Creating Better Harmony With Social CRM
Customers are having authentic and meaningful conversations with each other, in spite of the ambient noise and the ever increasing signal to noise ratio. Staff are having authentic and meaningful conversations with each other too via the intranet, instant messaging and post-it notes. Customers are staff and staff are customers. The wall that separated them is subverted by the click of the mouse.
So why not make great music together? Great transaction music! Transactions are still a big part of the end game for business. Tons of Twitter followers or Facebook fans and no conversions means the business won’t be around much longer. If customers and socially engaged staff are in sync, wouldn’t the transaction be a more enjoyable experience for both? Isn’t that what social CRM should enable the company to do?
I figure that CRM programs are about establishing and nurturing relationships with customers. They are not about command and control. So obviously a good CRM program starts with people. Processes, technology, data and everything else follow. But it’s not just customer people we should be paying attention to, it’s internal people too. If the CRM program is unfriendly to the internal people, it won’t work because the internal people won’t play nice with the customer people. Without the software, does your business have a customer relationship management program? A program that the staff know about and engage with. Can your business be social with customers and anti-social with staff? If your business doesn’t have a customer relationship management program outside of the software tool, are you ready for social CRM? If your ‘socialness’ is only externally facing are you ready for social CRM?
I think not.
The kind of great music I am talking about is not possible without harmony because you have more than one part playing. The company, when singing alone, is making melody. The customer, when singing alone, is making melody. However, the customer has you outnumbered. They don’t need to change their tune, you do. If you don’t, your messaging remains off-key, unauthentic and hollow. The result is low transactions. Those low transactions get lower when the internal people are anti-social with your social customer. It’s downhill from there.
A core part of relationships is listening to the other party and finding their beat and the key they are singing on. The market is already talking about what it wants, how it wants it and what it doesn’t like about what you are doing. Listening to them is not “Marketing’s” job. Your customers talk to sales, finance, support, your front office staff and even Security. It’s everyone’s job to listen and it’s everyone’s job to play an active and honest part in the conversation.
So here are three things we can do to make great transaction music possible.
- Empower your staff with the policies and tools to be social internally. Wikis, blogs, microblogs, access to external social networks and social media all work in tandem to empower your staff as long as the governance of it all is clear. Where proper governance is missing, a tower of Babel is built. And we all know how that worked out.
- Nurture a human-friendly culture. Organizational culture is different from organization to organization. But is your culture human-friendly. A culture that makes it difficult to achieve objectives turns your business into a 9 to 5 obstacle race. Frustrated and depressed staff aren’t very happy or social.
- Make listening important. Your staff talk openly with each other. Do you listen and respond? Your staff will tell you what the customer hates if you will listen. Are you listening to what your customers are saying? Are you being honest and trustworthy in your response? Customers see right through the gimmicks. Gimmicks don’t work when trying to build relationships. Ask any married man, they’ll back me up on that.
What’s your take?
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