Loving Your Customers: Social CRM is Making It Actually Happen!
by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

Without customers there isn’t a business. Yet companies often operate like the customer isn’t a priority. In comes social media and changes everything. How a company treats customers is no longer behind the wall. It used to be just between the customer and the company, whether the interaction channel was email or a call… But now, companies behaving badly, can’t hide behind the wall. Social media is outing them.

What is great is that the customer’s voice is now heard; echoed in fact from the bowels of Twitter to the tips of Facebook and more. What’s sad — at least to me — is that it took “outside in” technology to drive change.

I used to be a systems integrator, giving advice on how company’s should treat customers. You know, the technology they should buy to make great experiences- for employees and customers… What processes to change that make more sense and how to treat people.

It felt like a large boulder, being pushed up a steep mountain. Change was difficult, resisted and well down right mind boggling. You’d think if you could help a company be more customer-centric, they’d realize they could be more profitable. Message often not received.

“Outside in” technology, meaning social media, which gives the customer the voice, is driving change. Change that has long been needed. Ask any room full of people- I do when I speak – and they will tell you for the most part they down right hate Customer Service.

Many companies are now doing the right thing, but its taken a Witness Factor to get them to change. That Witness is the ears and eyes of millions of people who see what people say about companies in social media. Like cave painting on walls that last forever, reviews, comments, ratings… are plastered all over the internet. And customers read them and make decisions to buy or not based more on peer reviews than PR and Advertising.

So what is social CRM? What is our topic at Social Media Club LA about? It’s about this transformation of business to a more conscious, kind and present way of being and interacting in the world. It’s real-time and its authentic (meaning you don’t speak in social media channels like a scrubbed and pruned corporate press release- you use you real voice- like a human being).

source: http://mashable.com/2010/05/21/social-crm/

Our topic is about looking at the customer lifecycle- Marketing, Sales, Customer Service and determining how to drive not just satisfaction, but loyalty and advocacy. It’s about how to use technology to make that happen, easier and better.

If you are a small business – you might want a system like Nimble that can help you with contact management- both traditional and social. If you are a large company- you might want an integrated system that combines traditional and social media interactions like SAP for marketing, sales and service.

Whatever technology you choose, remember one thing- putting customer’s first means that you have a chance to drive loyalty and profitability.

Many people have written about Zappos. I have. What I find extraordinary about them is that they choose– as their main profit strategy – to make Customer Service the best it could be. This flew in the face of all tradition. Customer Service had been at the bottom of the barrel of priorities for most companies. But what their leadership knew was that a new type of company was to be born. One that put customer’s first.

Many people say, “Hey don’t compare me to Zappos. We aren’t them.” I ask, “Why wouldn’t you want to be?”
They went from $0 to $1 Billion in ten years…
Ya know.. maybe there is something to this customer-centric stuff, this CRM stuff, this social CRM stuff.

Come find out! http://smclascrm.eventbrite.com/ See you there! Learn. Share. Grow!™ - @DrNatalie

You can see more of Dr. Natalie’s musing here:
Ebook: Social Media ROI Myths and Truths | YouTube Videos: On ROI of Social Media | White Papers:  Social Media ROI | New Book on Facebook: Like My Stuff – How to Monetize Your Facebook Fans With Social Commerce & A Facebook Store | Twitter: @drnatalie | LinkedIn: DrNataliePetouhoff | website/blog: www.drnatalienews.com/blog

Have you met Gary May? He’s one of our guest speakers at next Tuesday’s panel on Social CRM! Gary is the President of imacsweb, an interactive marketing and consulting service. His blog is pretty interesting as he is an expert in the automotive industry. Consider keeping an eye on his thoughts in the auto industry, social media and online marketing.  Better still, stop by at the ING DIRECT Cafe LA next Tuesday, February 21 when we grill Gary and the rest of our speakers on social CRM!

IM@CS continually evolves to build, educate on and support platforms in critical sales, branding, process, media and best practice application for forward-thinking companies and those trying to grasp the online space. We work with retail, manufacturers, portals and service providers that have a large consumer-facing business, primarily in the automotive industry as well as luxury and specialty markets and other high-end services. IM@CS also specializes in working with companies investigating opportunities within the automotive market to make sense of a diverse and dynamic environment, providing insight, direction and solid fundamentals to achieve success.

Overall IM@CS provides greater opportunities through brand awareness, reputation management, process improvement and sales organization coaching for companies looking to create sustainable improvements and add to their bottom line.

