Potential uses for Social CRM

Today Will and Eliza (one of our clients from The BodyShop) will be speaking at a Social Media Week event, Social CRM: Building Customer Love, (link to Will’s slides here). I won’t go into detail on what Social CRM is as others can do so with far more skill (this wiki entry gives a good overview), but I do have a few theories on how Social CRM might play out.

Retention teams will benefit

Anyone that ever tried to move or cancel their mobile contract will know that service providers have large and effective retention teams, designed to keep you on as a paying customer. These specialist customer service agents are often entirely separate to their first and second line colleagues and often have more power, able to offer you a better contract for example in order to retain your business. It is this type of service that could really benefit from social.

Imagine a retention conversation where the service provider genuinely knows why you’re unhappy and has insight into your core values. They may have seen various Twitter rants you’ve written, or perhaps followed a forum thread in which you plead for a better type of service, and before you’ve made the effort to pick up the phone and cancel your contract they’ve contacted you, with a better targeted and more suitable service.

It won’t just be conversations

It’s easier to imagine our tweets, forum conversations and blog posts being fed into existing CRM data fields than it is the videos and photos that we post online, but I believe the latter includes some genuinely exciting opportunities for Social CRM. Imagine the fashion brand that adapts iPhoto’s face recognition software to pick out Facebook photos whenever someone is wearing said brands products. Not only does that fashion brand immediately have insight into where, when and how their products are being used, but they can reward their most loyal customers with targeted offers. Then imagine the other side of this, how much money Facebook could make by charging brands for such a service.

Likewise with video; if clever monitoring software can not only detect when certain products appear in videos, but gauge the contextual sentiment, imagine the potential for insight, advertising and customer service. If a luxury car manufacturer spotted (via smart YouTube monitoring) that their premium models were actually a huge hit with a subculture of boy-racers, they could then target messaging to these customers and build advocacy, as well as feeding this back to product and brand teams.

It won’t be popular unless it’s invisible and easy

The above examples are a long way off which arguably is a good thing. With ongoing concerns for online privacy reaching the mainstream, are consumers ready for clumsy attempts to add social to already clunky CRM processes? It’s great to see so much interest and enthusiam in this area, but when thinking about our biggest and most trusted service providers (banks, utilities, comms providers) and the sheer amount of sensitive data they hold, I personally would like to see a healthy amount of cynicism and restraint. If brands are to better understand our needs and better respond to our questions, then they need to do so with tact and ease. Our consumer experiences are drowning in tick-boxes, passwords and waiting times, and social CRM needs to alleviate these rather than add more.

Image taken from the fantastic Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising