Connect CRM and social media

This year was the year of Social CRM.


Last year also.


And already in 2011 Bosch was selected as a social CRM pioneer with its professional tooling department ("Blau").


Peter Gentsch is no longer able to hear all this: "Most companies are still not able to respond to requests via Twitter and Facebook at high speed", says the customer of the customer relationship management Business Consulting Business Intelligence Group.


Social CRM (SCRM) has been haunted for three years by the discussions of the online scene. It is not just about profit games or gamefication customer loyalty, it is about more. With the help of social media and the much-used mobile apps, existing customers can be targeted and quickly addressed, usually faster than with the classic CRM data fax number, telephone number or e-mail address. Some young customers can hardly be reached in other ways.


In turn, the rich data from the social networks can serve to enrich the company's data treasures. In the past, large numbers of address publishers or market researchers were left to validate or enrich addresses, so at least a part of the data is now freely available on Facebook and Co. Since the users maintain their data, they are mostly up to date.


As far as the theory. In practice, the beautiful new data world is a handful of challenges that must be mastered, and of which Gentsch can report that they have so far hardly been mastered. The largest: social media has grown in many companies as a function of marketing and PR. You now marry with support or sales, most of them at best short-term. For example, HRS failed to respond to a Facebook request within 24 hours, which involved a problem with an overnight stay. The final response was actually e-mailing after a week. At this time, the issue was long gone.


Payback has developed a special structure for such cases. "Social is a special case in terms of support, here is a specially trained team, which is the interface between Facebook and telephone," explains a Payback spokesman. "When a user writes to Timeline and asks for support, he calls the same employee who responds to the posting.


As simple as it sounds in theory, SCRM is not at all. With a "Username on Facebook" field in the Oracle database, it is not done. One of the major hurdles is, for example, Facebook's own terms of business. "We do not integrate Facebook into our CRM because Facebook does not allow it," Payback says. For example, if you invite your customers' data to Facebook, and then contact a segmented Custom Audience with Facebook advertising, you will not be able to get the data enriched by interacting data from Facebook so easily.


This is why many companies are taking the detour through a Facebook app, where users are specifically asked for permission to read certain data from the profile and to address them via this channel. Bosch Blau received an innovation award for this approach in 2011. They created a tester community and asked the Facebook fans to register. This included not only personal data, but also information on industry and company size. In this way, Bosch Blau received both enriched customer profiles and an overview of the composition of the fan base. The same could also be achieved via a newsletter registration. A content-based segmentation can be justified by the fact that the contents of the newsletter are adapted to the respective target groups. Bosch makes the current - but does not want to connect to the user identity on Facebook.


Payback is much easier. All actions are focused on the topic "Collect points" in the customer loyalty system. This is only possible if the customer number is given. The willing user links the customer and Facebook data voluntarily and independently. The Payback CRM knows exactly which vouchers a customer has redeemed and where he has purchased, as long as he has presented his card. Of the 20 million advertising letters that the company shipped, eight million are uniquely put together and personalized according to shopping history. With the Facebook app "Likes Lounge" Payback would have the best chances of making such personalization also on the basis of preferences expressed on Facebook. But that does not happen. So far, there is no direct link between CRM and social media, with the exception of the SCRM team, which is concerned with support cases. However, even then, the direct reference to the normal customer service, which is accessible through the website, is often carried out. There is then a login required.


A major structural change for customer relationship management in times of social media is the fact that at least part of the dialogue is publicly broadcast. This is both an opportunity and a risk. Good customer service pays for the brand and can also increase the customer loyalty among users who are not directly affected. Conversely, this also works. In order to select the right reaction strategy from the company's point of view, one should especially pay attention to an SCRM data set, namely the viral range. If a customer has a high Klout score, then caution is called for when a problem is publicly discussed. However, if it is a marketing activity, the influencers identified as such may be a special treatment.


