What Is Social CRM and Why Everyone Needs It

Social CRM (customer relationship management) is the integration of social media channels with customer relationship management in order to provide information about customer interactions and increase the level of customer interaction.

Social CRM is about taking interactions from social media and integrating them into the CRM systems we live in more traditionally. We see that our daily life in the business world usually consists of emails, phone calls or physical meetings.

However, real life is not like that. Our customers don't just email, phone or hold online meetings. They also have a social life and spend time on social media.

If we implement a classical customer relationship management system, we will ignore this part of them. However, at the heart of our customer relationship management strategy should be understanding our customers and providing after-sales services.

If you ignore social CRM in a customer relationship management strategy or customer relationship management tool you use, you are wasting a huge opportunity.

Traditionally we have a one-way relationship with our client. This relationship of ours has a beginning and there is only one line going in that direction. This aspect could be emailing the customer, sending a marketing campaign, or making a sales call. It has a one-way beginning.

If we take the one-way relationship one step further and add social CRM, this communication will be like an ellipse. There is a point, an arrow goes from that point to another point, but we come back to the first point from the same point.

Social CRM has a two-way interaction;

• “I will also interact with my client on social media to persuade him.”
• “A potential customer or current customer will also be able to contact me on social media.”

So, is the definition of social CRM limited to that? Of course not!

We can compare social CRM to a triangle. The starting point is the institution or brand. He wants to convey a message, to offer his service related to a product he sells. Hence, one side of the triangle is formed from the brand to the customer.

Let's go a little deeper.

Then there is a request from the customer that makes its way to the brand. “I am interested in your product, inform me more”. or “I bought this product and have complaints. Solve them." There are also parts that touch after-sales services.

So what makes up the third side of this triangle?

The biggest window that Social CRM opens to us and the biggest difference it creates, namely the third edge; interaction between a potential customer and another potential customer, or an existing customer with a potential customer, that does not originate from the company...

When social media is involved, that is, when interactions, correspondence, conversations, shares, likes and comments on social media are added, the customer side can be able to talk. The customer can express his opinion.

So how?

There is no direct involvement of any brand or institution in this statement of opinion. With Social CRM, we don't tell my client to "become my brand advocate". Social CRM is the ability to access and analyze information that we normally do not have access to, and to include it in our entire customer relationship management system as structural data.

For example, being able to write someone's complaint on the product owner's page on Facebook is one side of the social CRM triangle.

On the other side, there are independent interactions between potential customers or current customers who are completely independent, with no brand involvement whatsoever. For example, mentioning a brand to another person, asking them to share a photo, etc.

Result?

When you include this third dimension in social CRM, more real, meaningful and real-time outputs emerge that can provide resources for data sources and marketing strategies that we have not had until now. This data offers us golden platter opportunities to increase our sales, grow and interact with customers more directly.

Why is Social CRM Important?

Now, as human beings, we have begun to underline the concept of "social" in a different way. In the past, when we said social, we thought of people who meet in physical environments and spend time together. Today that has changed a lot.

For example, meeting in a restaurant, eating together, going to a party, going to a concert were associated with sociality.

Yes, this part of the job continues, of course, but sociality is not limited to these activities.

Today, the easiest and direct way to socialize is social media platforms. Everyone has their Facebook, Twitter, etc. They can use them for a social job, they can also do it to really distract themselves, to take a break from work for a while and get concentration.

On the other hand, a company can also spend time on social media as a marketing strategy. We also spend time on social media to follow the posts there, see the shares, like, comment and attract customers to the company from there. 

Therefore, the most fundamental point of the importance of social CRM is that we can be where our customers are.

So where is our client?

According to statistics, we spend 4 hours a day on different social media platforms. One of the most important places where we can find customers is social media channels. The most critical point of the importance of social CRM is to be where your customer is.

Easy, right?

Since your customer spends a quarter of their time on social media, you should incorporate CRM into your business as part of your marketing strategy.

We correspond with someone for days, weeks, reach them by phone, send e-mails to set up a meeting with someone… That person actually maintains his presence on social media. So if that person is there, you have to pursue it as a marketing strategy.

Do you want to learn a secret?

Social CRM provides speed and cost savings. Social CRM is essential as it gives us speed and saves costs. If you expand your client management activities to include social networks, you will gain speed and savings.

Excellent!

