The million dollar question in CRM today is, “What is social CRM?” Essentially, social CRM is all about managing customer relationships and engagement over social networks. With social CRM, you can build a presence on the sites that your customers frequent most. You can also monitor what your customers are saying, as well as what they think about your product or brand. All in all, it’s about using social technology to enhance the customer relationship and take it a few levels deeper. And you thought social CRM just meant having a company Facebook account!
The market is still fairly fragmented. There are multiple tools for different activities. A social media monitoring tool like Radian6 helps track brand presence on social networks, as well as customer actions on those networks. A social collaboration tool can be either internal or external and allows for real-time chat-like communication. Salesforce’s Chatter is a great example of this kind of app. Then you have the platform products like Jive or Lithium that strive to offer a deeper offering by incorporating several of the above features, as well as social marketing, social commerce, social support and sales enablement tools. Unlike traditional CRM solutions that lead with SFA or support and lay social on top, these platform systems are social to the core.
Sound like a lot to swallow? Well, it is. Which is why we’ve gathered a ton of resources to help you make sense of it all. Here, you can see best practices videos from companies and experts who are optimizing social technology for their business. You can also watch demos of some of the top products on the market and maybe learn about some you haven’t heard of yet. The time to go social is now, and we want to help you get started.
