Social CRM Best Practices

a program launch framework

Value Proposition for Social CRM

Insights for Future Initiatives (Social Insights)

Insights For Existing Initiatives

(Dashboard ―Lenses‖)

Social CRM

(Auto Tagging, Auto Responding, & Auto Routing)

Customer Care Efficiency

(Integration to Customer Care)

• Improved Customer Satisfaction

• New Product Launch - Revenue

• Marketing Campaign Effectiveness

• Improved Lead Generation and Conversion Rates

• Customer Retention

• Brand Awareness & Value

• Advertising Equivalency

• Reduced Labor costs

• Speed to Resolution

• Mitigated Risk

• E-mail and phone call deflection

• Lower Average Handling Time

• Increasing First Call Resolution

ROI for Social CRM

Gross Margin can be improved by $268,257 in the first year alone of the social CRM project.

Return on Investment in the two years of the project is greater than 1.8 times.

IRR at the end of year 1 is 570%, and at the end of year 2 is 619%.

$(100,000)

$(50,000)

$-

$50,000

$100,000

$150,000

$200,000

$250,000

$300,000

Q1 Q3 Q3 Q4

Monthly Project

Investment

Monthly Efficiency

Benefit

Cumulative Payback

Business Value

1. Gains from Consumer Insights◦ Reducing traditional marketing research efforts

like surveys and focus groups to enable quicker delivery of results

◦ Gathering more frequent and better intelligence through scalability of a social monitoring solution

◦ Leveraging real-time insights to accelerate product development, messaging, and launch

2. Gains form Brand Protection◦ What percentage of revenue per week would

your company lose if your brand were attacked unfairly in the marketplace?

◦ How many weeks would your brand be impacted?

◦ How quickly could you mitigate the problem with social engagement and monitoring?

◦ What would it cost your company to recover from an unforeseen attack on your brand?

3. Gains from Lead Generation◦ Lower cost of lead acquisition through less

expensive social channels

◦ Larger marketing conversion rates

◦ Shorter sales cycles due to better and faster informed buyers

Value for Marketing & PR

1. Improve the effectiveness of your campaigns and activities

◦ Understand and quantify buzz around your product launches and campaigns

◦ Correct the course of campaigns that aren’t working, adjust your strategy

◦ Improve messaging and SEO

◦ Identify best sources, prioritize your investments

2. Acquire additional customers at a lower cost

◦ Identify customer and prospect communities

◦ Join the conversation

◦ Identify and engage influencers

◦ Improve quality and relevance of sales tools

◦ Capture and share intelligence about your customers and prospects

Value for Marketing & PR

3. Increase product awareness

◦ Understand the features and benefits that drive interest, apply to campaigns and product positioning

◦ Gain insights for targeting specific groups and segments

4. Increase market share and leap-frog the competition

◦ Monitor top competitors at a fraction of the cost ofmarket research

◦ Understand what customers like/dislike about competitors

◦ Identify gaps in the marketplace expressed by consumers

◦ Identify and capitalize on emerging trends

5. Reduce time and costs involved in new product launches

◦ Identify new product opportunities

◦ Create, monitor and measure online focus groups

◦ Reduce campaign testing costs and improvement cycles

Value for Marketing & PR

6. Increase customer retention

◦ Understand and share specific customers’ needs and interests

◦ Identify and engage brand advocates

◦ Respond proactively, generate good will

◦ Identify and address threats to customer relationships

7. Strengthen and protect your brand equity

◦ Identify emerging problems, resolve before they go viral

◦ Improve brand positioning by understanding brand strengths and weaknesses

◦ Adjust your actions as you see howsentiment around your brand changes

Value for Customer Care & Support

1. Increase awareness of emerging issues◦ Monitor millions of websites in real-time for

relevant posts

◦ Identify urgent issues and filter out the noise

without requiring human intervention

◦ Quickly identify negative sentiment and

adverse events

◦ Automatically alert key individuals

2. Improve speed and quality of response◦ Automatically route and escalate interactions

based on your rules, in under a minute

◦ Equip team members to collaborate

◦ Respond through multiple tools

◦ Integrate with multiple CRM and contact center solutions, simplifying response and tracking

◦ Capture detailed records, minimizing duplicate, inconsistent, and conflicting responses

