Why You Should Make Salesforce Your Social CRM

“Social CRM” – it was a buzzword a few years ago and now it’s making a comeback. With the CRM market becoming even more competitive and diverse (from integrations to price points), we’ve noticed a lot of these hyper specific “xyz CRM” ideas surfacing. However, this Social CRM concept is actually extremely relevant and, in our opinion, a must have for larger SMBs and big brands. As of 2015, “there are more than 1.6 billion social network users worldwide with more than 64 percent of internet users accessing social media services online.” And that number is only going to grow, especially in developing countries and as new social media platforms saturate the market. This growth of users on social media leads to an increase of people talking about themselves, about what they love and, hopefully, about your company/brand. This is why “social listening tools” are important for your company to invest in. With these tools, you can set up alerts and prompts to proactively engage with your customers before, during or after problems arise. In fact, there are a lot of different social listening tools on the market right now. While it’s extremely important to have some social listening tools in place now, in the next 3-5 years, it’s going to be 100% pivotal. Enter the “Social CRM” idea. All of these social listening tools are pretty darn great, but few of them actually integrate well [if at all] with many CRMs, let alone Salesforce. Thus, making your current CRM into a Social one is a big deal. Why? Here are just a few reasons why you need a Social CRM:

1. Better customer experience: Your customer Tweets at you that they’re high-end widget that they bought at your store is broken; you get an alert in your CRM and start the return process. Within 5mins you tweet at the customer with the tracking code for the part and resolution to the problem. Boom. Forever this customer will love and buy from you. This is all tracked in the CRM and you create “engagement” reports that prove ROI. Boom. Forever the CEO loves you.
2. They save the company money: We’ve worked with companies that say, “For monitoring X, use Software #1, for reporting Z use Software #2,” and so on. This is a huge time drain and resource mis-allocation, in our humble opinion. Having everything in one Social CRM saves the company money by streamlining business and having all the contact info in a central place. The best example of this BT, who saved millions of dollars by implementing a Social CRM.
3. It empowers sales and customer service with knowledge: Since all the information is housed in one CRM, the user of the CRM gets a whole picture of the potential customer. This is huge. Connecting all the dots from emails opened to tweets sent – that’s a powerful sales tool.
4. They’re a digital analytics marketers dream: You can pull a lot of data from Social CRMs. Think words used by customers, how many social interactions it takes to sell a product, what channels are the most popular for you market and a lot more. If you have an analytics heavy guru on your team, they need a Social CRM.
5. They make life easier: Everything is in one place. You’ll need two computer screens: one for email and one for your CRM. That’s it.
6. Because smarter people than us say so: Please see article #1 and article #2 from Econsultancy.com. They’ve done a darn good job of outlining the importance of Social CRMs.

Here are some interesting updates… While we had mentioned about the new hype on social studio, Salesforce will now host the entire marketing family under Marketing Cloud. Basically, Marketing Cloud will have the channel apps for Email, Mobile, Social, Advertising and the Web called Studios, and their cross-channel platform services are called Builders. The builders are platform services for content, creating highly personalized experience for customers. Audience builder helps you to manage and build multidimensional audience segmentation. You can understand customer behavior through Analytics builder. And the best of feature of all is the journey builder where you build a 1-1 journey with your customers in turning their experiences richer. There are, of course, many Social CRMs available on the market that claim to have great social listening features and to do all the above. Sadly, few of them actually integrate well [if at all] with Salesforce. And one of the biggest time/resource wastes is having multiple software systems that your employees have to use. If you have Salesforce, you don’t want or need another CRM tool. At this point, you are probably thinking, “Jinkies – Social listening tools sure are important. And Salesforce is my best CRM pal. Golly, it would be great to marry the two.” Well, you can! Seeing the Social CRM trend, Salesforce scooped up Radian 6 and created the “Social Studio” designed just for this. This Social CRM upgrade lets you listen to customers, react in real-time and stay ahead of the social conversations. Basically, it fulfills reasons #1-#6 above. You could piece-meal other Social CRM ideas, but they won’t be as powerful as this. In the next few weeks, we’ll write an article about the Social CRM capabilities for the Salesforce Social Studio. Stay tuned for that. And there you have it – you need a Social CRM and the best tool for this is the Social Studio from Salesforce. We’ve implemented a lot of social ideas for Salesforce. We’d love to talk with you more. Please contact us to start a conversation with our Salesforce Consultants.