It’s 2011. Where’s My Social CRM?
Photo: jurvetson
In his recent article on the Software Advice blog, Houston Neal builds a case against the existence of Social CRM. I think the real issue is that the technology providers haven’t caught up to the somewhat overhyped promise of how companies should manage social relationships with their customers.
From the moment we started Trustworthy, we envisioned a day when our services would integrate seamlessly with a client’s existing CRM software.
The implications were huge. We imagined responding to customers with complete purchase histories, tech support tickets, and demographics in front of us. Armed with all this automated info, we could respond in record time with the perfect answer tailored specifically to each customer. In turn, we’d log our interactions into the system, adding valuable intelligence about communication preferences, product usage and analytics.
The writing was on the wall, too. Software giants like SalesForce.com were already hinting at social media features that seemed ready to deliver everything we’d dreamed.
It’s 2011. Where’s my jetpack? Where’s my flying car?
So far, the best we have is a lot of talk about Social CRM from analysts and pundits but none of the providers are actually connecting the dots. Overall, monitoring tools monitor and enable engagement, while CRM tools offer shallow products integrating Facebook and Twitter tracking.
In a valiant effort to bridge the gap, Radian6 announced integration with Salesforce.com in 2009. From the R6 dashboard, you could add Cases, Contacts and Leads to a record in Salesforce, and store histories of online interactions. But just like the old-media-marketing dinosaurs the Social Age has pushed towards extinction, this conversation is too one-sided to provide much more than better lead generation and targeting. This might improve the company’s experience, but the CRM provider needs to meet them halfway if we’re going to improve the customer’s experience.
Right now, unless your company has development resources to patch together API’s and create your own custom bridge between monitoring, response management, CRM, and analytics (our approach here at Trustworthy), you’ll have to manually manage multiple services because no one provides a turnkey solution.
And while we’ll be the ones jumping up and down like a New Yorker with a Verizon iPhone when someone does finally offer a complete Social CRM suite, the real winners will be the customers who benefit from what will surely be the next level of customer service.