Value for Customer Care & Support

3. Improve customer satisfaction and engagement◦ Quickly identify where and when you’re

needed

◦ Engage with customers via their preferred channel

◦ Promote goodwill through timely assistance

◦ Leverage social profiles to enable more personalized service

◦ Identify and engage with your advocates, showing your appreciation

4. Gain actionable service and support insights◦ Gain access to thousands of customers and

prospects who won’t typically contact you

◦ Track the impact of your actions

◦ Understand the quality issues that impact satisfaction and buying decisions

◦ Understand what customers like, dislike and love about your company

Value for Product Management and R&D

1. Improve the quality and volume of consumer and customer insights◦ Increase the pace of innovation with a constant

stream of ideas and feedback

2. Identify new product opportunities and markets◦ Identify emerging trends as a basis for future

development

◦ Gather detailed requirements in the detailed conversations

◦ Prioritize your efforts by viewing volume and velocity of conversations

3. Decrease time-to-market for new products and services◦ Gain a high volume of input at a low cost and

short period of time

◦ Expedite prototyping and demo tests

4. Improve the success of new product launches◦ Increase your precision in meeting consumer

and market demand

◦ Provide better product documentation to marketing and sales

Value for Sales

1. Increase customer acquisition◦ Identify where customers and prospects

interact online

◦ Catch leads in ―mid-air‖ as needs are expressed around your products and services

◦ Build targeted relationships by joining the conversation at the right time with the right message

◦ Identify and engage the most relevant influencers

◦ Increase positive word of mouth and generate referrals through increased engagement

2. Improve sales effectiveness◦ Leverage real-time feeds to identify and

respond to sales triggers

◦ Eliminate time spent manually searching for relevant conversations

◦ Improve your ability to resonate with your audience by viewing their words and phrases

◦ Know which features and benefits matter most to your audience

Value for Sales

3. Improve competitive intelligence◦ See how conversation, sentiment, velocity

and topics differ between you and your competitors

◦ Find the silver bullets in the conversation details

◦ Understand competitive strengths and weaknesses

◦ Get insight into new and planned product offerings and pricing

4. Improve customer retention◦ Understand and address your shortcomings

◦ Identify and engage with your advocates online

◦ Understand your customers’ needs by viewing their real-time feeds

◦ Leverage social profiles to provide more personalized service, improved responsiveness and increase satisfaction

Social CRM ROI

Customer Trends Driving Social

1. 75% of online consumers (> 1.5billion) visited a Blog or Social Network site in 2010

2. Over 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations

3. Nearly 75% of consumers would rather resolve issues online versus traditional methods

4. Publicly posted feedback to social posts were proved to be positive

5. The integration of Social CRM into the customer service function drives numerous benefits:

◦ Ability to proactively service customers, enhance their experiences and strengthen their opinions of your brand to inspire positive word of mouth.

◦ Lever existing processes and systems.

◦ Representatives are empowered with the right tools and knowledge to effectively engage an individual—or a group—at the right time.

1. Maximize human resources

2. Cut costs

3. Strengthen customer relationships to inspire advocacy

Customer TrendsDriving Social

Customer Care Social Ownership

1. Consistent cross-channel experience

◦ Social media, phone, e-mail, and online chat

◦ Centralized feedback and 360 degree voice of the customer capture and reporting

2. Coordinated responses◦ Consistency in messaging and

handling

◦ Determination of contacts to escalation

Align with Enterprise Initiatives

1. Define reason for effort

Prioritize by:

