you to look at what your current CRM tool lacks and what
each vendor can offer.

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

About Coffee Bean Technology

Coffee Bean Technology offers Social CRM for mid-sized companies.

We integrate sales and marketing with social media allowing companies to

prospect new business and nurture customer relationships to cross-sell and up-sell
more.

Website http://www.coffeebeantech.com/
Twitter http://www.twitter.com/CoffeeBeanTech
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/CoffeeBeanTech
You Tube http://www.youtube.com/user/CoffeeBeanTechnology

About the Author

Marcio Saito is President of Coffee Bean Technology and draws from his
combined past experience as a pioneer of the Open Source Software
movement, which gave him the first insights on collaboration and
community engagement, and as a provider of solutions for Change
and Configuration Management in the enterprise space. He blogs on
Social CRM, Social Business and Social Media.
Blog http://community.coffeebeantech.com/blogs
Twitter http://twitter.com/Marcio_Saito

About the Coffee Bean System

The Coffee Bean Social CRM System is offered as a

subscription service (SaaS) and is built from the
ground up on a collaborative platform based on
Streams. On top of the Social Layer, it incorporates
business applications supporting traditional CRM
functionality.
Product http://coffeebeantech.com/solution

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Social CRM Use Cases for Medium-Sized Companies

References

The shift from Classic CRM to Social CRM will happen over the next several
years, but the time to invest in research and select the right partners for
the journey ahead is now.

(1) The Click Company – Adapt to the Digital Medium or Die – John
Lima and Marcio Saito 2010 – ISBN 978-0-9826645-6 – http://
www.coffeebeantech.com/booklet

(2) CRM at the Speed of Light – Fourth Edition – Paul Greenberg 2009 McGraw Hill
– ISBN 978-0-07159045-7

(3) Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of
Relationship Management - http://www.altimetergroup.com/2010/03/altimeter-
report-the-18-use-cases-of-social-crm-the-new-rules-of-relationship-
management.html

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