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

I sat in on a session at a conference recently, titled interestingly enough, "The Trainwreck that is the Distributed Conversation." The central theme was that users are participating on our sites, in our blogs and communities, and then leaving in a hundred different directions to continue the conversation someplace else. Essentially, once the message was relayed, it was traveling farther and faster than the original contributor could follow.

While this was problematic for the original poster, it struck me at the time (and still does) as somewhat amusing. Isn't this exactly what we want? It seems like a case of succeeding too well. After all, without the network of users picking up and amplifying the signal, the message would gradually have been lost to attenuation.

I bring this up because it seems to me this is analogous to the broader issue most organizations are facing today with social media, namely that customers are no longer forced to talk one-on-one with companies' support desks or quietly consume the one-to-many messages of brands. Customers today have nearly unlimited opportunities to talk to other customers, and they are taking advantage of it. How can businesses possibly scale their interactions in social media, be it promoting, innovating or supporting products, to keep up with their customers?

Back to the conference session I started at, the final consensus of the group was that the distributed conversation may be distressing, but ultimately its okay - at least it is better than the opposite, which is silence. And in true social fashion the group thought of a clever potential approach - crowd-source the problem! If easy-to-distribute content caused the message to spread, make it easy for users to aggregate the conversations that they have so that others can follow more easily.

With Lithium's newly announced Social CRM suite, this is exactly our approach to the challenges and opportunities presented by the new social customer today. This new solution connects the reach of the social web with the business rules and data gathering capabilities of your CRM, through the amplifier of your online community to create a more integrated, responsive and powerful customer network to take you where you need to go. Or as Paul Greenberg puts it in his recent article, Time to Put A Stake in The Ground on Social CRM:

"Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING.  But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM."

The days of 1-to-1 interactions between companies and customers are not over, they are just no longer enough. Customer value isn't just a measure of how much customers spend with your company, but how they help you sell more products, lower your costs and capitalize on new market opportunities. To achieve this, Social CRM needs to do 3 things:

1.       Cultivate a group of active advocates within an online community.

2.       Connect them to the broader social web to amplify their actions and grow the customer network.

3.       Integrate this customer network into your business processes and data sets through your CRM so you can measure and act on what you see.

Smart companies will work to cultivate and extend their customer network, to help the network to reach were the company can't follow. And in the process achieve the mutual success that each desires.

How are you integrating and amplifying your customer network?

Photos by kainet and surroundsound5000

Future Shop is in the limelight again, as we celebrate their award-winning achievements in online customer experience! As mentioned before, a major part of their online success has been their community. But it hasn't just been the community itself that made Future Shop's online presence stand out - it was the way they have integrated the community experience into their online presence. From the press release:

"To help personalize and enhance the user experience, Future Shop integrated its community with a virtual product expert, or avatar, which lives on the Futureshop.ca homepage. The avatar encourages users to "Ask an Expert" if they have a technology-related question, and helps users find answers by scanning conversation threads and highlighting relevant information. If a user doesn't find the answer they are looking for, the avatar offers to post their question to the appropriate discussion area in the community. There, the question can be answered by other customers or Future Shop product experts."

As a bit of technology 'gee-whiz', their avatar expert is a nice novelty. Providing a more human face the site and its search functionality is pretty cool the first couple of times, but if you kept getting the same answers it could get pretty stale and repetitive. The solution? Make your avatar search a window into the community, with its continuous supply of relevant, fresh content! The avatar now is not a just a proxy for the company, but a guide to the Future Shop community, facilitating the 'introduction' of new members and even offering to place the first post on the user's behalf.

If you get a chance, take a look at their site and try it out - as Future Shop is a Canadian retailer, there's both English and French versions to see. And learn how they are using their community to make the customer experience better!

Photo by DRB62

I ran across an interesting blog post from the ubiquitous Chris Brogan I thought I'd share: 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day

Chris titles his approach as "Presence Management", which struck me as odd initially, since it's about reaching out and responding to the community, not about pushing yourself on others. But upon reflection I can see how defining it as a discipline can help - especially for someone like Chris with such a huge following. Putting yourself out there every day is an effort that needs to be performed religiously, which is really what his post is about. And the tips he provides are useful examples of those hundreds of little things that add up over time. Here's a few for reference:

1. Find seven things worth retweeting in your general feed and share.

3. Point out a few people that you admire. It shows your mindset, too.

10. Share at least 3 interesting updates that you find.

13. Drop into Q&A and see if you can volunteer 2-3 answers.

(see the full article for the other 15)

This is one of those areas that is often tough for newcomers to social media to grasp; that it's not about the killer content, the ultimate blog post or your perfect design. Its about the constant stream of little things that keep people connected to you or to your community. Like a snowball rolling downhill and growing larger as it travels, those little connections are the way your members come to know who you are and what your community is about, and grow closer as a result. So be sure to keep in touch, keep it real, and keep it coming!

Are you inside your community, whether its your corporate site, your facebook page or twitter feed, interacting with others and sharing with them? How do they know who you are?

Photo by redjar