Consumers today are mobile, connected, informed and expect brands to be contactable and fast responding. 71% of consumers who experience a quick and effective brand response on social media are more likely to recommend that brand to others, compared to just 19% of customers who do not receive a response. The increasing culture of immediacy also means that customers can choose to provide their feedback on their experiences not only to businesses, but to the entire world, instantaneously.
Businesses need to be ready and confident to rise to this challenge. Knowledge is power and CRM solutions offer organisations a real-time 360° view of their customer base, including their social profiles. This means that, armed with the data on the customer’s history and prior interactions with the business, anybody in the entire organisation can make informed decisions quickly, efficiently and tailor their response to the needs of the customer.
The main reason for tailoring the approach is that people buy from people and customers need to feel that they are treated as individuals and not as just another number on a list. Especially when products and services seem to be more similar than ever, personalisation can be the route to marketing cut-through, success and profitability.
For many organisations, social media is the most effective personalised marketing channel. 62% of marketers said social media became more important to marketing campaigns in the last six months. Customers being able to express their views and feed, not only back to the businesses, but to the entire cyber-sphere, means that social media platforms have a massive impact on brands’ reputation. Businesses need to take the bull by the horns and integrate customer service with social media to gain value and have an exponential effect across the entire organisation. A major benefit of the CRM tool is the ability to make sense of all this data that businesses are now able to collate. The big data collected is only useful if it is analysed and applied to the relevant situations.
With the right CRM tools in place, social customer service can capture the right information and make it accessible to all customer-facing employees. In this way, the benefits of having personalised customer insights can be extended to all parts of business. Processes are coordinated in a more time and cost efficient way and high quality leads flow into the sales pipeline. For example, if a customer was to phone up and the person answering the call already knew what product they had and could see that they had already tweeted complaining that it was faulty – the problem could be escalated quickly and result in a replacement product being sent out.
Individualisation is the way to push forward and into the customers’ eye line. Identifying key segments for targets and prospects marketing helps to cuts the delivery of irrelevant information. By using the right CRM tool, companies can make informed decisions on the incorporation of social promotions and apps into their campaigns, based on the information they have gathered from all available platforms. This information empowers customer-facing employees who can nurture leads on the basis of the activity and the interest of individual customers to ensure that their businesses stay top of mind.
