Forrester’s 7 Steps to Social CRM Success

Forrester defines social CRM as the way customers buy from and interact with organizations of all types through social media. In its recent paper “Social CRM Goes Mainstream,” Forrester shines a new light on customer relationship management. We are challenged to “embrace new ideas about customer behaviors, innovative business capabilities, and fresh technologies as part of (our) CRM solutions understanding and vocabulary.”

Yes! It is time to reframe our idea of CRM to include the sphere of customer-to-customer relationships. If you were thinking that this might not be such an easy task, you’re right. The experts at Forrester kindly get us started with their seven steps to achieving social CRM success:

1. Initiate social CRM experiments immediately.
2. Benchmark customer and prospect social readiness.
3. Define your social customer objectives.
4. Assess your social CRM capabilities.
5. Understand the social CRM solutions landscape.
6. Map out your social CRM capabilities-building plan.
7. Define your CRM metrics for success.

These seven steps seem a bit daunting to undertake when your customers are collaborating, right now, in real-time, and you haven’t any time to benchmark your readiness, set objectives, and map out a plan.

Don’t panic. Yes, your customers have formed opinions about you, your level of service, the quality of your product, and are likely expressing that opinion somewhere on the web. And, yes, it would be a good idea to find out where, when, and how this is happening.

But remember, you can’t really affect the dialogue in these forums. What you can (and must) do is take control of this conversation by providing the space for your customers to readily communicate with you and, maybe more importantly, with each other.

This is the crux of Forrester’s social CRM approach. By creating the tools (blogs, wikis, forums, customer feedback tools, social networking sites and other platforms) you can then mine the data, influence the outcome, and demonstrate that your organization is listening and actually doing something with this extremely important feedback.

Forrester is right. Planning your social CRM strategy is absolutely essential to ensure you are taking the right approach for your organization. So start immediately. And begin by reading “Social CRM Goes Mainstream.”