Social Customer Relation Management

Last week, we talk about social customers, this week I will introduce social CRM to you.

I think it is a shift from traditional CRM to a new social customer relationship management. From my point of view, social CRM combines social media with CRM (Thompson, 2009). Social CRM is about your communications, listening, internalizing and responding (Lieberman, 2012).

In the next part, I will share some examples which reflected the importance of Social CRM.

BEST BUY------Twelp Force:
The employees of Best Buy has grew to 2,200 in 3 months and there are over 13,000 customers  accustomed to interact with the employees on social networks such as asking questions, stating their views. Thus, Best Buy set up a better relationship with their customer though social media. Nowadays, there are 29,000 followers of TWELP FORCE. To maintain the good relationship, everyday the employees of Best Buy will answer 100-125 questions from its customers per day (Petersen 2011).

FOILED CUPCAKES:

FOILED CUPCAKES is a Chicago company which is based online. However, once it’s the lauch of its website can not work normally but its cakes are all prepared. To not to influence it sales, they use Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their customers. The reasons referred by the host are that people can tweet all day long can update their Facebook pages all day long. In addition, the owner Mari Luangrath also pointed out: “people only listen if they know you care about them.” (Petersen 2011)

From the two examples, it can be found that as the power of traditional CRM diminishes, companies should turn to online social networks to catch their customers.

References:

Lieberman, M. (2012) Best Practices for Social CRM?. The social customer, [blog] 13/02/2012, Available at: http://thesocialcustomer.com/mitchlieberman/46089/best-practices-social-crm [Accessed: 20/03/2012].

Petersen , R. (2011) 16 case studies that prove Social CRM . BarnRaisers , [blog] January 13, 2011 , Available at: http://barnraisersllc.com/2011/01/19-case-studies-show-social-media-builds-1-to-1-sales-relationships/ [Accessed: 20/03/2012].

Thompson, B. (2009) Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad?. customer think, [blog] 16/09/2009, Available at: http://www.customerthink.com/blog/social_crm_strategy_technology_or_passing_fad [Accessed: 20/03/2012].