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Making Your Social CRM Processes More Efficient
By Jim Berkowitz
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-01-11
Here are several excerpts from an article by David Worthington about a new Forrester Research report, ‘Social CRM' changing how processes are developed:
Social media has become the new soapbox, and public conversations about companies and products have changed how customer relationship management systems and business processes should be developed, according to a Forrester Research report published on Tuesday.
The report, entitled "Social CRM Goes Mainstream," suggests that CRM solutions should now include technologies that support business processes for acquiring, retaining, targeting, understanding and collaborating socially with customers. Business process professionals should design their future plans around that vision, it says.
Forrester believes that the social Web is forcing business process professionals to expand their thinking beyond the traditional two-way channel of communication between enterprise and customers to also include the interactions that customers have among themselves.
"CRM is evolving from its traditional focus on optimizing customer-facing transactional processes to include the strategies and technologies to develop collaborative and social connections with customers, suppliers, and even competitors," it states.
Forrester vice president and principal analyst William Band and senior analyst Natalie Petouhoff contributed to the report.
The social trend has not gone unnoticed by CRM solutions makers, both new and old.
New York-based startup Bantam Live is building its CRM platform around social CRM, and Salesforce has introduced a new capability called Chatter to its subscribers.
Social CRM was initially adopted by large organizations such as Comcast and Zappos on the customer support side, but also gives businesses the ability to listen and respond to the voice of the customer, said Bantam CEO John Rourke. That ability has shifted social CRM back to where CRM started: sales and marketing, he said.
Salesforce announced the integration of social CRM into its platform at the Dreamforce Global Gathering 2009 in December. Chatter is a layer of functionality that infuses social information into its existing application, said Salesforce's director of platform research Peter Coffee.
"The world's leading experts on your product or service probably doesn't work for you anymore," he said. "A customer has been forced by demands on their job to find a way to stretch your product or service in ways you may never have anticipated…Innovation is not limited to the producer of a product or service, but becomes a democratized process in which entire communities participate directly."
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About the Author:
Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions.
Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives.
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