{"id":426,"date":"2010-04-11T03:11:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-11T03:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/?p=426"},"modified":"2010-04-11T03:11:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T03:11:54","slug":"definition-of-social-crm-%e2%80%93-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/definition-of-social-crm-%e2%80%93-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Definition of Social CRM \u2013 Explained!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In one of my earlier posts<\/a>, I defined Social CRM as follows:
\n
\nSocial CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty<\/strong>. Loyalty is defined as attitude towards a brand that inclines a customer to repurchase it and\/or recommend it to others. Social CRM and Social Media are more about building trust and managing loyalty with customers than about managing relationships or transactions, which are focus areas of \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM.<\/p>\n

I received a lot of great feedback on this definition and want to elaborate further on it to answer some of the questions raised by readers of this blog.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break-down the definition to its individual components:<\/p>\n

1) Social CRM is the business strategy:<\/strong> It is not technology, tools or platform. Fundamentally, Social CRM is a business strategy. It is widely accepted by Social CRM practitioners and SMEs that Social CRM is a business strategy.<\/p>\n

2) Engaging Customers through Social Media:<\/strong> Engagement through Social Media is the most important aspect of my definition. Any CRM related activity through existing channels like the telephone, email, snail mail etc.. will continue to be part of \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM and will not be replaced by Social CRM (unless the Customer prefers to use Social Media instead of \u201ctraditional\u201d channels).<\/p>\n

Thus, Social CRM will augment \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM, but will not replace it. And for some industries like health care or financial services, emphasis will continue to be more on \u201ctraditional\u201d channels and not on Social ones for privacy related issues (who would want to tweet about their bank account or health condition). Traditional CRM channels will offer more private communication as compared to \u201cpublic\u201d Social CRM channels.<\/p>\n

Having said Social CRM will augment traditional CRM and not replace it \u2013 let me add that Social CRM will be well integrated into overall CRM platform and systems with a 360 degree view of the Customer with feeds from all major Social channels. Customer will have a choice on what channels to use and organizations will reach out to the Customer based on that choice.<\/p>\n

3) with goal of building trust and brand loyalty<\/strong>: Ultimate goal of Customer Engagement through Social Media is to build (a) Trust and (b) Brand Loyalty. I have used the word \u201cTrust\u201d before \u201cLoyalty\u201d for a reason because Social Media has introduced the \u201ctrust\u201d dimension to marketing equation.<\/p>\n

Before the Social Media age, Trust in marketing relationship was limited to face-to-face interactions (like friendly neighborhood coffee shop or grocery shop). What Social Media has done is to make it possible for any one to have the same sort of one-to-one relationship irrespective of geography. This kind of one-to-one relationships based on mutual \u201ctrust\u201d are not possible through \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM channels like phone, mail or emails.<\/p>\n

While \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM helped manage Customer Relationships on a massive scale, it did not help in building mutual trust between buyers and sellers as it is impossible to build \u201ctrust\u201d with thousands of customers over phone or mail. For building Trust, you need to know your partner well and not just be limited to mere \u201ctransactions\u201d as was the case with \u201ctraditional\u201d CRM. Social Media provides the opportunity to marketers to become \u201cpersonal\u201d, interact with thousands of customers spread across geography on one-to-one basis so that marketer and the customer get to know each other so well as to trust each other \u2013 the essence of a true relationship.<\/p>\n

Second most important goal of Social CRM is to build Customer Loyalty \u2013 the ultimate goal of any business! Some have interpreted my definition as not being \u201ccustomer focused\u201d or \u201ccustomer centric\u201d or being \u201cSocial Media Centric\u201d. This is not correct. The very fact that goal of Social CRM in my definition is to build Customer Loyalty implies that it is \u201cCustomer Centric\u201d \u2013 as you cannot build loyalty without having a customer focus.<\/p>\n

Hope this clarifies many questions that were raised regarding my definition of Social CRM. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.<\/p>\n

Link to the original post: http:\/\/hkotadia.com\/archives\/2157<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In one of my earlier posts, I defined Social CRM as follows: Social CRM is the business strategy of engaging customers through Social Media with goal of building trust and brand loyalty. Loyalty is defined as attitude towards a brand that inclines a customer to repurchase it and\/or recommend it to others. Social CRM and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[137,214],"tags":[276,275,273,274,277,215],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-dr-harishkotadia","tag-brand-loyalty","tag-building-trust","tag-business-strategy","tag-engaging-customers","tag-managing-loyalty","tag-social-crm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions\/428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thesocialcmo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}