In a series of articles Cognizant s Customer Solutions Consulting Practice explores how organizations can use innovation and integration to engage with the new breed of technology fuelled customers of the digital marketplace. This article looks at the evolution of Social CRM and what the future may hold.
Summary: Social Media has created new communication channels, technologies, devices and services. It is now realistic to consider that there will be a social component to almost every device and technology. This sets up a world filled with data and conversations flowing back and forth between people, devices and channels. Facts 4 If Facebook was a country, it would have the third largest population in the world. 4 40% of respondents clicked the like button for, or liked, a company, brand or association on Facebook to receive discounts and promotions. [Source: ExactTarget, September 2010] 4 Worldwide, internet users spend 4.6 hours using social media a week, compared to 4.4 hours using email. [Source: TNS, October 2010] 4 There are more than 60 million status updates on Facebook every day. [Source:Facebook, August 2010] 4 There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages) 4 37% of UK smartphone users have a social networking app on their phones which they use at least once a week. [Source: Initiative, June 2010] 4 Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events 4 Twitter claim to have 190 million users and that there are some 65 million tweets a day.[source: Econsultancy blog, July 2010] 4 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news blogs etc) are shared each month on Facebook. 4 An average user creates 90 pieces of content each month The rise of social Social media is changing everything for companies. You can t ignore platforms like Twitter, Blogs or Facebook anymore when it comes to your customers. Social media is pushing brand awareness and sales in more ways than typical media channels like TV and radio. Customers are busy and don t want to spend time talking to customer service or sales people. In many cases the customer can find out more about your company in 10 minutes than from some of the sales people working at the company. Between review sites, blogs and even asking for recommendations on sites like LinkedIn, customers are making buying decisions before ever crossing the virtual doorstep of the vendor. These customers need and demand to be treated differently than customers from even as short as 2 years ago. They do not want marketing fluff and buzz words thrown at them. Customers now demand information and they want answers and information in minutes rather than days. Social channels are fast becoming the mainstay in all aspects of the purchasing cycle. Social CRM is the natural evolution and fulfillment of CRM: Social CRM can be defined as a strategy whereby companies, using social media channels and platforms in conjunction with traditional CRM, aim to build a deeper and truly interactive and beneficial relationship between the customer and the company. Social CRM attempts to integrate social media channels with traditional CRM to build a truly beneficial and interactive relationship.
Social CRM in companies: With companies increasingly using social media channels to interact with customers and customers using social media at every step in the purchase cycle, customers have come to expect efficient, personalised service and companies are dealing with an exponentially increasing pool of data. This in effect means that the touch points that the customer uses to communicate and interact with a company has increased with no way of the company integrating that data into the traditional CRM Single Customer View that captures metrics to inform strategy and improve the customer experience. These trends and challenges are driving social media beyond the Marketing and PR departments the fact is, that these social media/scrm campaigns are being run by the marketing and PR departments using non-enterprise levels systems that are run in isolation. Marketing/PR departments are now looking to the CIO to provide enterprise level systems that can fulfill this. Companies are also looking to inculcate a culture that is customer focussed. The rise of Facebook as a platform. Facebook is a platform within the web that manages and supports social interaction with its own developer base and specific unique development tools. It is now moving towards a platform where users are targeted with advertisements and can also do a certain amount of real transactions within the site. This will only increase with the rise of Facebook credits and better reporting tools within Facebook. What will this lead to? The internet and online connectivity was once only available at specific locations or through slow modem based connections. Email was king and data transfer was limited. The New Social: 4Social TV: Using a second screen (phone or tablet) to supplement and comment on content being viewed in real time. 4Social shopping: Groupon 4Social devices: Phones to refrigerators, ovens... etc. 4Social systems: ERP, CRM, BPM, MDM systems all having a social element built in that will change access to and the way the technologies are used. With the arrival of broadband, mobile phones and wifi, the internet is accessible virtually anywhere and even household devices are getting connected to the internet. This has created a world where everything is connected and can communicate with each other. Social media is now used only by the individual manually on specific sites (Facebook, myspace, second life and forums) with little or no integration. The connected network along with Open ID, NFC chips, Smart phones and RFID chips now has the potential to allow devices to talk to each other. We are fast moving to a future where physical objects can be connected by a social network allowing you to share information directly on your social media profile. This will create a new breed of technologies, devices and services that will all have a social component built in. Some developments already in the pipeline: 1. Arduino : Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of imple-mentation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life ob-jects to social networks, like Twitter. It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what s fresh from their oven.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects. For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Using the data from RFID tags it is possible to look at consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits. 3. NFC chip: Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has bought the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication). 4. Optical Pattern Recognition & Augmented Reality: Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. If you have thousands of pictures of your children and family on your computer at home, it would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for you automatically by recognizing faces and objects in your photos. 5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph: OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. Companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream. 6. Natural Language Processing: Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking. What are the challenges facing companies? 1. Data location and formats: Where is this data and what format is it in? 2. Identification/ digital profile: consumers create different IDs on different channels. One way to address part of this problem is to consider: whom does company want to target? How can the company identify influencers/ evangelists? One typical fact is that evangelists will make themselves noticeable.
3. Regulations: Data protection looks like being the biggest hurdle facing social media data usage now. Also, different industries are regulated differently and the strategy needs to reflect that. 4. Training: Companies need to invest in social media training and arrive at a set of guidelines that need to reflect the personality of the brand and regulations for the specific industry. 5. Disparate data sources and repositories: need strategic / consolidated approach to create standard data definitions and central repository 6. ROI/ Monetisation of social media. Can integration to CRM systems help address this? How can global IT Service / Consulting organizations help companies address these challenges? 1. Help companies to develop integrated holistic strategies towards customer centricity 2. Identify the appropriate technology to enable enterprise level data integration and drive a consolidated customer view. 3. Help companies identify new technical processes and develop the capacity for managing them. 4. Integrate new data technologies and enable consolidation (Master Data Management) RFID chips, NFC devices. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph NLS (Natural Language Processing) The Facebook platform 5. Share strategies that break down the functional / geographic silos to encourage collaboration and embrace the increasing overlap of responsibilities across Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. 6. Explore enterprise level monitoring across multiple geographies and languages with some level of automated curation. 7. Enable closer relationships with leading SCRM technology providers 8. Deliver an analytics solution that integrates all touchpoints (CRM, Website and Social CRM) and de-velop a compelling ROI solution. 9. Enable mobile ready initiatives that support the needs of the digital marketplace customer 10. Deliver and implement end to end dynamic Business strategies that capitalize on both customer and technology developments In our next article we explore the key metrics that support the Social Media Business Case. About the Author Rajeev Talwar is a Business Consultant in Cognizant s Customer Solutions Consulting Practice. He has 10 years experience of working with blue chip clients across multi-industry sectors including FMCG and Phar-maceuticals. Subject matter expertise across Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing, SCRM, Word of Mouth marketing, Online/Digital marketing, CMS and website integration, customer and business intelligence. Cognizant s Customer Solutions Practice (CSP) is dedicated to building stronger customer relationships for our clients through business, technology and delivery expertise. We bring the advantage of domain understanding, best practices and industry templates to a critically important area of business technology. Cognizant s CSP practice has strong industry focus with considerable expertise in each of its target sectors: Banking & Financial Services; Healthcare; Information Management, Media & Entertainment; Insurance; Manufacturing & Logistics; Life Sciences; Retail & Hospitality; Technology & Communications.