social crm posts, articles, and infographics

9 Dreamforce Draws For 2011

August 18, 2011 by Adam Honig
with 67 views

Photo: Courtesy of Kreepin Deth

From social CRM to service cloud, Google executives to guitar heroes, expect Dreamforce 2011 to rock. [read more]

CRM, Customer Collaboration, and CRM Evolution 2011

August 9, 2011 by Paul Simon
with 116 views

I heard a lot of pithy sound bites Monday at the opening of CRM Evolutions in the heart of muggy Manhattan. Most targeted business relationships with their customers. My new friend Joe Galvin, an independent B2B sales analyst, was more skeptical about Opening Day. He observed a greater emphasis on customer service platitudes and less about the selling side of CRM. Still, the conversation was exciting and informative... [read more]

Social Support: The Emperor Has No Clothes? When the Board Doesn't See Your Value

June 29, 2011 by Orhan Ertughrul
with 150 views

Photo: Curt Gibbs/Flickr (Creative Commons)

We often expect our efforts in social support to be lauded throughout the company when they appear to us to be successful, but how is success measured? More often than not in customer care, cost reduction is the KPI of choice. So how does Social CRM measure up? [read more]

Empowering Human Movements: 7 Observations about the State of Social Business

June 24, 2011 by Brian Vellmure
with 110 views

Like a room full of toddlers, the industry is learning to walk. There have been starts, stops, over compensations, disparity amongst players in general understanding and development, and in some cases, the harsh realization that we’re just not quite ready to do what we want to do. [read more]

The Importance of Positive Customer Service Experiences

May 18, 2011 by Mitch Lieberman
with 2,804 views

Customer experience is made up of the sum of all interactions and touch points between the people, products and services a company provides and their customers. Customer service experience is a subset of the overall customer experience, with a slightly different focus. Specifically, a customer service experience is the sum of the... [read more]

Self-Service for the Social Customer?

May 16, 2011 by Hansen Lieu
with 468 views

However, my take-away from Maoz's observation is that it is still important for companies to offer a combination of touch points in the future. Organizations need to balance the level of service they deliver to the resources that they have while making a reasonable return for their investors. Self service offers organizations the ability to help customers solve their problems quickly and provides a high ROI. [read more]

Natural, Organic, Social - That's Where CRM is Going

April 12, 2011 by Leigh Dow
with 606 views

Organic CRM: Aggregating information and contacts to have a more natural open dialogue with your customers. [read more]

Conversational Commerce Update: End-user Advocates Set FTC Straight on Personal Data Ecosystem

February 22, 2011 by Dan Miller
with 679 views

Even though it addresses one of the more egregious ways that companies gather data about Web browsers, FTC's "Do Not Track" proposal deserves a serious critique and privacy/identity advocates Kaliya Hamlin and Mary Hodder have provided a "middle way," the Personal Data Storage Service, which is beneficial to advertisers and social customers, alike. [read more]

A Case for Social CRM

November 23, 2010 by Lauren Carlson
with 734 views

We have heard a lot about this "2.0" buzzword "Socia CRM," and it has even emerged as a recognized segment of the market. While the talk surrounding social CRM is informative, software buyers are more concerned with how they can actually use it to gain a competitive advantage and improve customer relations. So I put together a list of 5 real world examples that illustrate how these new social CRM technologies are helping organizations cut costs, while improving their front office operations. [read more]

So Not Social

October 27, 2010 by Esteban Kolsky
with 1,963 views

Recently I noticed that everything in the world is converting to social. We have social media, of course, and social CRM, and social business, and social analytics. We also have social ERP, social SCM, Social Communities – and more socials that I can keep straight. It seems that the turn for e-everything and i-... [read more]

Egging on the Social CRM Battle

September 16, 2010 by Blake Landau
with 870 views

Every ten years disruptive technology comes along to change business. Henry Ford once said “if I’d asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” We are there again…and brands are clumsily hobbling along in horse powered buggies. And rather than battling over the definition of social CRM, we will have more success focusing on the business challenges caused by obsolete internal technologies and processes. Soon enough the horse and buggy will collapse. While Henry Ford was obviously not a fan of VOC (voice of the customer), in social CRM we desperately need to talk to customers. Every industry, and specific organization, has different challenges. We need to find out what those are on an ongoing basis. [read more]