What IM@CS does is more relevant than training, enterprise processes, networking or guidance. We offer solutions based on your real world needs, not what others do nor what worked last year.

Gary also co-founded and head efforts for a social media marketing and promotion company focused on multi-vertical success called PromoSPARK. We allow businesses to get the SPARK for their social networks! www.promospark.net

If you’re a geezer like me who has worked in tandem with sales, you’ll know what GoldMine is. If you don’t know what GoldMine is, that’s ok. The founder of GoldMine, Jon Ferrara, is also the founder of Nimble!

Nimble is a social CRM program. If your company has a customer service team that also answers customer questions on social media, you might want to take a look at Nimble. I like to see the numbers – number of customers assisted via social media vs number of calls decreased/increased as a result. If you’re a small business, you might want to dig around the Nimble website to see whether you could use a streamlined, robust program for your customer service needs (and social media).

Got questions? Ask Jon on next Tuesday, February 21 when he joins the panel at our next SMCLA event! RSVP now, and we’ll see you there.

A social entrepreneur at heart, Jon Ferrara founded GoldMine Software in 1989 where he served as the executive vice president of the company until it was sold in 2000. GoldMine is one of the best selling CRM products that helped pioneer the entire Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market. During this time, Ferrara was awarded the
Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award while GoldMine was named PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice in 1993 and again in 1995, 1996 and 1997.

After selling GoldMine and watching the immense rise in power social media was experiencing, Ferrara entered the start up world again when he noticed a distinct lack of any products that effectively combined Relationship Management, Social Listening and Engagement, and Collaboration with Sales and Marketing. In 2009, Jon founded Nimble to create an extensive Social Business platform to fill this gap.

The wonderful team at SAP are sponsoring our Tuesday, February 21 event on Social CRM. Please welcome them into the SMCLA family!

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP  helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. Today, SAP is on an innovation hyperdrive.  With a user-centric lens on Big Data, Mobility, Cloud, and Social, SAP is helping people like you to have relevant and smarter 360-degree customer conversations like never before – without requiring you to dig up your ERP and CRM foundations.  In addition to solutions for the B2B sector, SAP CRM extends its reach to companies representing B2C consumers – delivering the entire customer experience unified across multiple channels.  Stop by and experience the new SAP. http://www.sap.com

“It’s incredibly exciting to be a part of Social Media Club LA,” says Vinay Iyer, VP of Global Marketing for SAP CRM, “not only can our offerings inspire the social CMO, but we are exemplars of social inbound and outbound marketing – we grew our own social channels two-fold last year and we’re leveraging best practices through our participation in Social Media Club.

For further information on SAP CRM, visit them at http://www.sap.com/crm and follow them on Twitter @sapcrm.

Chris here. Our fellow board member, Charles Miller, will be on our Tuesday panel on Social CRM. Don’t know what that is? Come by and learn more from the pros! We’ve changed venues – so please head on over to ING DIRECT Cafe LA on February 21!

Charles Miller - @chasmiller

A leading Social Media practitioner, speaker and panelist, Charles Miller has advised CMOs, CIOs, and CTOs on Social Media best practices, sCRM, and customer communities nationally. Within DIRECTV, he has influenced and helped employ Social Media use throughout the enterprise including advising PR, Marketing, Engineering, Research, Field Services and Mobile Advanced Services. His operations team is both U.S. and internationally based with overseas travel to Manila, Hong Kong, London, Paris and Rome.

Forrester Research and Frost & Sullivan seek out his insight for studies, publications have noted his expertise, and case studies are now featured in recent business books for adapting business practices based on online feedback. Charles has been featured on Mashable, ComputerWorld, ZDNet,
Financial Times of London, and CNNLive.com. In addition, he’s spoken at the Harvard Faculty Club, Stanford Faculty Club,  and the SOCAP International Conference in Atlanta.

For those of you who are DirecTV customers, here’s your chance to ask Charles about your satellite account. I kid. Seriously speaking, I think you should ask about the complexities that he and his team deal with – not just with the usual customer service issues but the integration of social media with the customer service department(s).  With Charles, I’m interested in whether he thinks DirecTV’s social CRM program has moved the needle for the company. Have they saved money by integrating the two?

We’ll find out on Tuesday, February 21 at ING DIRECT Cafe LA! RSVP and we’ll see you there!

Learn more about our President and speaker for next week’s Social CRM event, Dr. Natalie Petouhoff. Haven’t RSVP‘d yet? Here’s your chance – see ya at ING DIRECT Cafe LA next Tuesday!

