Customer Relationship Management covers many different platforms, but have you thought about how social media could improve your customer service, and therefore your business?
Using social media
Social media enables companies to connect with their customers on the customers’ terms, using their preferred channels of communication. To get a conversation started with a customer, you must first identify them online, by researching their social footprint. You can do this by updating your website’s contact forms and website pages to request your customers’ LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter and Facebook usernames when they get in touch.
Be a social company
There’s no point using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn if you are not going to take full advantage of their capabilities. Start using these applications to monitor customer conversations and relevant mentions of your company and products.
You should encourage your customers to connect with you, to share stories of great customer experiences, answer questions and identify customer problems that your business needs to address. You will start to understand what’s working and what’s not working, where that bad review came from and how to improve the customer experience that you provide.
You can use your social media capabilities to identify existing and new customers, respond to their questions and concerns, and generate ideas for new products or offers.
Cut costs and improve customer relations
You may be hesitant to use social media out of a fear of over-stretching staff resources or incurring high costs. In reality, social CRM solutions offer you the ability to integrate social media with your existing CRM and knowledge management systems, at no added cost.
Social CRM tools capture social media conversations that your customers are having and filter out the noise, analyse the meaning, and highlight the relevance of each interaction to you. By exploiting this capability, you are taking full advantage of the potential of social media—improving customer relations at no cost.
Increase customer loyalty
All businesses know that customers will be loyal to those they trust. By using social CRM, you can capture important information from your clients, and effectively analyse the outcomes of interactions to generate new ideas for sales and marketing. You will not only increase profits, but also understand—and so be able to deliver—what your customers want.
Businesses must adapt to change and it’s now more important than ever to listen closely to your customers. It has never been so easy to connect directly with customers and engage with them in such an in-depth way. Social CRM has been proven not just to deliver return on investment to companies, but also to enable them to learn from their customers and change for the better.
