Simple Social CRM
Social CRM is a fairly new concept. I love Paul Greenberg’s definition of it because it allows me to evaluate vendor offerings. He says (tweetable version) that it’s “a company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”.
Any CRM system that still attempts to put customer data in a silo and generate a company-side-only view of the data is obviously a traditional CRM. Any CRM that adds Twitter functionality doesn’t necessarily become a social CRM. The system has to allow the company to respond to the customer in the space where the conversation is happening and make that conversation available elsewhere. And that’s just for starters.
In emerging markets such as the East African one, the organisations that tend to be early-adopters for concepts such as social CRM are usually the small and medium ones. They need to be scrappy and agile to survive. And they are almost always in a perpetual state of bootstrapping. The applications that are allow them to leverage the web to be effective and efficient are, for the most part, not priced for them. $10,000 a year for access to a system may as well be $10,000,000.
So what options are there for the African small and medium enterprise that has adopted a social CRM philosophy and now needs the technology to do it well? I think a mashup of open source applications can do the trick for a while until the funds are available to acquire a single vendor solution. Some middleware would also probably be necessary.
Here’s a dream technology scenario I think would be great for starters.
- Monitoring blogs, Twitter & Facebook using SwiftRiver (great tool with a great set of web services including semantic tagging of content from multiple channels and location data extraction).
- eGroupWare CRM with middleware connecting into SwiftRiver providing the latter with data for establishing veracity of sources based on the people in the database.
- Implementation of ‘talk-back’ functionality in eGroupWare via a plugin (maybe?) to allow the organisation respond/contribute to conversations.
A few things are missing, of course, like sentiment analysis in SwiftRiver (which would be really cool), consolidated analytics in eGroupware for conversations and more.
What is your dream mash-up Social CRM given a budget of $50?
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