At the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, Mark Tamis from Net-7 and Esteban Kolsky from ThinkJar talked about “A new era of customer engagement with Social CRM”. Their point of view on this complex matter is the following:

Why is the social customer becoming an important subject these days? Simply because people trust other people – even if they do not know them or only know them from the Internet – more than any company. Instead of watching a company’s ad and then buying the product, potential customers are turning to friends to ask for advice or post a request in some relevant online forum to find out about other people’s experiences. So, instead of seeing the product you want to sell through the eyes of your company, you now have to see it through the eyes of the customer.

Therefore, they say, the new business model is going to be twofold: In addition to focusing on internal Enterprise 2.0 operations, external aspects have to be included as well - namely the social CRM (client facing operations).  Thus, the new business model must be a hybrid of both internal and external communities. This means that employees and customers have to work together very closely in the near future as customers want to become part of the process themselves. So after evolving into a social enterprise, the next step will be a “collaborative enterprise” where there is major interaction with the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, channels).

According to Mark and Esteban, the following things have to be taken into consideration:

  1. Customers are more connected to each other than to the producing company > The company has to become part of the communities to become a trusted entity
  2. Customers follow the direction provided by the social network > Natural effect of herding
  3. Organizations follow the direction provided by the technology > But they should follow the direction provided by their strategy
  4. Convergence of social CRM and E20 occurs in communities > This takes a lot of time!

Of course, this is a very long and time-consuming process. And according to the presenters, a company first needs to be entirely E 2.0, before developing into a collaborative enterprise. Many companies are already at different stages in this process and the crucial point is always the maturity of the company: The change in the mentality is a long way to go.

A more detailed insight on Mark Tamis thoughts is provided by him in his blog.

So much about the presentation in Milan. Social CRM is currently a very trending and highly debated topic among the evangelists. The integration of the customer in the business process is also not a new topic (see the discussions about mass customization). But the integration of socially interacting customers is a new one that is relevant to various fields of business processes such as communications, marketing, sales etc. Each of this disciplines are experimenting in the one or the other way with the social web - a holistic view on this topics must be the end solution but is still far away from yet being realized.

Or do you think differently?

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