A Very Social Contact Center

September 16, 2010 by Blake Landau
with 928 views

Have you ever tried to talk to a robot? I have and let me tell you it’s quite frustrating. I don’t think I am the only one who wishes every IVR a long slow death. In the early nineties we got a little “automation-happy” in the contact center. The more “happy” we got in the contact center, the more unhappy our customers were. We saw the quick cash we could save with IVRs, and laughed all the way to the bank never looking back. But guess what? Now as an industry we are paying the price. When was the last time you were at a party and the topic of call centers came up–and everyone started cheering? Yah that’s what I thought. [read more]

The Social Customer Engagement Index Whitepaper: Survey Results, Insights and Perspectives

September 2, 2010 by Brent Leary
with 4,388 views

We’re glad to announce the availability of the detailed survey results from our initial Social Customer Engagement Index. The whitepaper with the survey results is available for free by using this link to register for the download. In June 2010 we invited members of the TSC community to take a few minutes of their time to share... [read more]

The Looming Social Revolution

August 16, 2010 by Esteban Kolsky
with 2,143 views

Think of any revolution, they all have similar components: unhappy people, despotic rulers, catalyst events, turbulent times, and uncertain outcomes. Now, think of the current evolution we are experiencing in business: the social evolution. Lots have been written about this being a paradigm shift, or a revolution, or a... [read more]

Putting The Experience In Customer Experience

August 11, 2010 by Maria Ogneva
with 1,354 views

Photo credit Kate Hazard

To actually give this experience to others, you need to live and breathe it within your organization. You can't adopt social if you aren't ready to service the social customers; regardless of whether or not you are using social for awareness or another goal, customers will want your help regardless, so you need to prepare to service them. Crummy service and crummy product are the top killers of customer experience. No matter how pretty your community is, and how awesome your charts and graphs are, if the customer experience is bad, your social media efforts will backfire. [read more]

Introducing The Social Customer Engagement Index

July 19, 2010 by Brent Leary
with 5,002 views

A few weeks ago we invited members of TheSocialCustomer.com community to participate in a short survey to help us better understand how your companies were using social technologies to support their customers. We also partnered with The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP) to invite their global membership of customer... [read more]

Three Things You Must Understand to Get Customer Service and Social Together

July 17, 2010 by Esteban Kolsky
with 5,116 views

Ah, the allure of Social Media.The rise of the Social Customer and the advent of Social Media has thrown a monster-sized monkey wrench into the operations of the organization. Slowly we have seen good examples emerge of adoption of Social Media by the different business units and stakeholders in the organization.Social sales has... [read more]

Your Untapped Goldmine

June 22, 2010 by Maria Ogneva
with 1,006 views

Here's one resource you are probably not using to its 100% capacity: your employees. And I don't mean it in the run-em-into-the-ground-work-around-the-clock kind of way. What I mean is that you are probably not leveraging their knowledge, their passion and enthusiasm or their social capital well enough. How do I know that? Because very... [read more]

The Ultimate Social CRM Question

June 22, 2010 by Mike Boysen
with 611 views

What Does the “s” Mean in sCRM? Did you notice anything? I used a lowercase “s” because it's time for the hype to be over (I didn't come up with it — but saw it on Twitter). It's time to start putting the social extensions to traditional CRM into place. There's really no reason to keep talking... [read more]

The Social Customer — Complete Control or A Level of Control?

June 21, 2010 by Mike Boysen
with 498 views

I'm not going to quote it directly, because even 140 characters seems long-winded these days, but I believe Paul Greenberg's tweetable definition of Social CRM has been blown way out of proportion. So much so, that I actually feel that I need to build a bridge. Can you believe it? The iconoclast is building a bridge! I've read and heard... [read more]