SOCIAL CRM: THE NEW FRONTIER OF MARKETING, SALES AND SERVICE.

The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered how companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider. Clearly, this shift presents both opportunities and risks to companies.

To derive greater value from these new communication channels, companies should adopt a “social CRM” strategy. Such a strategy will help them touch customers at many more points and much earlier in the buying process, often at lower cost than that of more traditional marketing, sales and customer service channels.

To do so, companies should embrace the social media channels being used by their customers; identify and engage with the “superusers” who supply product expertise to other customers; and harness the power of advanced analytics to provide broad insights on customer needs, wants and behaviors. Perhaps most importantly, companies must remember that social media and Web 2.0 will not work for all customer needs and segments, even though they can significantly alter the role played by more traditional contact channels.

In short, social CRM presents many opportunities to build a distinctive capability that can serve as a building block of high performance: a method to potentially connect more tightly with customers at lower cost and in a way that provides a real differentiation from competitors.

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Accenture

March 2010