CRM at the Speed of Light: SoCiaL CRM StRategieS, tooLS, and teChniqueS foR engaging YouR CuStoMeRS in Software

Encoder QR-Code in Software CRM at the Speed of Light: SoCiaL CRM StRategieS, tooLS, and teChniqueS foR engaging YouR CuStoMeRS

transactions, maybe even customer lifetime value or other metrics, to see how important you are to the company The number and level of complaints in the past will drive whom you speak with, how quickly it escalates, and so forth The trouble ticket is assigned and the dance begins

It starts the same way You call customer service about problems with the company s product This time, when your call is in and the complaint is generated, your customer record, the appropriate SLA level, and the potential solutions from the CSR s in-house knowledge base pop up But now, information that has been captured from the unstructured social discussions about the product and customersuggested solutions, and your conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and the Consumerist appear like lightning The content of the unstructured information is automatically analyzed to see if it s about the same subject that you re calling about, and what your past relationship to the company is Sentiment analysis is done on the spot on your external conversations to help the CSR determine how severe the issue is, what kind of complainant you are (chronic, one time, valid, whiner), whether you are an influencer, and so on Based on the analysis, the CSR knows how to treat this case aka you It might mean sending you to a supervisor right away or working with you at a level that, in a prior era, couldn t have been determined If the problem is not solvable on the phone or whatever medium it s being addressed through, when the ticket is assigned, it s not just a specialist who gets the problem to solve, but a combination (potentially) of internal and external communities Once they have used their combined intelligence to come up with an answer, then the answer is refined, enriched, brought in-house, and added to the knowledge base while your customer ticket is being punched as complete On a more disconnected scale, this is already going on Companies like Samsung and Procter and Gamble are using external social networks ( 9) to capture customer data and improve their product knowledge about everything Remember 13 s Superstah! Helpstream found that their clients who have customer communities get 17 percent of their customer service issues taken care of by the customers themselves IT issues are often solved elegantly in the thousands of independent technical threaded discussion forums without any support of the company involved at all

What isn t common is the aggregation of the unstructured external data, meaning the data extracted from the conversations going on in forums outside the company in a form that s usable by customer reps anywhere However, the means of capturing structured and unstructured data into a useful report is becoming more easily available with companies like SAP and Oracle on the mega-side to much smaller companies like open source BI provider Omniture making them available through their applications Customer insights don t come free, but they do come if you interpret the data and make smart judgments

Using the analytics tools can let you see the rich data you do have the combination of transaction data, conversational data, and richer profile information in ways that can help you make the kind of advantageous decisions that get you the value you re looking for from your customers But in order to use these tools, you have to have a strategy that s geared toward what you want from your customers Part of that has to be determined by your business imperatives revenue goals, profitability objectives, cost efficiencies, and your longer term overall business strategy, including the present and future mixture of products, services, experiences, and tools that you want to provide to the customer Another significant factor is what kind of customer you re looking to recruit Are you happy with high customer satisfaction ratings Is a loyal customer what you strive for Are you measuring that satisfaction or loyalty by the number of products that you re selling the customer I ve got a proposal for you