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The Evolving CRM Social Strategy

The Beringer team has returned from Convergence with exciting news about the future of Dynamics CRM. The million dollar message is that Social Data Insights will be huge in the coming year. Businesses were abuzz about developing a “Social Strategy” or “Social CRM”: a honed business approach that monitors and maintains an online social presence. Ariana Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, stated in her Microsoft Key Note that “Social media is the new front page.” The themes of many of the sessions that our team attended were in depth analysis of social tools and solutions that Microsoft has adopted in the last year. Within the coming months a new repertoire of features and solutions will be available for Dynamics CRM 2013 Online that tap into this Social information… the impact is that CRM Online can be used as a big data tool in the “Age of the Customer”.

It’s phenomenal to think that a decade ago the emergence of social networks would change the way that consumers interacted. Nonetheless in “The Age of the Customer” the hyper-connected consumer is here and he or she can navigate to your business and your competitors in a number of different ways. Perhaps your customer is a friend of a colleague on Facebook and happens to land on your page from a liked post. Maybe your customer is following a unique hashtag on Instagram and stumbles on your photographs. Your customer could follow your business on Twitter, monitor your RSS feeds or comment on your blog post. What if your biggest customer is one connection away on the next emerging social network, and you don’t know it? Microsoft is creating a way for you to be aware of all of these potential connections at the same time and insightfully react to a positive or negative online presence.

The first preview of this information is a free solution for Dynamics CRM 2013 Online. Inside View is an incredible tool for monitoring social media and has some powerful free features in addition to other features which can be purchased with an upgrade. Inside view allows your team to monitor media using Social Listening and Social Insights from Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, then allows you to develop a social strategy based on competitor trends. In addition it enables users to target decision makers in organizations using LinkedIn and Facebook. This tool creates a consolidated view of contacts from disparate locations online so that your organization can make connections in the warmest way possible.

Another solution for Social CRM is Parature, which provides an approach towards social customer service. Parature has created a Social monitoring tool which enables a user to monitor multiple social networks for brand sentiment and then respond to positive and negative commentary. Parature shows its users social posts by keywords and allows users to identify social media influencers (those with more followers). With Parature a CRM user can get a better understanding of what customers are engaged in by viewing threads and related tagged posts. This tool enables customer service representatives to react to social media cases in real-time, and to consolidate a ticketing system across multiple user names and networks.

The relevance of Social Media is undeniably growing and the challenge to monitoring all of these different platforms in daunting. The hyper-connected customer wants a response immediately regardless of which platform they choose to engage your organization. You were probably already aware that it was pivotal to businesses to have a social presence, the next logical question is “Does your organization have a Social CRM Strategy?”