18 Use Cases That Show Business How To Finally Put Customers First
Social and CRM: How Companies Will Manage Their Social Relationships
Over the last six months, I’ve been working closely with Ray Wang who is well known in the CRM space as an expert. Coupled with my focus on social technologies we did a deep dive on how our worlds are intersecting at Social CRM. In our opening webinar when we announced our joining of the firm, we made it clear that we were looking at the holistic business, across multiple business departments –not silos or roles.
Companies are unable to scale to keep up with the social phenomenon
We know that customers are using these social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up.
- For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
- Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and Comcast Cares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now.
- Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.
Above: Framework of the 18 Use Cases of Social CRM
How To Use This Report: A Pragmatic Roadmap
Regardless if you’re in IT or in a business unit, we wrote this to meet the needs of both groups. This architecture lays out all the possibilities (18 use cases) defines the problem and goal for each, and suggests some vendors to watch. It’s also pragmatic, as it lays out a process on how to get started, baseline needs (listening) and what to do next.
Action Items
- Sign up for the webinar series. This is a deep topic, and the report is only the tip of the iceberg. As we’ve done in the past, we’re going to offer a series of free webinars on this topic to explore each of the use cases in gritty details. Sign up for the webinar now, as we can only have 1000 attendees per webinar, as our last webinar had over 1100 registrants.
- Read then spread this report. Like open source, the Altimeter Group believes in open research, we want our ideas to grow, and others to take advantage of it. So if you found the report helpful, please forward the report to internal constituents, partners, vendors, clients, and blog it. Use it in your presentations, business plans, and roadmaps. I’ve embedded it below, and there are download features for your own use.
- Have an internal discussion. Evaluate your current situation at your company, then draw up which business needs need to be tackled first. Use the use cases as a roadmap by mapping out which phase comes first, and which phase comes second.
- Learn more and join the community of pioneers. This is new territory, we don’t have all the answers, so we’ve created a group in which pioneers can learn from each other. It’s free, and the conversation has started already. Jump into the group, and learn together.
The Altimeter Approach
Standing behind our belief in open research, the Altimeter Group wants to be part of the community. Thus, we:
Involve the expert community in the research process
Altimeter is unique as our partners can tightly comingle our topic areas and see how they converge, we highlighted our vision when we joined. We seek to be stewards of community and during our six months of research we talked to way over 40 thought leaders, vendors, and companies that are approaching this space. We blogged ideas, engaged in conversations with the #scrm hash tag, and had working sessions with thought leaders like Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky. We approached research in an open way, and allowed for vendors to review the report and submit back their ideas, some of which we incorporated. This effort was a group effort and included a lot of heavy lifting from Christine Tran, operations who helped to schedule countless meetings, and guidance from Charlene Li, our founder.
Provide a holistic view through deep collaboration
We see that worlds are converging, and we model our research the same way, through really analyzing the mixtures of our different topic areas. For example, what was interesting is that my ‘marketing-speak’ and Ray’s ‘IT Speak’ often resulted in the tower of babel. Although we were talking about the same topic, he had to translate IT and marketing speak both ways. After many puzzled looks, we embracing this, and realized that this isn’t unique to us but a sign of companies converging as a result of mass adoption of easy to share social tools. Thus, we realized this framework that could meet the needs of the various camps would be helpful, companies need to move quickly, as customers have adopted social in rapid fashion.
Use open research to grow ideas
We want ideas to spread, and have made the entire report available at no cost on Slideshare, and put up images on Flickr, we hope you use them, under creative commons licensing of Attribution -Noncommercial – Share Alike Status, we believe in open –not closed research. We’re trying a different business model, we want to involve the community of experts and publish our findings out there for everyone to benefit from, please support us by sharing it as much as possible, while we trial a new way of doing research.
Update: I forgot to mention, this report was entirely funded by the Altimeter Group. Also, we are open about disclosing who are clients are (providing they approve), as a result, we hope you’ll trust as more.
Related links: I’ll roundup interesting links that discuss this report
- Ray Wang, co author has his take
- Dave McClure blogged his take
- Ray cross posted on Enterprise Irregulars
- Marketing Profs Daily Fix
- Brian Solis
- All Things Digital
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.
What is hard to stomach for me with the Dooce / Maytag example is that companies need to assume that all of their calls have that potential social network attached to them and treat EVERY customer with that level of respect. Top notch customer service scales very easily with clear direction from the top thru to appropriate hiring practices and training. I will gladly pay more at Chik-Fil A where their customer svc is top notch. You can keep your PDA pokers at McAverage fast food.
Yes, influencer or not, every customer deserves the same respect and level of service.
Thanks Mark, it’s true, every customer is likely to be an influencer, I think we agree.
Thank you for a great post @debs
Do you think one of the major factors missing from the SCRM framework is benevolence and empathy?
