What is Social CRM? Need, Benefits and Trends


What is Social CRM?

Social CRM refers to approach of managing customer relationship by using Social media as the channel to listen and engage with Customers.

In CRM Software context, when a traditional CRM is integrated with your social media channels to help you manage your customer relationships from social media channels, it is termed as Social CRM.


Need for Social CRM:

Marketers tends to make mistake of thinking Social Media platforms as the place to only broadcast their social media posts and drive traffic. 

But there is more to it. Social Media should be used for more for listening to the customers or prospects and engaging with them. 

Social CRM Landscape


Some associated facts:

As per a 2017, Techwire Asia article 
  • 95% of customer complaints on social media don’t reach companies.
  • 1/3rd of all customer complaints on social media are ignored.
  • 80% of surveyed companies said they deliver exceptional customer service on social media but only 8% of their customers agreed on the same.
  • 63% customers expect companies to offer customer service on Social media channels.
  • 90% of social media users used social media to engage/communicate with a brand.
  • When people get responses on social media, they are 30% more likely to recommend a brand to others.
  • Implementing a good Social CRM could help improve annual revenue by 81% through referrals as well as reduce customer churn by helping you improve customer retention up to 92%.

Benefits of social crm for sales teams:

  • Increase in Lead Inflow: Sales teams get to generate more leads from Social Media.
  • Hot Leads: The Leads from social media are mostly comes from referrals via viral posts or comments from their friends thus they are far more likely to convert.
  • Reduced Sales Cycle: The leads from Social Media are informed prospects, hence the sales cycle duration reduces thus helping in faster sales conversion.
  • Multichannel Selling: Modern Social Media platforms are also equipped with sales store front. Thus Social CRM helps track the sales or leads getting generated from multiple social media channels and bring it together inside one single CRM, thus enabling the organization towards multi-channel sales.

Benefits of social crm for Marketing team:

  • Better Customer Segmentation: Social CRM contains a lot of customer demographic information from social media. It helps the Marketers in better customer segmentation and enables them to create more contextual and personalized marketing campaigns.
  • Instant Feedback & Sentiment Analysis: Customers find it easier to interact on social media comments and messengers compared to usual email or ticket based communication on website. Social CRM is helping the Marketers get more up-to date real-time customer sentiments and feedback about their products and services from social media. This helps them improve their product and service offerings. Also it helps them optimize & improve their marketing communications.

Benefits of social crm for service teams:

  • Customer Issue Resolution: Sometimes Customers use social media channel as an escalation mechanism if they are not happy with the resolution provided by your usual service help desk. This shall help Service teams take the issue on priority and shall help them transfer the ticket to a more experienced customer service rep to take it to satisfactory closure. 
  • Process Improvement and Knowledge base Development: With social media sentiments on the issues, you get to understand certain frequently occurring issues which are painful for your customers. This data helps you do deep dive towards improving your customer resolution process better and improves you’re the knowledge base documentations for your service teams to serve future similar issues better.
  • Ease of Connect: Whenever customers are unable to get certain help with your product and services from available public sources, they find it easier to interact with their brands via social media or on your social media community to find answers to their queries.

Things to look for in a social crm:

  • Integration: Features such as Integration with top social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.
  • Analytics & Insights: The platform should be equipped to extract data from your social media channels to give you reports, analytics and actionable real-time insights on what is working out versus what is not working.
  • Social Media Management: It should let you manage your multiple social media accounts from one single platform such as post scheduling, comment and message notifications. Primarily it should equip you with Listening, Publishing and Engagement on your social channel.
  • Team Collaboration: It should offer a collaborative way of working so that you can add your team members in the application and work together.

Advances in Social CRM:

  • Automated Chat bots for answering to user messages, product enquiries, frequently asked questions sent on Social Media messengers.
  • Follower tracking features which lets you track lost followers in addition to new followers. Source of followers such as organic vs paid.
  • RoI Insights such on Organic Impressions vs Paid Impressions.
  • Budget based alerts and controls on Paid Social Media campaigns.
  • Integration with Video meeting platforms such as Skype, Zoom, Slack , etc, to take up instant product demo, calls or meetings with prospect.
  • Integration with document storage platforms to automatically sync and store artifacts related to key client conversations.
  • Social media sales workflow for automating many repeatable sales processes associated with new lead capture and nurturing via social media channels.
  • Ability to pull contact and other information from Prospect’s social media public profiles such as LinkedIn, Public databases, etc.

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