I’m starting to blog my first day at the Social CRM Strategies Summit organized by CapGemini with Paul Greenberg, Esteban Kolsky, Bruce Culbert.

Social CRM Strategy (Paul Greenberg)

• The goal of the workshop: getting ideas about Social CRMand gaining basic models for applying things in your company
• The Social Customer: what is this beast?
  • We are living a social communications revolution that impacts all institutions, business among them. The customer controls the conversation going on. A lot of debate about the word control.
  • The customer has the ability to impact your business in channels that you don’t own. The first step is believing this and then acting on it.
  • The social customer communicates and behaves differently (Edelman Trust Barometer). Most trusted source moved from non-connected (to corporation) experts to a person like me.
  • Customers demand authenticity and transparency. Peer trust, new form of communication, customers increasingly aware of how powerful they are.
  • This revolution has been triggered by Gen Y (more stime spent online than on television). More people communicating through communities than through email and communities are the fastest growing sector for internet use (Global Faces on Networked Places, March 2009)
  • Each customer wants a personalized experience and to be treated as an high value customer even if you are not. Even low value customers today can really impact your brand
  • So how do you begin to know millions of customers in a personalized way? Give them the tools and information to manage their own experience as a partner not an enemy
  • But you have too many channels (Brian Solis’ prism)! The only way is not giving them too many reasons to complain. You need to prevent and create advocates
• From CRM to Social CRM: “CRM is no longer just a model for managing customers but one of customer engagement”. It’s the company’s programmatic response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation
• 5 simple principles of Social CRM
  • value & values are given, value & values are received (collaboration, co-creation, mutual value, transparency, authenticity, advocacy)
  • each of us is governed by self-interest (personalization, controlling own experiences)
  • we are social creatures too (communities, conversation, social marketing, data capture, customer insight)
  • for ideas to be truly exciting they have to be real (measurement, analytics, realistic objectives, success)
  • do unto other.. you know the rest (customer experience, customer company interactions)
• While Social CRM is a contemporary extension of traditional CRM not a replacement but
  • new business model where users and producers are engagement in co-creation as partners. The producer becomes the aggregator for users’ activity while the user is an advocate of the experience and, directly and by extension, the company. This is engagement.
  • Customer engagement has perfect case studies in the PC & Video games industry. They prove how giving products, software and tools to customers to help them creating their own personalized experience
  • So new customers to engage customers and listen to them with new business models to get advantage of that in sales, marketing, support
• The Pillars: sales, marketing, support new models.
• Let’s start from Sales:

• traditional CRM is driven by sales but today customers want to be involved in the process not just sold to. Customers as subject of an experience. Consumer thinking penetrates the company, even B2B companies. Customers are demanding more and there’s a change in how sales people approach customers
• Competition is no longer limited to companies of like size, smaller companies can compete, while (unstructured) web information can level the competitive intelligence playing field. The thinking of salespeople have to change from lone wolf. You have to compete also for attention and create a sales culture that involves collaboration across departments, geography and roles
• Lead generation: use of social meda to treat yourself as a subject matter expert and generate leads non traditionally in communities and forums. Don’t be too salesly, be transparent and subtle to go a long way. This takes time and affects compensation..
• Opportunity management/deal closure: capture customer attention of decision makers on the customer side through her internal influencers. Engage other employees in the same company
• Organizational knowledge/sales intelligence: improvement of communication among sales, using collaboration to make more accurate assesssments and presentations. Getting information about competitors and potential customers are giving insights to close deal (report from Aberdeen 2009 cited)
• New sales models. Integration between social media & CRM apps become mission-critical to contemporary sales process. Traditional sales tools are still part of the package
• Case study: Threadless and Karmaloop as a personal sales team of advocates. Karmaloop has a community retailing model (800k users) with a section of the site reserved to independent designers (The Kazbah). 1% of community drives 15% of Karmaloop business as a result of advocacy. You spread the word and involve others to get cash a free clothes. Threadless is a similar and more famous example

• The cluetrain manifesto as the end of the business as usual
• Marketing no longer pushes message to your face but is the first channel to get in touch with your customer
• There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. Whether the news is good or bad, the community tells everyone
• Because the model is built on trust and authenticity, the reputation of the company not the message becomes the brand
• Marketing becomes the center point for engagement of the customer
• Broken marketing logic is both product centric or company centric. Look at the work customers need to do with your product and help them with that! Be customer centric
• New marketing logic is customer engagement. Example is KLM Club China, a community about how to do business in China (the same with Club Africa)
• Customer insight is a new class of technology. The value of the data is in its use for insight, not on the data itself.
• Authenticity and trust is what matters more than even the consistency of the message
• Case study: Queensland Tourism that got 100K followers with a video

• Customer service is becoming the most important of the CRM pillars because the social customer is demanding rich, consistent experience
• The tenets: experience dominates not efficiency, first contact even more than first call, inbound/outreach, facilitation/moderation, community based, listen and learn, value in collaboration, answer queries not just provide info, measure the experience
• Most monitor & analyze all channels. Phone is not going away. Still the most used channel, even for gen Y
• The problem is (RightNow and & YouGov Plc in 2007):  Most people don’t even hope to get the issue solved. they just want to complain
• Remember customers are aggressively conversing either to you or about you. Learn from the conversation and plan the actions to respond appropriately
• Internally, customter service is a component of customer experience (Jeff Bezos)
• Providing right knowledge management internally to come up with answers to customers’ need
• Create a knowledge based and customer focused culture
• Keep the ordinary ordinary. You don’t need to delight every customer and this is 90% of the requests you’ll still get
• Intuit example: specialized call center group that answers social network/new media questions from customers. CSRs as moderator of the communities where customers are. An escalation process with a protocol associated with identifying how to respond. Most of the knowledge available to CSRs is made available directly to end customers. Barclays is another example

