Social CRM: Putting Customers First

Last night I attended Social CRM: Putting Customers First, hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Social Media Club.  It was a great event, and I'll briefly recap some of the discussion and my observations.

The panelists were first asked why Social CRM (SCRM) was relevant.  Their answers were as follows:

• Vendors need to know who their customers are out there on the social web.
• Vendors need to be able to identify customer pain points from conversations on the social web. 
• Vendors need to know what to do with these conversations on the social web.  These discussions are the center of business today; their importance cannot be understated.
• The social web grows too fast for vendor solutions to keep up.  Therefore, vendor solutions must embrace the social web, and learn how to crowdsource.  There is no way that you can scale communities and community managers that fast.
• Customers don't care about your organization structure, they just want answers and solutions.

One of the things that leaped out right away was how much of the conversation revolved around collecting customer data from the social web, opposed to traditional vendor-owned community sites.

When a customer engages a vendor (or vice versa), the vendor should be equipped with that customer's full range of relevant information—call records, emails, tweets, blog posts, facebook status updates, etc.—so that the vendor can better understand the customer's sentiment, concerns, and needs.

Of course, this is not always feasible or easy.  Identity disambiguation is a big challenge.  Carnegie Mellon University is currently researching this, and what they're finding is that identities can be determined by their unique social network imprints; an individual's social network map might be the closest thing to a social "fingerprint" that exists online.

One interesting question that came up was: Who owns the data collected from the social web?  For example: if Vendor B watches all tweets about "Vendor B", and is able to map that to some customer ID and store it in the SCRM system, does the vendor actually own that collected data?  It's a legal gray area, but it would initially appear that the vendor would in fact own that data.  Finders keepers.

Another topic that came up was incentives.  Studies have shown that monetary incentives are a terrible idea; even incentives with tangible rewards can be a bad idea because it encourages the wrong kind of participation.  You don't get the "good" data that you're after; instead you get reems of low or no-quality data submitted by members who are after a prize.

In the spirit of the recent Facebook media fiasco, there was a healthy debate over privacy.  Of course, vendors feel that they want all that information on the social web and that they're entitled to it.  Many customers feel otherwise.  There are potential abuses of such data; such as health insurance companies bumping premiums on people who announce that they ate half-a-dozen doughnuts or who post pictures of themselves smoking/drinking.  The panelists all felt that data collected from the social web should be used as a means to a) better understand their customer and b) reward their customers with responses and feedback.  There seemed to be no interest among the panelists in using that data to punish customers.

The panelists all expressed confidence about the emergence of SCRM, but acknowledged that vendors that don't have social cultures will struggle with this.  Vendors need a social strategy for employees within the organization and for engaging customers outside the organization.

The SMC folks said they were going to try to broadcast a video of this event online.  If they do, I'll be sure to post a link.

Cheers!