How Social CRM Will Improve Your Customer Engagement

With the advent of technological advancement, it has revolutionized the way customer does business with us. It is no longer about the price or product but about the customer experience. It has given rise to an entirely new breed of what we call ‘socially engaged customers.

To be able to convert visitors into leads, you need to deliver a great experience by going beyond their expectations. You know how social media has transformed the business landscape. It has offered new channels of discovery and enabled brands to connect to their customers in a more personal way.

During this time of great evolution, social CRM was born out of the integration of social media and traditional customer relationship management (CRM). Social CRM is an excellent tool for brands that want to utilize the full potential of interacting with their customers and engaging with them.

The Evolution of Social CRM

You can improve customers’ experience by listening to them. What social CRM does is that it makes the whole customer engagement process a two-way street. Consumers become active participants in the story of a brand, and they see how the brand values their customers.

It puts a new frontier on customer relationship management. It focuses on how to use social media to enhance customer engagement. Moreover, it streamlines data from multiple channels to provide businesses with holistic insights on the customers’ activities for optimum outcomes.

Building Strategy Using Social CRM to Enhance Customer Engagement

The first step to increasing your customer loyalty is by engaging with them. And, the best way to do that is by building your brand presence on different social media networks.

Social media is the best medium to have conversations with your potential customers and receive quick feedback on your products and services from them. A study by NM Incite shows that 71% of customers are more likely to recommend your brand to their friends if they receive a proactive brand response on social media.

In fact, you can also use social media as a shop window front and sell your products or services online. Besides, you can keep your consumers informed about the latest product launch, innovations, or other trends through targeted banner ads, widgets, mobile applications, and polls.

So you may ask where does social CRM exactly fall into the picture?

Let’s look at how social CRM can help you engage your customers:

i. Collecting Data and Having an Analytical Approach

Today more than 90% of companies have a social media page — be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Youtube. Facebook alone has more than 2.32 billion users, and 4.5 billion likes generated daily. 96% of Facebook users use mobile phones to access content, and approximately 75% of Facebook revenues come from mobile advertising.

It’s essential to have an integrated approach that focuses on customer acquisition and retention. Here, social CRM is a complete game-changer as it leverages the full capabilities of social media platforms. It captures daily interactions with your customers across multiple channels and collects huge data that is analyzed internally.

Social CRM is a powerful tool to benchmark your social media communication using dashboards and metrics. Your marketing or sales staff will always have an overview with references and context to saved data, statistics, interactions, and customer history. Thus, it not only help drive conversations with your customers but also conversions and customer value.

With the advanced targeting options provided by today’s social media platforms, you can precisely define your audiences. Social CRM helps collect all the data about your customers and manage them efficiently.

ii. Providing a 360-Degree View of the Customer’s Behavior

With the introduction of social CRM, getting a holistic view of your customers is quite possible. Social CRM maps customer statistics with internal customer data and related information stored in the document system and integrates into a single database. In short, it takes into insight all the available information about the customer, which helps to drive more engagement and loyalty. It ultimately results in increased revenue.

One added advantage is that even if the customer change channels, you can still keep track of their issues or behavior efficiently. That’s how you keep your customers happy and satisfied more than ever.

Not only that, but social CRM also engages in a sustainable customer experience driving program. For instance, IKEA can see what their customers’ preferences are via Facebook, Twitter, and any other social media channels with the help of CRM. Or, the site woot.com publishes statistics about user interests and creates a sense of community. Online retailers like Netflix are not behind either. They create a viable ecosystem by providing personalized recommendations to their customers. This helps in achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Companies require an end-to-end approach to build their customers’ community, and technology-based business models can only drive it. Did you know research suggests that the social media marketing budget will be doubled in the next five years? Almost 83% of B2B marketers prefer to invest in social media to increase brand presence. Thus, you can imagine how much social CRM is vital to provide an enhanced customer experience.

iii. Providing Seamless and Consistent Customer Experience

To drive an omnichannel marketing campaign, it needs to follow a coordinated, integrated, and customer-driven strategy. And, social CRM holds that key to advertising in this era. All channels need to work together to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience.

For that, social CRM helps keep track of all the interactions of customers at different channels and consolidate into a single database. It allows you to learn valuable information from overall customer behavior to strengthen comprehensive channel experiences. Additionally, these pieces of information also help streamline operational activities by integrating other systems like billing software solutions with social CRM.

About 79% of customers reported improved customer service, which shows how social CRM delivers real benefits.

iv. Personalizing Interactions With Customers

Segmenting and personalizing is one of the most integral parts of any business. Social CRM helps enhance your social interaction on all channels by enabling you to provide personalized responses.

Having prior knowledge about your customer’s behavior and their preferences, you can provide tailor-made interactions. You can offer them relevant suggestions that might please them.

In a nutshell, social CRM teaches businesses to listen to their customers and create a personalized experience for them, thereby increasing their sales and revenue. It helps your business to stay on top of every situation.

Conclusion: Social CRM Has Become a Necessity

To conclude, social CRM contributes to the overall business growth of your company by letting you harness the full power of predictive insights and vital data management. Top CRM already includes social CRM as part of their traditional CRM model. However, if it isn’t the case, you can easily integrate the social CRM system into your existing system and develop your business.

Clearly, the future of social CRM looks promising and is here to stay. A company can’t ignore the digital sentiments of its customers if they want to outsmart their competitors.

In fact, businesses across different industries believe that social CRM is the future of customer care. With the help of social CRM, organizations can reach out to customers, understand their views on your product or service, and take proactive action from thereon.

Overall, social CRM is an ideal way to create a win-win situation for the customers as well as the brand involved.