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Emtec Adviser - Social CRM Growing Rapidly

Social CRM Growing Rapidly

Body textAs awareness and use of social networks increases, customer service executives and planners are feeling increasing pressure from corporate executives to articulate a strategy for how this new communication channel will be harnessed so that they don't get left behind. For many organizations, such a strategy will revolve around social customer relationship management (CRM).

Social CRM – sometimes referred to as CRM 2.0 – involves the integration of social media and social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube into traditional CRM platforms. Such integration is increasingly important in an age when customers’ purchase decisions are just as likely to be influenced by the real-world experiences of online contacts than by a company’s marketing and advertising efforts.

“For many companies, brand building has been synonymous with rigid control over messaging, but in the age of the social customer, this is no longer desirable even if it were possible,” said Bruno Teuber, Vice President & GM EMEA, Lithium Technologies.

Most deployments of social CRM are taking place in corporate marketing departments as an exercise in brand management, such as maintaining a presence on Facebook or Twitter. However, savvy customers are learning that the employees that manage interactions across these channels can also provide customer service functions — sometimes with much-faster responsiveness than that provided over formal contact center channels. As customer awareness and use of social CRM for marketing as a back door to customer service increases, it is expected to progress from an exception-handling situation to a process that needs to be standardized to scale to broader use.

Gartner, Inc., projects that 30 percent of leading companies will extend the goals of their online community activities over the next two years to include the design of enhanced service processes. The firms says social CRM for customer service has the potential to bring new and dynamic methods for improving customer service, and in doing so is creating opportunities for new and existing providers in the customer service and contact center infrastructure markets.

This is why Gartner expects the worldwide market for social CRM to reach more than $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010 and a projected $820 million in 2011.

"In 2010, only 5 percent of organizations took advantage of social/collaborative customer action to improve service processes; however, customer demand and heightened business awareness is making this a top issue among customer service managers," said Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner. "At current trajectories, within five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center."