According to the latest research, customer service offered over the internet costs $1 per interaction. This one-dollar cost is much cheaper than traditional customer service over telephone lines.

We may see complaints about a product or service on social media platforms. Complaints can thus be resolved faster.

You know what else?

If you are not aware of the importance of social media and do not exhibit a social CRM management integrated into social media channels, you will unfortunately miss the opportunity to gain speed and save costs.

Social CRM examples have become increasingly common in the world.

As you know, the history of social media dates back to ancient times. For example, Facebook was founded in 2003. CRM is a concept that has been in existence in the business world since the 1990s.

Look at it like this:

How are you sending your campaigns right now? You're probably either making a phone call or sending an email. If you share over social media applications and take it as your goal to manage it in an integrated way, you are showing an example of social CRM.

Today, some CRM programs have included features such as sending email, Facebook and Twitter integration. Sending shared messages and interactions within permissions is an example of social CRM.

Listens to the interaction of customers, both you and each other, and interprets them positively or negatively. It saves as data in your system's database.

But how?

For example; with social CRM, you can use artificial intelligence, natural language processing techniques, semantics and machine learning methods. So, you can take data from social media and personalize and execute them too.

Let's expand a little more:

Let's say that you are selling trousers, jackets, shirts, etc., in the men's ready-to-wear area. You can know your customer when they make a purchase. You know as much as the information he gives you there. Whereas, you may be aware of that person's social media interactions first. You can even predict that person's interests and probable income level through Facebook's algorithms or their interactions there.

You need to implement which product you will offer to the person by applying the social CRM logic and starting from this social CRM example. In CRMs, such as Prosoftly, developed with various machine learning and artificial intelligence methods, this turns into really meaningful data and allows you to make your customer segmentation much more realistic.

It's not over!

Using social CRM as the customer support service unit of customer relationship management is one of the most common examples. For example, you can receive customer requests for your service, current customer requests, usage problems, requests to learn about these usage problems via social media, by using your social CRM platform. In addition, it is in your hands to answer and manage these requests. You can make the data you receive meaningful and analyze it later. A Customer Support Services unit, where you can evaluate all the data such as how satisfied the customer is, whether he is our brand advocate, can be given as an example of social CRM.

Benefits of Social CRM

Social CRM is a medium that is useful today and will exist even more tomorrow. Social platforms are gaining more and more weight. Here, too, there are developments that increase the importance of social media.

Mark Zuckerberg has recently announced that; Facebook will connect Instagram and WhatsApp. He said that he will be able to create company pages on WhatsApp and interact from there. Purchases can also be made via WhatsApp.

This statement reveals the fact that the benefits of social CRM will increase a lot.

Let's move on to the benefits of social CRM now!

The benefits of Social CRM are summarized below;

• Fast accessible customer service

Your customer can quickly communicate their problem. The company can also give feedbacks easily and quickly.

• More visibility

On average, we spend four hours a day on social media. If you are where your customers are, you will be in front of them. For example, in the last year and a half, many physical places have been closed due to the epidemic. We could not go to shopping malls from time to time. Would it make any sense for these periods to present a billboard inside the shopping mall as a marketing strategy? Of course not. In this period or not, people notice you when you gain visibility on social media platforms.

• Opportunity to interact in real time

With Social CRM, you can directly capture when your customer is active there in real time. If necessary, you can offer him your message, product promotion, service, etc., send your advertisement or vice versa, you can get feedback from him with a survey. You can also turn this data into a resource for your marketing strategy.

• Quick response to complaints / A positive brand image

If social CRM is integrated with social media, it provides a position open to positive and negative feedback at the point where your customer feels distressed and cannot reach anyone. This gives you the opportunity to instantly correct them and respond promptly. It also benefits as customer satisfaction and brand image increase.

• Finding and rewarding brand attorneys

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most ideal solutions of marketing. You will not spend a budget for this. The product sells itself. The easiest platform to do this is social media. If someone is satisfied with a service, they may share it with great appreciation when it comes to the subject or when there is a medium about it. If we incorporate social media into our CRM platform, we can realize who our brand advocates really are. We can enable them to act as our brand advocate with various awards.

• Better relations with the audience

Social CRM will help you develop your audience better. From here, we can interact with our audience much more directly and easily. We can make campaigns to drag these people behind us. When we manage our customers from social media, we manage both more directly and at a faster rate of interaction.