FindItMore | Social media has become an integral part of people’s life. They take it as a platform to talk about the things they like, how they feel and their opinions on various products. If a customer likes your product/service, he will definitely talk about it on social media and recommend it to his friends and family. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the significance of the platform and incorporate social customer relationship management (Social CRM) to engage with your customers and learn about their choice and preferences.
The Objective & Benefits of Social CRM
Adding a social strategy to your customer relation management is a great way of keeping your users engaged with your business. It enables a business to generate increased revenues with decreased costs.
The major objectives of Social CRM are as under:
- Learning about customer preferences
- Retaining customers
- Engaging prospects
- Acquiring new customers
- Gaining customer trust
- Gathering information about competitors
All the afore-mentioned objectives are important metrics in ensuring a business’s success. They help the organization in augmenting its brand awareness by becoming recognized on a global stage.
Some of the significant benefits of Social CRM are:
- Process Enhancement
One of the most significant benefits of CRM adoption is improved transparency and knowledge about the customer preferences and sales process coordination. With a social CRM, you can maintain complete consistency throughout all customer interactions. May it be through phone, SMS, email or social media, you can centralize your efforts to achieve a uniformity in voice and approach.
- Productivity Expansions
Social media can be greatly instrumental in acquiring knowledge about your customers and prospective leads. This information can then be used to speed up the process of selecting qualified leads and procuring sales. You can also gather insights on the leads that are almost ready to make a purchase and zeroing in on them can lead to major productivity gains.
- Seamless Internal Communication
Social CRM promotes seamless internal communication. All the departments, from sales and marketing to IT, are provided with the ability to gain updates on customer interactions in real time. This reduces the chances of any ambiguity and improves overall coordination.
- Be Proactive
These days, most of the people with a smartphone and internet connection are tremendously active on social media. With a social CRM, you can be in direct link with your customers and learn about their opinions and feedbacks, which can help you in understanding your position in relation to your competitors in the market.
- Improved Market Analysis
With a social CRM, the research and development teams can acquire improved insights into the customer behaviors. By watching customer conversations and purchasing patterns, companies can come up with better-quality and innovative products to suit the customer demands.
- Build Stronger & Deeper Relationships
A lot of social tools in your CRM offer live updates on your customer’s activities which include their major life events such as marriage, change of job, etc. You can use this information to send personalized messages to your customers that can help in developing a deeper bond with them.
In order to instill customer faith and trust in your business, it is imperative to show that businesses listen to the voice of their customers, are concerned about their opinions and choices and are willing to address their trepidations. This is largely possible if these businesses implement Social CRM in their marketing efforts. Social CRM is a robust marketing tool that offers intelligent customer experience insights, understands their disappointments and well receives their feedback. This data can be used by companies to reevaluate their marketing strategies and improve their products according to the customer needs.
On the other hand, implementing social tools in your CRM strategy is a lengthy process that calls for a lot of time and effort. It may take some time to generate positive results. Here are some tips that can help you in implementing a Social CRM strategy.
Some Tips for Implementing a Social CRM Strategy
- Invest in a Reliable Social Tool
Make sure you invest in a social CRM tool that is capable of managing social posts across all platforms, while carefully monitoring who is saying what and indulging into personalized conversations with customers. Also, you need to evaluate your budget and select the right tool that seamless integrates with existing CRM software.
- Focus on Appropriate Networks
If you have an e-commerce retail website, it would be great to put attractive pictures of your products on Instagram, or Pinterest in order to attract crowds of leads. However, if you are looking to target enterprise software company’s customers, you are more likely to be active on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Therefore, it is important to direct your attention towards the appropriate network in order to fetch new customers and retain the existing ones.
- Closely Monitor Customer Interactions
Your Social CRM should have the ability to track a customer’s comments, tweets, and likes to know what they are feeling. Also, it should be quickly able to track specific keywords such as your company’s name or any other keyword related to what your business does. For instance, if a user comes up with a query about a field of expertise, your business should swiftly respond in order to acquire new leads.
- Group Your Customers for Personalized Interactions
With a social CRM, you can create different groups of customers based on their social persona. Thereby, you can tailor smart and personalized conversations and target messages about a specific product or service for each group. This can help you to stay more relevant and attract increased sales.
- Appoint Social Media Managers to Improve Customer Interactions
Social media managers are the greatest ambassadors of your business. Depending upon the type of business, incorporating robust social media tools in tandem with smart social media managers into a cohesive department can help you increase your company’s overall productivity. Also, it leads to an improvement in the quality of responses as these managers can carry out more interactive conversations with the customers without any delay.
- Leverage Social Incentives to Create Brand Loyalty
It is a great idea to incentivize the most loyal customers of your company to build a lasting relationship. For this, you can send additional discount vouchers or promotional codes to reward these customers. Or, you can also give a @shoutout to these customers to show them how much you value their loyalty. This way, you can use your social CRM to make the most out of your connections.
- Don’t Delete Negative Feedback
There may be times when your business receives some kind of negative comments or feedback from its users. Some may be true while other may not be. However, instead of removing such comments from your social accounts, deal with it in a professional and proactive manner.
Final Thoughts
Social media is fast gaining traction. A business with reliable Social CRM system is more likely to stay at the forefront. Customers are exchanging opinions and ideas over social media and businesses can largely benefit from such conversations by offering improved and customized products to its patrons. They can connect with the customers on a personal level and extend products that are suitable for their needs. This is a powerful reason for businesses to adopt social CRM as a part of their existing as well as future strategy.