Social CRM uses social media platforms and analytics to gather customer insights and engage customers. It aims to be proactive about customer expectations and provide personalized experiences. About 80% of social media users prefer connecting with brands on Facebook and 34% of marketers have generated leads on Twitter, showing the importance of social media. Social CRM is an add-on to traditional CRM that extends its reach beyond corporate systems. It uses tools to analyze conversations on public and private social networks to provide quantifiable insights and notifies customer service of issues. When combined with superior technology, social CRM allows organizations to better engage customers.

1. Social CRM
Social CRM can be defined as the use of social media platforms and the
appropriate analytical methodologies to gather actionable insights which can
help organizations engage better with their customers. The main objective is to
be proactive to customer expectations and make customer experience more
personal and relevant.
Why ‘Social’ CRM:
A study shows that about 80 percent of social media users prefer to connect
with brands through Facebook. About 34 percent of marketers have generated
leads using Twitter. Such jarring statistics imply that the ‘social consumers’ of
today now have the prowess and means to employ social media platforms to
voice out their sentiments. Personalised selling has become the new mantra for
sales agents who continuously monitor social media to react with customers and
prospects alike with the main objective to engage them better. In addition,
organizations are increasingly deploying social community platforms that
enable consumers to reach out to other fellow consumers to gather information
about a product or a brand, thus adding a new dimension to the role of
consumers in a marketplace. Such rising usage of social media indicates a
radical change in the way organizations are reaching out to customers. In short,
Social CRM has become the new mandate!
Social CRM – A CRM add-on!
Evaluators of social CRM often have a misguided sense that it is here to replace
the existing ‘Customer Relationship Management’ solutions already adopted in
their organization. It is important to understand that Social CRM is not here to
replace traditional CRM. On the other hand, it augments the capabilities of
traditional customer engagement, sales and marketing capabilities by extending
the reach of CRM beyond the corporate firewalls. In fact, from a technological
standpoint, social CRM can be viewed as a powerful add-on tool that provides
an integration between social media, analytics and the existing organizational
CRM applications. In addition, the traditional one-to-one customer
communication channels are being replaced by multichannel communication
platforms which are more conversational than transactional - thus helping
organizations acquire and retain more customers.

2. Social media data sources can be broadly classified into 2 categories. On one
hand, there are public social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums
etc. and on the other hand there are organization specific community platforms
or company social media pages for customer complaints, feedbacks, reviews
etc. Powerful Social CRM and analytics tools are deployed to crawl across the
web to gather textual data in the context of an organizations’ brand from these
data sources. These tools use state of the art analytical methodologies such a
sentiment analysis, natural language processing, big data analysis etc. to parse
through conversations across the web and convert them into meaningful,
quantifiable and actionable insights. For instance, any customer complaint that
has been voiced out in any social forum can be captured by the social CRM
listening tool. This ‘event’ can then notify, using a workflow, the concerned
customer care representative who can then address the issue proactively before
it is blown out of proportion. On a macro level, these tools can generate
statistical and market sentiment reports on brand / product performance,
customer favourability, perception and such. The end results can then be
analysed by key decision makers to make profitable marketing decisions. One
could trigger actions/workflows from these reports either in the existing CRM
application or using in-built workflow tools.
Social CRM solutions has thus made great inroads into the traditional marketing
and customer service efforts of organizations. Add superior technology to the

3. equation and the impact is quite powerful. Easy to use web based CRM tools
have ensured that front line managers are able to engage their customers and
prospects better by being involved in the ‘Social’ aspect of the CRM. At Avaali
Solutions, we believe that by bringing a mix of best-in-class technologies and
consultative change management into an enterprise, Social CRM can be a true
game changer. Avaali provides advisory services as well as implementation
services to help organizations adopt a Social CRM strategy and the associated
technologies.