Social CRM by Oracle (Tara Roberts, VP Social CRM)

• Oracle is embedding social media in CRM, adding intelligence on top of it and collaboration in the context of employees work across entire line of products
• Social customers are relaying to a plethora of channels: sales rep, call center, store, online, mobile, sociali with a consistent experience, in a personalized way
• Augmenting CRM to capture social interactions and provide this information in the right context
• Listening Platform Integration: proof of concept for Siebel and Radian6 that will be productized. Also integration with CRM on Demand through Buzzient
• One of the key challenge is getting a 360 degree view of the customer across channels both traditional and social
• Oracle Social Media Manager to access, interpret and act on social media data within CRM capable of calculating the total customer lifetime based on customer interactions
• Social is refining lifetime value of the customer. Influence is a critical component that must be considered
• You can segment customers and define a strategy considering customer transactions value and customer referral value
• She gives a demo: they have data integration, records consolidation, storage of social interactions, complete history of transactions, influence for each customer (in terms social influence, amplification, network strength), integration with campaigns and special offers, top topics for each customer, social graph (visual depiction of customer’s network in a specific time frame and for a specific topic, with people who bought in her network, level of activity and reactions in social media
• Improving sales productivity with Oracle Fusion Applications (Sales Prospector, Sales Library, Sales Campaign, CRM Predictor, etc)
• To give easy access to relevant information they are providing Oracle Fusion Activity Stream through status updates for CRM objects when something notable happens
• They will be able to integrate with other Social Media Monitoring tools in future
• They are supporting different languages

Building a framework for Social CRM (Esteban Kolsky)

• A framework is a plan. We are going to talk about the pieces of this plan. Strategy, roadmap, tactics and best practices
• Strategy. No plan of operations survives the first contact with enemies

1. 1. Consider the end result
   2. Compare to your business
   3. Layout the basic components (mission, vision, goals, objectives)
   4. Setup the measurement strategy to accompany
   5. Get buy in
   6. Rinse and repeat

• Step 1, is end result is a social business. 4 steps you take to become a social business are listening, learning, maturing, optimized as a continuous process:

1. 1. Listening (understanding what social media is, what customers are saying)
   2. Learning (learn how to match customer behavior and organization goals)
   3. Maturing (embrace social media and integrate it into your infrastructure, start acting on insights)
   4. Optmized (leverage actionable insights to become a social business, a customer centric, client driven, feedback based organization)

• Evolution of customer metrics. Social CRM is all about data that has changed adding a last piece:
  • Demographics (who the customers are)
  • Operational (how efficiently the business operate)
  • Behavioral (what customers do)
  • Attitudinal (how effectively the business operates)
  • Sentimental (how customers feel about the business)
• Now we have much more data than before (20 times), unstructured data and more trustful data. Capture that data and use it to optimized
• Step 2 is comparing your current state with where you want to be in terms of people (culture, leadership), process (documentation, end to end process), governance (guidelines and methodology to deploy), measurement (strategic and flexible KPIs), technology (maturity level and architecture). You end up with a radar and a gap to fill. For each of the dimension you have 5 levels of maturity. Es. People goal is culture is social, leadership is social
• Step 3 is putting together the strategy with mission (what business needs are you trying to fulfill), vision (what does it look like at the end), goals (what hard numbers are you going to show at the end), objectives (specific items that you cannot measure but that you’ll be able to reach if the project is successful)
• Step 4 is measurement. Accounting, sales, marketing, customer support, shipping have always been separate not integrated interactions built on different systems. Each process generates an experience and collects a feedback. Today the amount of feedback has exploded with social noise. Too much to store. We need real time analytics to store insights not data.
• Customer centric feedback model still addresses customer, process, agent looking for loyalty, satisfaction, performance, effectiveness, morale but does that end-to-end. You got the same formula to assess performance of each process and channel EEX = Sum (Fn*Wn)/n where F is feedback, W is weight, n number of feedback events include
• Step 5 is getting management buy-in. Intangibles are not data to prove the case. The data you need to use is operational data
• Step 6 is learning, repeating and improving
• Social CRM Roadmap to figure out how to put in practice Social CRM. What to do when in your organization.
  • To become social you need to be social. It means that to engage externally you need an Enterprise 2.0 internally
  • For a roadmap you need to decide on functions, rules, channels, communities
  • Going through the layering rules for business functions, channel selection and prioritizing e-service channels (have a look  at http://www.diigo.com/user/absolutesubzero/%22Esteban+Kolsky%22+roadmap)
  • Align your segments and your strategy. You cannot treat every customer at the same way
  • End goal is customer loyalty

Social CRM Meets BPM (Stephen Haighton, Pegasystems)

• New value proposition among Pegasystems, Attensity and Capgemini
• Level of conversation is growing too quickly to handle it manually in order to separate threats from opportunities. How to cut through the hype and noise? How to get actionable insights and how to turn them into action
• Attensity has the ability to listen to the noise and identify the trends
• Connect social analysis, case management and bpm
• Sift through the noise and take tow kind of actions: short tail and long tail. The first is a reactive response to individual threat or opportunities. Long tail is about institutional response. From a trigger to investigate more complex trend analysis (trigger event, defined cause trigger, create case, investigation, collaboration, change in process)
• Have a look at the great post by Laurence Buchanan and the connected diagram