I agree with Harish Kotadia that Social CRM represents a huge opportunity for services companies.
He has create a follow-up post on how IT services companies can prepare for the opportunity covers some of the key steps to capitialise on these opportunities. Paraphrasing slightly, his recommendation is for organisations to
1 - evaluate ways their clients can:
• integrate social media channels into websites
• integrate the new channels into their Sales, Marketing & Support processes and systems
• include social media metrics in performance dashboards and SLAs
2 - develop delivery capability to address Social CRM requirements of their clients, partnering with leading vendors in key areas of Social CRM, namely:
• Social Media Measurement & Monitoring
• Customer Community Platforms
• Social Media and Network Analytics
To this I would add the complicating factors that (1) there are a large, changing number of players in #2, with a lot of experimentation at the moment and consolidation coming soon – see for example Michael Maoz from Gartner’s comments on this and (2) there’s a big integration challenge behind point 1 - between heavily structured CRM systems that may not be very integration friendly and a whole new world of often cloud based services. This integration will need to support a lot of change as companies as experiment and evolve their Social CRM implementations.
So I would add a third step to the prescription for services companies following this path, and that would be to investigate lightweight integration technologies that can bridge these old and new worlds cost-effectively and flexibly but without creating more hard-to-maintain complexity.
3 comments:
I believe Social CRM is vital for businesses.
When i was launching my companies website Bobs Plumbers Belfast we made use of social CRM to grow our following.
Using the correct strategy is key though and it is unique to each business.
Any opportunity in the IT services provided by companies are essential. It is to maintain good services and it will help them improve.
This is really cool opportunity for managing lab hypothesis writing companies. I want to say a big thanks for taking the time and sharing with us this great post. Thanks!
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