Opinion: It pays to get social with your customers

Many organisations are already listening to online conversations and understand the value of social data, however, very few are acting on the insights and taking advantage of the real value of that data by integrating it with other customer relationship strategies.

Social customer relationship management (CRM) must be part of the DNA of the customer services cycle. While solutions such as Salesforce Chatter enable sales teams to share knowledge, they are not, however, pure social networks where organisations can capture accurate knowledge and create appropriate responses.

Social CRM provides an opportunity for organisations to be part of pure peer-to-peer interaction with customers about the real issues they need to resolve, as and when they arise.

The majority of customers believe businesses should not only have a presence in social media but that they should be interacting with them in this way. As more organisations look to adopt social CRM technology they must also increase dialogue with customers to glean knowledge and data in order to understand and analyse customer conversations in social networks carefully.

Very often incorrect or damaging information that is shared in social communities can snowball through these networks before an organisation has chance to respond and disseminate the correct answers. This includes networks outside the boundaries of an organisation such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo and MySpace.

Some businesses have rushed into implementing technologies such as Lithium to allow them to monitor customer feedback and queries in their organisation. However, they are finding they have a huge amount of knowledge from these technologies and do not have the appropriate solutions in place to utilise it.

Customers are now the experts and they are becoming ever more savvy and outspoken about their experiences. It is vital for customer support experts to have the appropriate policies in place to be able to take advantage of this knowledge and expertise.

An effective social CRM strategy will allow a business to take advantage of their savvy customers and feed their expertise back into their organisation, so that it in turn can provide better answers and information back to its customers.