Business Benefit

Organizational Readiness

Technical Complexity

1. Social Customer Insights: The 5M’s

Marketing

2. Social Marketing Insights

3. Rapid Social Marketing Response

Social Campaign Tracking

Social Event Management

Social Pull-Through Marketing

Sales

7. Social Sales Insights

8. Rapid Social Sales Response

9. Proactive Social Lead Generation

10. Direct & Distributes Social

Commerce

11. Dynamic Social Supply Allocation

Service/Support

12. Social Support Insights

13. Rapid Social Responses

14. Peer-To-Peer Unpaid Armies

Innovation

15. Innovation Insights

16. Crowd sourced R&D

Collaboration

17. Collaboration

Insights

18. Enterprise Collaboration

19. Extended Collaboration

Customer Experience

20. Seamless Customer Experience

21. VIP Experience

22. Mobile-On-Mobile Location

Source: Altimeter Group

Define a Few Use Case Scenarios

1. Scenario

2. Stakeholders

3. Topics

4. Reports

5. Integrating

6. Value

Align with Enterprise Initiatives

1. Capture Insights

2. Track value to the business

3. Utilize stakeholder interviews

◦ Ask questions to quantify value to the business

4. Maintain selectivity in what you respond to

Align with Enterprise Initiatives

Stakeholder Insights

1. Focus on stakeholder topics

2. Train on their dashboard ―lens‖

3. Track insights

Stakeholder Insights

1. Focus on Company forums – i.e. Facebook & Twitter

2. Industry Specific Community Sites– i.e. Blogs, review sites, aggregators

Too much focus on popular sites – too narrowMost companies respond to a few posts – labor

constraint

Agents spend too much time looking for actionable posts – Automate through business rules

Monitor

* Word of Mouth

Respond

* Social Network Wall/Page

Engage

* Identifying opportunities

Industry Forums

Community Sites

Social Networks

Staffing

1. Call center agents are not always the best social CSR

2. Hire for social skills

3. Have candidates respond to sample social posts as part of the interviewing process

◦ Social writing skills -Personality

◦ Value added information

4. Use social agent positions as career development opportunities

Quality Assurance

1. QA – review agent responses and social responses to the agent responses

2. Monitor often!◦ Monthly, weekly, and daily

3. Social QA is an extension of existing protocols already in place

Social Media Policy

1. Who can respond

2. Legal issues◦ Information for internal

use only◦ Promotion need frequent ◦ Customer account

privacy

3. Provide CSRs access to approved company knowledge management system

◦ Approved messaging ,with out scripts

◦ Clarify social misinformation

Click here for examples

Define Rules of Engagement

1. Many organizations provide their CSRs with documentation to ensure that they follow the appropriate processes when communicating with customers

* Who can respond

* Process maps for types of complaints

Online Conduct

1. Purpose

2. Standards of conduct

3. Disclosure regulation

4. Trademark and Intellectual property

5. Confidentiality

6. Press inquiries

7. 3rd party paid endorsements

Involve Legal

1. Seek corporate counsel prior to launch

2. Federal Mandate

3. Customer privacy

4. Data security

5. Escalation channeling (off-line) & messaging

Metrics

Sample Metrics Include:

1. Number of followers / Interactions

2. Number of customer communications deflected from phone/e-mail to social media

3. Rate of response4. Issue resolution rate (based on

platform)5. Customers moved from social

to direct 6. Utilize existing customer care

metrics as appropriate7. Customer retention (based on

platform)

Business Rules to Route

1. Auto respond

2. Escalation (Leal, risk management, safety, etc.)

◦ Utilize existing customer care escalation standards

3. Faster response time - <15 min.

4. Lowers labor costs –◦ Less manual monitoring

◦ Auto tagging

5. Scalability

Integration to CRM

1. Customer DNA insight

2. Lever existing customer care operation, processes, and swim lanes

3. Lever agents experienced with complex issues and escalations

4. Integrate into CRM database for holistic customer reporting

Using Auto Responses

1. Good for immediate response during off hours

2. Utilize personalized auto responses

3. Social CSRs are increasingly trusted to represent the organization without scripted messaging

4. Unified social messaging is needed for consistency

Public Response or Direct Message

1. Posting a public answer is the most valuable response

2. Take private if you suspect a needed escalation – i.e. legal, risk management, customer privacy

3. Blocking abusive followers can make a consumer look bad online

Improvement

1. Think big…. Start small

2. Utilize Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA)

3. Iterative, Agile approach◦ Understand, adopt, adapt,

execute

4. Iterative approach◦ Understand, adopt, adapt,

execute

Contact Us

Contact Information:

David WeaverIndustry Consultant

davwea@astutesolutions.comOffice: (614) 508-6118Mobile: (614) 214-8820

www.astutesolutions.com

Contact Us

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Sources

Information and research gathered to produce this document came from the following sources:

AT&T

Best Buy

Campbell Soup

Coca-Cola

Comcast

Crayola

drugstore.com

E&J Gallo Wineries

Ford

Frito-Lay

General Mills

General Motors

HHgregg

Kraft Foods

MARS

Omaha Steaks

Quicken Loans

Scott’s

Unilever