A few weeks ago I wrote about the Social CRM Process (read this first before moving on) which received quite a lot of attention and feedback from the online community. The process that I have created has since evolved to incorporate some additional ideas and elements which were originally missing. I incorporated some feedback from the online community and specifically from my colleagues such as Mitch Lieberman and Esteban Kolsky. If you recall, the original social CRM process looked like this:
I thought this was a great starting point (which it was) but there were a few key things missing here. Take a moment and see if you can figure it out before moving on.
I think the biggest issue with the above process diagram is that it makes the assumption that social CRM is all about social media, which is absolutely false.
Read my recap of Paul Greenberg’s Social CRM keynote to see how he helped create a SCRM strategy without using any type of social media/networks. Social CRM is first and foremost a strategy; the technology piece always plays second fiddle. The next addition in the process is the CRM system, which actually needs to come into play in two parts (not one as seen above) of the process; once before the information gets to the human making the decision and then again after the response has been sent out. Finally, the addition of “business rules” to help govern and dictate the response was also missing. So taking all of these things into consideration (with a few other minor tweaks), the new social CRM process looks like this:
Let’s walk through this diagram quickly:
Here we can see that the customer can either exist online OR OFFLINE and once the “issue” is present it goes through the CRM system where the person responsible for making the decision gets valuable information about the customer BEFORE making any type of decision. Some of the information (thanks to Mitch Lieberman) included is:
- customer profile (online/offline)
- previous interactions
- customer history
- customer transactions
- customer preferences
- and other customer data
Once the employee has this information, he/she is now able to follow the business rules, which will dictate how the response is crafted and then sent out. Once the response is sent out (either macro or micro) the information is then once again fed back into the CRM system to capture the interaction and thus closing the CRM loop. The response is then fed back out into the community (or individual) and the process can continue.
I wanted to take this one step further and decided to introduce what I believe is going to be a crucial element of social CRM strategies in the future, the SCRM team. I think the “social media team” is going to become irrelevant as companies realize that the value of these strategies and technologies is not in promoting, selling, or building a network, but in collaborating with the customer and improving the overall experience. The people responsible for executing these strategies are not going to be people that understand social media but people that understand social media, the customer experience, CRM (among other things), and how this all fits together (I’ll have a separate post on this). See below:
Keep in mind that in order for this to work, social media/monitoring tools in the space are going to have to improve their semantic analysis and will need to be able to distinguish between various “issues” that exist. For example the difference between a marketing issue and a support issue. The goal here is to automatically route issues to the proper person in the proper team instead of having one person act as the funnel. Is this going to be possible in the future? Sure, I think so, but I don’t think we are there yet (read our partner Biz 360s post on sentiment analysis via Mashable).
There are other changes and additions that can be made to the Social CRM Process but Mitch Lieberman hit the nail on the head when he said:
“…anyone should be able to take his diagram and use it as a baseline model (not as a best practice) and move the arrows, fill in the boxes and make it work for your business.”
Of course, this is easier said than done (you can hire me and my company for that) but the idea is that companies need to map out their own process which will probably require some form of an assessment to see what is your company’s current state. Once the new Chess Media Group site launches, we will incorporate our new list of SCRM services which will include (most likely) an assessment and process mapping phase.
There is one other issue with the diagram above. Can you figure it out?
Look at where everything starts, everything starts with the community and then moves to the organization. This puts the organization into a reactive role (something Brent Leary was keen on pointing out when I spoke with him). What happens when it’s the company that initiates the conversation and not the community? That’s a pro-active model and requires a separate process map. I will address this and create a visual map for it in the future.
Thoughts, ideas, comments? What do you think about the new process flow and thanks for your feedback!
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