In today’s era of social networking sites, people do not hesitate to have a quick scroll through their Twitter feeds while sitting on the toilet seat. These mediums are extremely important for brands as young consumers prefer to use Facebook, Twitter to complain or compliment a product, service. Thus, a social CRM (SCRM) has become crucial for efficient customer management and engagement. Here’re four best practices for a successful SCRM implementation.

• Choosing solutions according to the organizational goals

Besides selecting a good crm development company as a vendor, the pre-requisite for adopting SCRM tools is a fundamentally sound CRM 1.0.

You can find multiple SCRM solutions to assist in opportunity tracking, lead management, brand mentions monitoring, and tracking consumer behavior as well as sentiment analysis. Based on the company’s goals, you can select from social publishing, media engagement, social analytics, and product advocacy apps. Implementing the new solutions can prove to be a challenging task, and it should not be performed in haste without a clear set of desired goals as well as strategies.  

• Appropriate training and motivation

Traditional CRM includes consumer’s name address, phone number, interaction notes, and email address, along with the list of the products that suit the customer’s interest. On the other hand, SCRM offers the above, plus, links for customer’s blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter handle, along with the history about communication with the concerned person done via email, phone call, Twitter, and Facebook.

Social CRM offers better leads to sales reps, with an opportunity for warm calling after monitoring social conversations. Due to SCRM inputs, the sales staff would feel more connected with the prospect during their interaction. But again, the concerned team needs to be trained to work on text analytics (keyword tracking) and to monitor social networking sites for brand name mentions, industry mentions for generating high-quality leads. Opting for social listening tools or systems that can help in monitoring conversations also becomes necessary for the organization from the sales point of view.

• Analyze the negative sentiments to learn and evolve

SCRM offers the opportunity to understand the public sentiment about a product or service and reduce reputational risk. Capturing the emotion and analyzing the same to resolve the issue as soon as possible is essential. Social listening tools in SCRM can issue notifications whenever the company or product name is mentioned in conversations. Thus, creating a special team for damage control to act on the inputs can help. Automating CRM workflow to integrate monitored conversations into the customer relationship management software can ensure that even the company’s call center executives would be able to take a look at caller’s social media interactions about the brand. Access to such data would help executives learn about the irate consumer’s issue without much of explanation and resolve the same. Your crm development vendor can assist you with the integration project as well.

• Appoint a social media manager

Appointing a social media manager is critical when it comes to monitoring operations and ensuring a consistent messaging. Select an individual who has at least five years of experience in managing digital brand campaigns. Before posting on social networking sites, every post should get an approval from the concerned manager. The person in charge can also be delegated the responsibility to assess the benefits derived from customer-focused initiatives.

A reputed crm software development company like Smart Sight Innovations can assist you with the best solutions. However, sufficient human resource in the social media team is necessary because people expect a response within ten minutes on Twitter.