Twitter and other social media sites are powerful communication channels. But CRM should be a two-way conversation, not one-way, like the latest Trump tweets.
It's not enough anymore for companies to promote to customers on social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook. It's time to listen, respond and integrate those communications into CRM records.
Setting aside whether or not a person agrees with or dislikes President Donald Trump, in this podcast, Volker Hildebrand, global vice president of customer engagement and commerce at SAP Hybris, talks about how the latest tweets from Trump showcase the power and influence of social media to directly engage with constituents. Yet, many companies are using social media more as promotion vehicles to talk at their customers, but not to hear what their customers are saying back.
In this podcast, SearchCRM speaks with Hildebrand at the Customer Engagement & Commerce 2017 conference in Orlando.
It's not a new idea, but the implementation is
The technology for companies to engage with customers or prospects via social media, as the latest tweets from Trump do, has been available for quite some time, Hildebrand says. Yet, few organizations are using these opportunities to their full potential. Rather, they see social channels such as Twitter, Facebook and others as pure marketing and promotion vehicles.
Some companies don't see social media as important, while others have bandwidth limitations and choose not to prioritize it. But ignoring it is a missed opportunity.
For some forward-thinking companies, however, Hildebrand says, "Twitter has become almost a service-escalation path. If you have a bad experience with a company -- many times, you call them, and you're on hold, or you get through and nothing really happens -- the minute you start tweeting about your bad experience, they react. You get their attention, because they're concerned that you're sharing this experience with a much wider audience."
IoT, comingling sales and marketing data boosts CRM
Hildebrand also looks beyond the latest tweets from Trump to dive into the customer engagement benefits of marrying sales and service data to better personalize customer service interactions. To customers, sales, service and marketing -- just like Twitter, text and email -- aren't channels, they are all part of one continuous interaction through a mobile device. Companies, however, look at them as separate entities.
To customers, sales, service and marketing -- just like Twitter, text and email -- aren't channels, they are all part of one continuous interaction through a mobile device.
"As an organization, you need to bring all these channels together," Hildebrand says. "You really need to bring these together to understand the customer journey, so that you know how to engage a particular customer in the moment when it matters to them, and not when it fits into your internal processes."
The conversation concludes with a discussion of the potential of machine-to-machine connected sensors, or the internet of things (IoT), to improve customer service. While the use cases for this technology vary from industry to industry, Hildebrand breaks down how a company can figure out whether or not it's worth exploring for themselves -- and how to start small with IoT pilot projects for field service groups or user research.
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