Customer Networks: the Secret Sauce of Social CRM
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