Natalie Petouhoff

Dr. Natalie, a former social media Forrester Analyst, heads up the Social Media
Executive Education Division at UCLA and is President of the Social Media Club Los Angeles. Her experiences as an Ad Agency executive and management consultant provides unique business insights that she shares as an accomplished keynote speaker, quoted expert and featured guest expert on TV and radio. Dr. Natalie helps companies understand how social media affects the bottom-line and to create executable strategies that provide real business value. She does this by benchmarking the “As Is” state of social media initiatives and compares them to “Could Be” via best practices. With this insight, businesses can create a world-class social media and digital presences and monetize their investments. Dr. Natalie wrote the world’s first social media ROI calculator.

What are you going to ask Dr. Natalie? I am interested in her thoughts regarding bad social CRM. I bet there are some compelling case studies on companies whose CRM programs have not integrated with their social media team’s customer service ‘program.’ Of the companies she’s worked with, I’d like to know if she thought there was one superstar that married social media and CRM well.

If you’re interested to hear her answer, drop by the ING DIRECT Cafe LA on Tuesday, February 21! I’ll be there and so will several other sCRM pros. (Make them work for their dinner!)

Hello, fans and members! Please note our venue change!

Our “Loving Your Customer: Social CRM” panel on Tuesday, February 21. The good people at ING DIRECT Cafe Los Angeles are graciously hosting us again, with all-you-can-drink sodas, coffees and teas, as well as (my favorite) FREE PARKING!

ING DIRECT Cafe Los Angeles is located at 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025.

They’re right on the corner of Santa Monica and Cotner. Entrance to the parking below the building is located on Santa Monica Blvd, just east of Cotner.

RSVP to our Social CRM panel now! We’ll see you there!

ING DIRECT Cafe LA: http://ow.ly/95uJB

Truly love your customers?
Here’s your Top 10 Brand relationship guide.

More and more, brands are focusing on how to build stronger relationships with their customers. While tools are important, they are only a means to the end. In keeping with this time of year, the following list will seem very familiar to the best advice on build lasting relationships in our personal lives. How many of these values are present in your brand today?

1. Be important in their lives
Unless your product or service is an important part of your customer’s lives your relationship is doomed from the beginning. Find out what matters most to your customers and fill those needs. Yes, they have the right to change their minds.

2. Do not nag your customers
The value of your product or service should be clear and complement their lives. Frustrated brands trying to get even more from their relationship can sometimes be demanding or complain about — and sometimes to — their customers. Don’t do it. It’s a relationship killer.

3. Show mutual respect
Long lasting relationships are built and maintained by respecting others time and values. The values you project as a brand will attract customers — both good and bad.

4. Maintain open communications
Customers can make the best decisions with good information. Customers today trust the collective wisdom of strangers over friends, families and brands. Share all you can in the open to clear up misunderstandings and myths.

5. Be trustworthy
With brand trust at all time lows, brands that can be trusted and counted on in both good and bad times will attract customers. Why leave one of the most important differentiators on the table for short term gains?

6. Stay relevant and be innovative
Times and tastes change. Even “classic” companies need a fresh approach to keep the relationship alive. Long time customers are rooting for you to bring them new things that enhance their relationship with you.

7. Be open to constructive criticism
It’s hard to hear criticism, it can be uncomfortable and even awkward. As tempting as it may be, don’t shoot the messenger. Criticism is a gift to be valued. Remember, they can always leave instead and never share how your could have done better.

8. You will make mistakes.
No brand is perfect and everyone makes mistakes once in a while. Where the difference begins is how a brand responds. Acknowledge the mistake and move quickly to resolve the issue. They will appreciate knowing they are worth your efforts.

9. Don’t forget special days
While every day and interaction matters, don’t forget the important days in your relationship. Anniversaries, birthdays, key customer milestones or announcements. Remembering these show you are paying attention and want the relationship to last.

10. Be responsible, you are part of a larger community.
Finally, it’s more than about just you and your customer. Brands are part of a larger community of brands and you will be weighed in context with partners and actions outside the relationship. Stay aware and active, and you will know how to fit in and participate.

If all these seems like too much work, perhaps it’s time for you and your customers to reevaluate your relationship.

Charles Miller – DirecTV

Charles Miller is the Director of Digital Care and Social Media for DirecTV. He is also an SMCLA Board member as well as one of our speakers at this month’s panel “Loving Your Customer: Social CRM.” Stop by McCabe’s Bar & Grill in Santa Monica on Tuesday, Feb. 21 and talk shop with Charles! RSVP HERE.