If you attach both these frames of thinking and approaches into the framework, one would inherently illustrate a sense of connectedness and genuine empathy to a client(s) problems. It also shows a capacity to truly listen to what the issues are and to be genuinely interested in resolving this even if it means sending a client to a competitor.
From an individual level, you’ll find the top sales people connect in this manner. The challenge for the enterprise is how to spread this paradigm of thinking and example of sales excellence throughout the organisation especially as everyone is considered “the organisation” based on what you say here: “Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed.”
What do you think?
All the best.
how can I download the framework table and the report
Yes, click through to the report on the text at the top of the slideshare, it’ll take you to the document on slideshare.net
From there you can download the whole thing.
This is an excellent piece of work. Congratulations to all concerned. I’m excited by your “open research” approach. I do have two concerns: 1. Are we being limited in our thinking by trying to force so much new thinking/activities/technology into the existing silos of marketing, sales, IT – do we not require some structural change to accomodate these massive market shifts ? 2. Where do businesses acquire the new competencies required to capitalise on the Social CRM opportunity ? Knowing what a tight rope walker does, does not give me the skills to walk on the tight rope. I am working on a project to address both these issues. I’m happy to share my thoughts with the appropriate person in your organisation.
Ray Brown thanks.
It boils down to cultural shifts. Cultural changes are one of the biggest challenges –it’s not about technology change management in the enterprise.
Charlene’s upcoming book is going to address a lot of this. Stay tuned, it’s focused on ‘open leadership’.
Good post. One of my key issues is connecting Social Media to CRM.
Here is another Blog post about yours: http://mutualmind.com/blog
for more tips and tools, this is a good read http://bit.ly/aQxde8
Learning a great site for social media
This is a great start. If you want to take sales 2.0 to the next level to know when to sell, who to sell to, and what to say, you should check out SalesView by InsideView. You can check out the top 5 reasons you’ll love the new SalesView here: http://blog.insideview.com/2010/04/29/5reasonstolovethenewsalesview/
Social Media and CRMs should go hand in hand to serve the Customer 2.0 better.
While I say this, it is more important to know that most of the sales and marketing teams are spending their valuable time getting the sense out of social media.
Are you also spending too much time in social media? If yes, read the tips to efficiently and effectively get the best out of social media.
http://blog.insideview.com/2010/05/02/investing-too-much-time-on-social-media-how-to-boost-your-roi
As the social media explodes with new and updated information, it’s become all the more important to stay on top of what your prospects and customers are talking about. The big question here is how you can leverage all this information. I talk about some tips and tricks in my post http://blog.insideview.com/2010/04/27/connecting-the-dots-how-sales-2-0-can-help-you-connect-with-prospects/
As the social media explodes with new and updated information, it’s become all the more important to stay on top of what your prospects and customers are talking about. The big question here is how you can leverage all this information. I talk about some tips and tricks in my post
http://blog.insideview.com/2010/04/27/connecting-the-dots-how-sales-2-0-can-help-you-connect-with-prospects/
As the social media explodes with new and updated information, it’s become all the more important to stay on top of what your prospects and customers are talking about. The big question here is how you can leverage all this information. I talk about some tips and tricks in my post
This blog post will be of interest to you: “Contesting the Death of Tradition CRM: Social CRM is a Process and not a Technology” – http://creativestride.com/blog/2010/06/01/contesting-the-death-of-tradition-crm-social-crm-is-a-process-and-not-a-technology/
Over the last six months, I’ve been working closely with Ray Wang who is well known in the CRM space as an expert. Coupled with my focus on social technologies we did a deep dive on how our worlds are colliding into the trend to Social CRM. In our opening webinar when we announced our joining of the firm, we made it clear we’re looking at the holistic business, across multiple business departments –not silos or roles.
For companies, real time is not fast enough.
I can only agree with them !
Muh macht die Kuh!
Muh macht die Kuh
Muh macht die Kuh.
This is a pretty good checklist, though not exhaustive and perhaps would be even more helpful if the case studies were a bit more in-depth.
My brother recommended I would possibly like this website. He was entirely right. This submit truly made my day. You can not consider just how so much time I had spent for this info! Thanks!
301 Moved Permanently I was suggested this blog by my cousin. I am not sure whether this post is written by him as nobody else know such detailed about my difficulty. You are wonderful! Thanks! your article about 301 Moved Permanently Best Regards Nick Andy
I hardly drop responses, but after reading some of the remarks here Altimeter Report: The 18 Use Cases of Social CRM, The New Rules of Relationship Management. I do have 2 questions for you if you tend not to mind. Is it simply me or does it look as if like some of these remarks appear like they are coming from brain dead people?
And, if you are writing at other sites, I would like to keep up with everything fresh you have to post. Could you post a list of every one of your social community sites like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on project sponsor.
Regards