Shaping Up Brand Strategy with Social CRM

Introduction to Social CRM

It must be a dream of any customer-centric company to have a magic crystal ball that helps predict the changes in customer behavior and expectations. In reality, it is quite a challenge to predict where, when, and how these changes are going to take place.

Sales, marketing, and customer service are the subject areas where businesses witness continuous innovation in order to get a bigger piece of the pie.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has evolved from on-premise customer driven solution and live-chat system to cloud-based on-demand software with social media, analytics, and mobile integration. By embracing social media as an integral part of the system, CRM has now become smarter than ever. It helps businesses to stay in touch with their customers and prospects by following them, listening to their conversations over social media, and engaging with them in real-time without leaving the CRM. This fusion of CRM with social media is known as “Social CRM”.

Perhaps, Social CRM is indeed a magic crystal ball of the 21st century that businesses have been dreaming about. This next-generation CRM involves active participation in social media conversations from social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc. in an effort to convert those leads into sales.

Irrespective of the business scale, companies are luring customers through human connections. Just like personal relationships, business people today still highly appreciate intimate and real connections. It is social media that holds the credit for strengthening those values as it plays a crucial role in forming opinions about companies and people we are engaging with. People like to interact with real people—whom they know and can trust. Not surprising why Social CRM is a game-changer. It is crowned as a new way of customer engagement.

The answer to why businesses should consider integrating CRM with social media is endless. Let’s have a glimpse into the benefits of social CRM integration.

Powerful Weapon to Nurture Leads & Maximize Conversion

Thanks to the development of CRM for making sales teams across the world become highly productive and efficient. Through CRM, salespeople can access records of sales leads, follow up tasks, schedule meetings and send out quotes all in one place. Popular CRM platforms are highly interoperable with other enterprise systems such as Voice over IP and marketing automation tools. However, the most powerful interoperability of CRM, in fact, lies in its integration with social media.

Generating leads is only the first part of the sales funnel. The real success of a sales team comes from both lead generation and lead management. The goal is to do everything in order to nurture each lead in order to get the highest number of sales possible.

By plugging social capabilities into CRM, salespeople are right at the heart of social conversations and social mentions. They can easily connect with prospects and build a better relationships through a seamless communication experience.

Businesses are working hard to build a strong sales team to communicate with their contacts, existing customers, and leads; however, the next question is how efficient they are in keeping track of all the records. It is a daunting task for salespeople to keep track of each and every conversation on their own. However, social media integration through customized social CRM can ease this task as it allows each account to be linked to all interactions including conversations coming from tweets, emails, or other social media.

Tackle Customer Sentiments

We have seen how ratings and reviews are so important to the restaurant business. Restaurants have to stay up-to-date on both online and offline reviews from their customers to ensure that they serve delicious foods and provide the best dining experience. Nowadays, all other businesses out there must keep an eye on sentiments shared on social media about their products and services too.