From attending numerous events and seminars, it is clear that customer engagement is set to take centre stage, certainly for the foreseeable future. How the customer interacts with our products, and what data we analyse and store is clearly going to be key in staying ahead of the competition, and as a result the shift towards Social CRM as a replacement for the CRM that we are more familiar with today, seems no longer to be a prediction but a certainty.
Reports show that approximately 70% of tweets are being ignored by companies. 
The main vendors such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft and SAP, are already forging ahead with Social CRM, as we see them rushing to make mobile and social app development quicker and easier.
Whilst their intentions are good, ironically the downside to these giants is that sometimes their sheer size can inhibit their creativity. Their mixed messages and keenness appear to be self-harming their chances of taking the top spot, as they bombard us about customer communities, customer interaction engines, social engagement and sentiment analytics at an extraordinary rate.
The Social CRM message should really be about connecting new social customer information to your existing CRM system, to create a single library for each customer. Thereby enabling companies to prioritise social messages within the context of a customer’s history.
For customers it is all about response time and seeing a positive outcome, a message than can get lost in translation the minute the technology companies step in with their answer to Social CRM.
Did you know?
- 80% of social media posts are not relevant to customer service
- Under 25’s are more likely to be communicating via direct communication, such as Facebook and Twitter, than regular email
- 81% of consumers use social media for purchase recommendations
- 60% of customers regularly interact with companies via social media