The Future of Social CRM

CHAPTER 10 The Future of Social CRM Ajay Row IntroductIon Social media, we have been told, is a force for good. There are several reasons why: people can easily say what they think, it is easy and it is free! Their voices will be heard by people who know them (in a manner of speaking) and want to hear their views—and eventually through their networks the entire interconnected world if their meme is of enough interest. From a business perspective, brands, businesses, and organisations can eavesdrop, are ‘tagged’, and often spoken to directly—and they can of course help monetize social media networks by paying for advertising space. Organisations thus have an opportunity to respond to comments in real-time as the rest of the digital world listens in. This then is the future of the world, the ultimate democracy, that which will drive us all to that economists’ utopia, perfect competition, as everyone will soon know (or at least have access) to every bit of information. But soon, practical problems get in the way. First, conversations are public and unstructured. This means comments have to be read and understood, and in organisations with access to appropriate data, the customer context understood by a review of his or her history of interaction with the organisation well before the response is thought through and A. Row (*) Mumbai, India © The Author(s) 2018 G. Heggde, G. Shainesh (eds.), Social Media Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5323-8_10 137 138 A. ROW sent out. This would be fine if it were a few conversations and data is ready on hand, but too often, and this is the second issue, organisations find themselves dealing with thousands of social comments every single day— and just don’t have the resources to manage this scale. Some redeploy contact centre staff but too often discover this is rarely a cost-effective solution. Naturally, tools have emerged to simplify things, service providers have created sentiment analysis and ‘listening tools’ and have even delivered response services on behalf of the organisation. These are helpful but, and this is the third issue, not always right. (Not that organisations got it right infallibly before the advent of social media—we are all human.) But this is the new reality and simple errors of judgment now get amplified in realtime as, increasingly, by the very nature of social media, one bad response that goes viral can destroy an organisation’s hard-won reputation and even shareholder value in mere hours. Given the scale of social media, and the reality of human nature, the more successful a brand is, the more folks are interested in it. This is of course good when things go right (or is it, given our utopian dream?) but turns into a double-edged sword when things go wrong. And eventually, for most, something will inevitably go wrong. The question isn’t whether; it is when—as with most complex systems. Failure can be one bad tweet away. What has thIs Got to do WIth the ManaGeMent of custoMer relatIonshIps? Relationships are built in a series of interactions between brands and their customers. Interactions are usually either brand experiences or one-to-one conversations and are usually in the form of a cycle of a number of stimuli and responses (e.g. you speak and I listen; I respond to what you said and you respond to my response, etc.) and over time, multiple cycles build relationships with individual customers, for good or bad. Some of these interactions may be in social media, others at point of experience, still others in communication. Often, interactions are hybrid and omni-channel. For example, a customer has a poor brand experience, calls the contact centre, and winds up with a diatribe via social media. So it is complex, and made more so as consumers now expect the interaction cycle to be context-appropriate and quick and resolve the issue on hand. THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL CRM 139 Brands can either manage these cycles (e.g. training front-line staff, creating channels for two-way communication) or leave things to chance. Most are forced to do the latter as practical problems exist. For instance, at the time of writing, most brands do not have a longitudinal view of individual customers deployed at points of interaction. Instead they tend to manage interactions as distinctive work units (so Marketing, typically, creates customer communication; Operations manages the front-line staff; and Training scurries around trying to ensure people know what to do). The customer on the other hand sees his or her interactions with an organisation from a single perspective that evolves over time. What the customer says on social media is often a result of the cumulative effect of those interactions and organisations without the benefit of context can be blind-sided. Too often, existing channels are broken: calling a telco or bank contact centre usually results in the stuff of nightmares. Social media is routinely ignored by many large organisations, perhaps because of a cynical calculation: being completely unresponsive is better than being inappropriately responsive, and it costs a lot less. Customer data is often a mess, and rarely deployed appropriately at the point of customer engagement. The list of CRM shortfalls goes on. Clearly, doing more of the same won’t work. So many smart people trying so hard for so long can’t all be incompetent. So perhaps the system, as we now understand CRM, cannot work. The challenge then is to find a new way. Perhaps one possibility is to first create a channel by which brands can cost-effectively manage interactions with all their customers (often numbering in millions and more) and then ensure this channel is the preferred source of customer interaction with a brand, the one customers reach out to before social media if things go wrong and the one that is their natural choice when things go right. This would be far more manageable by brands, and due to the nature of the channel (appropriate response in real-time) preferable to consumers. The question, then, is how does one make this happen? Well, in many ways. But one strong possibility is to consider using a device which has become increasingly ubiquitous and omniscient: the mobile (smart) phone. Logical, but how? Well, the phone is already more or less universally established—and often abused—as a mode of one-to-one communication with customers. Companies had become so used to using the short message service (SMS) to ‘spam’ their customers that it took governmental intervention to bring in some modicum of sense. But SMS 140 A. ROW has not died. For instance, banks use the ‘registered mobile’ number in India to send confirmatory messages of transactions. SMS and other messaging, if used well, can be good, but the real gamechanger on the phone is of course the mobile app: folks routinely use apps to hail a taxi (thanks Uber) or find how to get there by other means (Google Maps), respond to emails, chat on social media, play games, figure out the score between meetings, or figure out how to score this evening, plan their leisure time, organise themselves, hear a spiritual leader—the list goes on. Today, every company worth its salt has either planned, started work on, or launched, a mobile app, sort of like they did with websites a decade or two ago. Often, the challenge—as it was then—is to figure out what the customer will do with the app beyond hearing the advertising spiel, though many apps facilitate transactions, but the belief is undoubtedly that solutions will emerge over time. They have to, or the hard-won space on the consumer’s screen will be lost to a ‘Delete’ soon enough. Enter the future of social CRM. Here’s the real opportunity. With an effective strategy, brands can manage multiple interaction cycles simply, cost-effectively and in real-time, building individual relationships with millions of customers simultaneously. The way to do this is to create customer interfaces that allow for ‘structured conversations’. Market research taught marketers the value of a semantic differential scale decades ago (strongly agree, agree, don’t know or care, disagree, strongly disagree). Variations on the theme can now be delivered to customers real-time to find out how things are going. Later, as technology evolves, we are given to understand that sensors will take over to learn how customers are feeling but, for now, this is the best alternative. A start-up called Litmus (disclaimer: I am a co-founder), for instance, has developed several ways to ‘talk to customers’, asking them how they feel about an experience via what they call a structured conversation. Here are some examples: The beauty of this simple device is it empowers brands to develop customer relationships simply and effectively, they know what customers want or are thinking/feeling and can respond THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL CRM 141 in real-time exceedingly cost-effectively, thus building effective interactions. Since data/insights/conclusions/recommendations can be mirrored to frontline staff at the point of interaction, the loop between humans and the phone can easily be closed. Since interactions are built on past knowledge, organisations can build increasingly effective relationships with millions of customers, maximising the value of their customer base, their customer asset. So what is the future of social CRM? Let me make some guesses. • Social media tools as we know them today will continue to improve but will never be perfect; an organisation or individual will always be one bad judgment call away from being battered on social media • Cynics will manipulate social media. Actually, sorry, that is already happening, isn’t it? 142 A. ROW • People at large will get more and more jaded to social media (as they have become to news in general), which will lessen the downside risk but also blunt the upside potential. And perhaps most importantly, other solutions will emerge. One such will be ‘structured conversations’ that allow brands and consumers to speak as they should, as friends and good colleagues do: easily, with clarity and immediate, context-sensitive response.