BMW, reports Peter Gentsch, distributed test drives with new cars already times according to the order of the Klout score. Possibly also the Lufthansa should have consulted such an aid, before the 22 November Marco Nussbaum via Twitter virtually in the air hung. Nussbaum worked professionally in Amsterdam and got no access to the LH-Lounge despite the senator status, because he traveled only with a Germanwings ticket. There was a one-hour, but ultimately fruitless dialogue with @Lufthansa_DE on Twitter. The frustrated frequent flyer airs his anger: "I'm really stinksauer, not even because I have not come to the lounge, but just as their attitude is." Nussbaum is a hotelier in Bremen and Hamburg. He has the rich Klout score of 60 and likes to blog about the topic of "Social Media in the Tourism Industry"


But Lufthansa can also be different. In the Twitterfeed there are also lots of solved problems and grateful customers, as well as on Facebook. On an arbitrarily chosen day, 20 tweets are born from a dialogue. Only three have more marketing background. In Facebook the latter is, of course, more represented, especially with many colorful pictures of aircraft, but also there is room for service lecturers. A very tricky query answered the group on both channels within ten minutes superficially and on Facebook there was then after an hour still the detailed detailed response. This is even worthy of praise to David Moth: "Lufthansa is one of the few companies to succeed in efficiently using Facebook as a service channel," says deputy editor-in-chief of Econsultancy, a UK online magazine for marketing

While in Nussbaum's case only the social media team would have had to react differently, the scope of the SocialCRM challenge only becomes so clear in a channel change. Vodafone, too, overlooked the possible potential range of an angry customer and responded to a termination conflict with a lapidary "Hello Martin, we looked at your case and I'm sorry, here we can do nothing further. The Martin, addressed there, is named after full name Martin Meyer-Gossner, has a Klout score of 62 and is known in the online marketing scene as a colorful dog, because he is constantly on conferences. Its subject: online marketing with strategy. In addition, the misfortune - in which Gossner was able to explain four cases to four different employees four times - happened in the context of a relocation, thus the optimum sales opportunity for a telecom service provider. Gossner took advantage of his special right to cancel and changed to the competition.


Rafael Schwarz would probably not have happened, at least he would have known who he was with. "Finding the right participants is our USP," emphasizes the managing director of the market researcher TRND, referring above all to participants who are particularly active in the social networks. They will be part of the product test groups that are providing TRND companies such as Samsung or Dr. Oetker.


In addition to this core business, TRND now also operates in companies and manages their communities there. In the case of the FMCG giant Procter & Gamble, TRND is now even able to take part in international action. "We are using Procter's CRM very specifically to identify those users who are suitable for such projects," explains Schwarz. In turn, TRND also returns the user participation results back to the CRM database. "This information is not used yet.


Bosch Blau, on the other hand, has taken the next step in social CRM. "In the context of our Brand Community Bob, we use systematic individual social media information for customer relationship management, for example in the target group-specific conduct of online surveys or in the identification of suitable community participants for innovation workshops, with internal cluster definitions "Says Bosch-Blau spokeswoman Stefanie Schaefer. For Bosch Blau SCRM is only worthwhile in connection with the preselection by registering for the community. An enrichment of data via Facebook promises little added value: "We can better meet CRM with Bob, because the community is more user-specific.


In fact, the development of expert communities is another essential feature of Social CRM. Telekom is currently investigating how active social media friends of the company can actually be actively involved in the support, according to the motto "Customers help customers."


It is, of course, necessary to filter the most active among the customers. And this is possible if the CRM knows its Twitter name. Possibly the Telekom has learned at a glance to the edge of the Alps. In Austria, the A1-Community is a central point of contact for customers of the Telekom-company A1, if you have problems with lines and installations. The heart of the system is a qualification hierarchy on the user side, including "Held of the month". At the push of a button, the Austrians can find and respond to topic experts who need a highly qualified feedback. The sorting extends to the terminal level. User "kohlmark" is, for example, the expert for the iPhone 5. When he got married in October, he apologized to the community for his temporary absence.


The core discipline of Social CRM in the future will be to be able to interact with external, neutral communities as well. This requires a very sophisticated, clear strategy because it is by no means clear whether a user in a forum agrees to become a fan of a brand "geoutet". Motor-Talk.de is such a neutral community and again, the social media managers would be delighted to know which of their customers is hiding behind a benefit. The connection of such forums is sometimes difficult because the historical platforms often lack the interfaces.


BMW and Audi are currently programming a connection to Motor-Talk.de. For BMW, however, there will initially be no outward-looking interaction, and long-term action will only be taken when asked. In the first step, therefore, only the topics are included in the monitoring. From the integration of the user data into the CRM one is still a good distance away. So probably 2017 will be the year of Social CRM.


Or 2017?