Customer Networks: the Secret Sauce of Social CRM

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Customers are communicating online about your company today, across a growing number of channels and myriad individual conversations; how is this anything other than a big headache for companies?

Put another way, what are the problems your business is trying to solve with CRM today?

• How about increasing customer loyalty?
• How about making better and faster decisions?
• How about supporting the entire Customer Lifestyle?

Traditional CRM is simply not designed to apply itself to the scale of the social web. If you're just looking at one-to-one interactions today, it's like pointing a telescope at one tiny part of the sky and hoping you can guess what the rest of the universe is doing, much less affect it.

But this is a case where the problem is the solution. Social CRM is about powering your own customer network to address business issues beyond your limited view. By cultivating and leveraging a network of customers and superusers, you expand your reach beyond what you can quickly or cost-effectively handle on your own. Even better, this works across a whole range of business challenges:

• How about promoting your products to other users more effectively? FICO found that their myFICO community members showed a 41% increase in spending.
• How about supporting other customers on your products for less? Linksys estimates that their community deflects almost 12,000 cases per month.
• How about helping you innovate your products and sell more? In their ACT! community, Sage Software has experienced a 300% increase in participation in its product beta program, and received customer feedback that has resulted in highly impactful product, organization and process changes.

So what do you think? Can a customer network take you where you need to go?

Photo by boliston