Understanding Social CRM: Key Tips to Improve Customer Engagement

Nowadays, business is evolving to be customer centric: customer feedback online is gathered and analysed to improve customer experiences across variety of industries. According to Gardner, CRM market is currently worth $27.5 billion worldwide, and could potentially grow up to $36 billion, by 2017. More over, with the worldwide growth of social media, companies become under extreme pressure to accommodate the even growing customer expectations.

The challenge for businesses now is to adapt to meet the demands of customers in the various social channels. Social CRM, which is an integration of customer relationship management (CRM) with social media is the latest trend for companies that want to make the most out of their interactions with customers throughout social media. Social CRM is enabling companies to meet and engage with their customers online, respond swiftly to their feedback, and manage their business reputation better.

Instead of aggressively pushing products or services to customers in social networks, brands now collaborate with customers to solve business issues, empower buyers to shape their own experiences and build a high level long term relations, which aims to turn followers to brand advocates.

What to do to build effective CRM strategy that will help you create a community of advocates around your brand? Here are several tips that will help you to communicate with your customers better.

 

Incorporate social CRM to your CRM strategy

In order to successfully implement CRM initiative that is right for your business you need to have a strategy of how and what you want to achieve. While developing the strategy think of how you will leverage social media emphasizeing on channels that’s most important for your customers.

To keep track of your customers updates and respond to them quickly you need to integrate social networks with CRM system. Integration of CRM software with social media will help you to better react to customer feedback online and will make it easier to get the customer data from various channels.

Moreover, you will be able to communicate with customers online, share promotions or product updates with prospects directly from the CRM system. That is why the choice of CRM software solution is extremely important in improving customer relations, interacting with customers through multiple social channels.

While choosing the most suitable CRM for your business, it is important to make sure that the three customer-facing components of Customer Relationship Management – marketing, sales and customer service is included into the system, so you will be able to gather customer data from different channels and share information between all teams and departments that deal with customers.

For example, bpm’online is a great example of CRM that connects the dots between marketing, sales and service, providing you with a 360-degree customer view.

Analyze data and watch for the trends

If you want to  improve sutomer relations across all social channels, you have to analyze customer data to define behavior patterns as well as customer related trends to get the most of your interractions with the customers. The information you collect from all possible online channels allow you to improve your offerings according based on customers feedback.

Customer data can be also invaluable for crafting marketing campaigns to aquire new customers, as you will be able to match your customer profile and their buying habits and preferences with your data on the best repeat sales.

Reward loyal customers

Brand loyalty and reward programs are aimed to facilitate brand loyalty keeping customers returning to repeat experiences using your products or services. Social media is a great tool to engage with customers and attract traffic to your website. One of the best ways of customer engagement is rewarding them for their actions around your brand, products or in the e-store.

There are multiple ways of how you can reward online customers. Discounts or special deals that are exclusively available online work very well either you are looking to reward the consumers you already have, or increase the size of your online customer base. Leverage CRM capabilities to determine what attracts your customers the most and build lon-lasting relationships based ont this knowledge.

The social space is becoming more sophisticated and we can see only fragmented peaces of information on how customers use social channels. Consumers natigate between the websites searching different kind of information. Applying the right approach to social meadia management teamed up with the right CRM software will ensure that you can build long-term trustful customer relations, succesfully interacting with customers across social networks, while easily collecting, updating and analyzing their behavior.