Twitter - just a temporary hype?

I just read a post from Jennifer Leggio talking about twitter presence and overall social media strategy of corporations. And I have to agree that twitter has a somewhat limited value in a CRM 2.0 strategy as well.

The Comcast example might not be the blueprint for followers.
On one hand the twitter user numbers still seem to be growing fast, on the other hand I see lot of the communication moving to other platforms like Facebook. User numbers not necessarily visualize the amount of valuable information that is transmitted through such a platform.

My personal feeling is that the future will be a mashup of several social networks. Users will be looking for applications that combine the data streams seamless. I am using TweetDeck which has Facebook and MySpace connectivity already.

The idea of short messages enriched with pictures, location information and links to other sites might stay, but will twitter be around in a couple of years? Who knows…

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Twitter,Social Media

Are Facebook and Twitter just new channels?

Someone could argue that the new Web 2.0 platforms like Facebook, Twitter and co. are just additional channels that have to be supported by the existing CRM suite.

Dealing with these platforms as additional channels will not bring the benefit they could provide, though. Accepting that the rise of the Web 2.0 is dramatically changing the consumers’ behavior, leads to a simple conclusion – Businesses need to change the way they deal with the ‘new customers’ as well!

This means that Facebook and Twitter are only the spearhead of what will come in the near future. They are indeed channels that need to be dealt with (the more agile, the better) BUT the way corporations make use of them needs to change as well. The whole corporate culture needs to change!
Adapting to the new consumer behavioral patterns leads us to what I call a CRM 2.0 strategy (any other term will do as well as long as it has the same meaning and results).

New questions must be asked:

• How can I have a meaningful conversation with my customers?
• How can I engage customers to take an active part in this conversation?
• How can I leverage the knowledge and willingness of customers?
• Does my corporate culture allow meaningful conversations (what changes are required)?
• Do I know the little aches and pains of my customers? Are they dealt with?
• Who are my customers and where / whom do the talk about products and services?

In the very end, this might be the end of the transactions based CRM (not counting any order management here…) towards a more dynamic, flexible, agile and customer centric environment that acknowledges that customers are persons – usually – that make the buying decisions often based on trust and relationships.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Facebook,Twitter,Channels,Meaningful Conversations

Call Center –> Contact Center –> Enterprise 2.0

While in the 90s Customer Support predominantly happened on the phone, with the rise of eCommerce new channels were added and the “Call Center” was renamed to “Contact Center”. Unfortunately some of the additional channels (other than Email) like online chat or instant messaging (IM) did not get very popular due to technical limitations in the pre-Web 2.0 era and the missing experience of customers with this kind of communication.

In the current economic climate the agent costs are being reduced by the use of tools like knowledge management or customer self service. RightNow is a CRM tool focusing on this area and  showing some popularity when the focus is short- and mid-term savings (without losing customer satisfaction).

With the rise of Web 2.0, there are additional channels that need to be supported like blogs, micro-blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, SEO, etc. Within a CRM 2.0 strategy, the increased transparency and the concept of an Enterprise 2.0 helps reducing the costs even further by allowing direct contact into the company (even right to the experts) and establishing conversations that not only reduce the need for specialized support agent, but also help building the self service capabilities and knowledge management repository. SalesForce.com is recently growing the number of partners to leverage these new channels for its new customer support strategy.

In addition to the savings, the conversations help analyzing the customer requirements and aligning the product development with the customer needs. Involving customers also helps creating advocates - opening additional (viral~) marketing channels.

It has to be kept in mind, though, that these new channels are mostly targeted towards a tech-savvy and younger audience that is familiar with the new technologies. It would be a bad idea to completely shut down telephone support or tele-sales, even if the target group is the generation Y and techies.

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0,Contact Center,Enterprise 2.0

Cross-Channel Integration

If you - as a company - want to create a truly positive customer experience, there will be no way around the integration of all the different contact channels.
This was already a hot topic in the CRM 1.0 days (and still is) and led to terms like the "360 degree view on a customer". But having all the information available at the agents fingertips is not everything needed to create an experience.
In addition to the collection of data and making it available in the front office, the analytical side of CRM needs to take all this data into consideration as well when it comes to real time offering suggestions or campaign management. Additionally the customer wants to get the same experience independent on the channel he is using. There should be no difference between an email, a letter or a phone call to a business.
I am one of the typical "1st try an email..." type of guys. And guess what, I am getting really upset when it takes 3 weeks to answer my email but the agent on the phone can resolve the issue within 10 secs. Does it also take three weeks to answer a mail - or are they considered more important?

It looks like the processes in a CRM 2.0 environment need to change dramatically from the current ones, that seem to have strong preferences on certain channels (while ignoring some others completely).

The following questions need to be considered in a CRM 2.0 implementation:

• What channels do I need to serve?
• What are the costs involved (opening new channels will disburden others)?
• How can I make sure the experience is the same across channels?
• What channels do my customers prefer (each customer individual)?

Technorati Tags: CRM 2.0, contact channels,