Five ways social media can strengthen your customer relationship management

By: Muqbil Ahmar, Technology Evangelist

Wouldn’t it be great if your customer relationship management (CRM) software links comments on your Facebook page or Instagram back to your company’s database and automatically sets follow-ups for your support team? Similarly, what if inputs from different social media platforms help you in lead generation? The possibilities are endless. Integration of social media within CRM modules can indeed help you draw, close and create repeated engagements with customers. It can also set up post-sale engagement with customers, a valuable addition in the world of the fast and furious digital marketing.

Social media: The new mantra for digital marketing

We live in a world today where connectivity is the new buzzword. No wonder, there has been manifold increase in the adoption and utilization of social media platforms and networks for business expansion, particularly lead generation. In many case, the success of your enterprise could crucially depend on the connected-ness of your business.

Social media is one such tool that could offer several advantages to a company:

• It will make many it easier for business professionals to find and engage with peers and customers
• Support representatives have better chances of responding to complaints on a company’s Facebook page or those in the comments section of their websites. There are many companies which allow customers to comment and even make complaints on their social media properties. Customers, in fact, use such platforms to deliver feedback (positive or negative) or report support issues or technical snags much more frequently these days than any other medium.
• Sales people scouting for prospects and leads frequently utilize and send InMails to professional networks or websites such as LinkedIn.
• Enterprises usually need to employ people to be able to take feedback and respond to snags or issues. They also need to follow up with disgruntled customers. In today’s world, a small issue can boomerang into a major crisis due to the ubiquity and the reach of social media. A robust social media strategy will make such positions redundant.
• Recruiters can also look up social media platforms for potential hires and put up job postings across social media channels. There are umpteen examples of HR representatives hiring on the basis of social media posts of personal accounts of employees.

The Ubiquity of Social Media Networks: Discovering the potential of social media Integration

Social media networking is the new buzzword for companies wanting to promote brand identity, enhance internal communication and connect with consumers and prospects. Embedding the social media history as well as the profile of prospects and leads into the CRM system can be a handy customer and post-sale service tool. Companies should utilize functionalities to reach out to prospective leads. Social media can improve customer experience and help in creating engagements and post-sale customer engagement.

“In fact, CRM providers are developing functionalities in order to deliver the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 and built-in Web 2.0 technology. Embedding innovative features such as activity feeds, conversation threads, chatbots, etc. into CRM applications could open doors to new and immense possibilities in the field of software development as well as integrated digital marketing,” says Somesh Misra, VP, Deskera, a global cloud-based ERP and CRM provider.

In Conclusion: Social media integration is a necessity for customer relationship management

Gartner report says 50% of big organizations will possess internal social networks by 2016 and 30% of such networks will be considered as essential as email and telephones for business productivity. It’s in the interest of enterprises and organizations to chart out a comprehensive social media strategy to give their businesses the edge.