Social CRM: Customer Strategies for the 21st Century

A new marketing concept is conquering the Internet World right now. “CRM” is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. That means a company can organize the clients relation service in a new way targeting as a goal to know more about the client’s needs and to act more to satisfy them.

For a specific company, to apply the Social CRM concept is to build first a special data base containing various information extracted from the conversations with the clients. This is a sophisticated process having as primary input data phone calls, feedback from forms, emails and letter complaints colligated with a distilled content from social websites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, blogs, message boards and even news channels on the Net or print papers. It’s a hard work to do but is only the first step. The complete algorithm is composed from four terms defining four stages: Listen, Analyze, Relate and Act, the last being decizional.

This new concept involves to accept that the value of a product or a service is best described by the clients /users and not by the marketing department and new promotional strategies based on the interaction and the feedback are envisaged. This is a necessary movement as a reaction to reality facts because today more and more people are “social customers”. They discover a new brand on a social informational channel and act considering as valuable reference the online community feedback. They know to filter spamming messages from real and useful information and they know they have the power to interact by their feedback with brands.

Finally, on Social CRM concept, between marketing, service and support and the customer the relation becomes collaborative, based on the customer experience and his needs. This concept is well explained, among others, by the author of the book “CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century”, Paul Greenberg. Future attempted contributions will define scientifically this new concept establishing methodologies.