Onsharp

Everywhere you look you can see evidence that the world is becoming a more connected community because of social sites like Digg, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. The appeal of these social sites is the ability to share information among friends and find people with similar interests. Savvy business leaders also are discovering innovative ways to leverage social sites to enhance customer relationships. Making your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategy more social can provide many benefits. Below are two ways you can jump on the Social CRM bandwagon.

1. Use convenient social tools to easily share customer information internally 
2. Engage in conversations with customers on social sites 

Taking both steps can improve your customer focus as well as your sales. In a marketplace where consumers have countless choices, engaging with and listening to them is critical. 

Start a Conversation

Breaking down the barriers between your internal teams like sales, marketing and service, is a critical first step in becoming more customer-focused. Doing so helps ensure everyone's on the same page in regards to customers and the various actions that impact them. Traditionally, keeping everyone up-to-speed has been time-intensive. Who has time for yet another meeting? Adopting quick and easy tools like Chatter across your teams can help start the customer-focused conversations you need to have-conversations about client projects, feedback, unmet needs, and solutions. 

Join the Conversation

Your social media presence should encourage conversations with potential and current clients. Learn from those conversations and share that insight across your company. Consider tools like HubSpot, which is a service that helps you track your customers' social media and activity on your company's website. In addition, information gleaned from HubSpot can be integrated with your internal CRM system. Making these types of connections and acting on the increased customer insight goes a long way to making your CRM more social.

Track the Conversation

Do you know what your customers are saying about you? If you don't, you should. By using sites like www.socialmention.com, you can find out what people are saying about your company, staff, products, and service. This site serves up additional insight, like telling you what the "social sentiment" is toward a specific keyword, like CRM. You can use the tools on this helpful site to understand what's being said about your business and how the social world feels about topics important to your industry. (Lucky for us, people are pretty positive about social CRM!)

Don't wait any longer to start, join, and track social conversations. It's likely many of your customers are "social creatures," so it makes sense for your CRM strategy to "go social." Would you like to talk to someone about "going social" in your business? Tweet to us (@onsharp) or like us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/Onsharp or schedule a consultation with a consultant!