Posts Tagged ‘business problems’

Business Problems that Social CRM Helps Organizations Solve

13 COMMENTS
August 22nd, 2010

(White to move and Mate in 2, can you figure out the answer?)

There’s been a lot of talk about what SCRM is (social customer relationship management) and how it should be defined.  There has also been a lot of conversation around Social CRM from a technology standpoint in terms of vendor offerings.  I’ll admit I’ve engaged in the definition wars as well as it’s hard to resist however I’ve come to realize that none of this matters because at the end of the day we are looking to solve a business problem that organizations are faced with.  Nobody asks for a Social CRM solution and nobody has a Social CRM problem.  What we are dealing with is an evolution of business.

There hasn’t been much conversation around business use cases and specific business problems that Social CRM helps solve.  I thought I’d start the conversation, at least on this site.

I actually started writing far more than I should have and really scaled everything back to what I hope is an easy to understand yet comprehensive explanation of some of the business challenges that Social CRM is seeking to solve and how.  I probably should have put greater emphasis on the “people” and “strategy” aspect of making this work so I’ll clarify that here.  Every solution needs to be supported by an existing CRM framework, meaning people, process, and technology.  I don’t want anyone to read this thinking that just deploying a monitoring tool or a community platform is going to solve anything because it won’t.  Technology is always an enabler and nothing more.

I used the term “Transformative Solution” because I believe that the title of the framework for social business that Mike Fauscette and his team created at IDC is spot on, what is the title you ask? “Social Business Framework: Using People as a Platform to Enable Transformation” (personally I would have used the term “empowering” instead of “using” but you get the point, either way it’s definitely worth a read).  I don’t want to comment on the actual framework yet because I need to spend more time reading through it but at first glance it made sense.  Let’s get back to the point of business evolution or transformation and why this is significant.  In order to understand this evolution or transformation I think it makes sense to start off with a business problem, a traditional approach to solving that problem, an evolved or transformative approach to solving that same problem, and a brief explanation of why this transformative approach is an improvement.

I really wanted to go through the 18 Social CRM use cases that Jeremiah Owyang from Altimeter created but honestly I just didn’t have the energy so I thought I would give it a go with the two examples below (just to get started).

What I put together is not perfect but I really just wanted to show how Social CRM is seeking to solve existing business challenges which organizations are faced with.  Social CRM isn’t about social media and there is no magic voodoo here, it’s simply a different approach to solving a business problem that has and will always exist within most organizations around the world.  In fact, I think it would be great for everyone to contribute some ideas to this.  If you have a business problem your organization is looking to solve or have an idea of how Social CRM can help solve an existing (or new) business problem, then leave a comment below.

I’m sure many of you reading this can add to what I started or perhaps make changes/edits to what I have put together.  I actually think this approach makes a lot of sense for vendors who are looking to sell their tools and/or products.

So what do you think?  Does this make sense?  Are you able to see the difference between a traditional and a transformative solution to the same business problem?  I welcome any feedback to improve this as I’m hoping to incorporate more tables and similar breakdowns in future posts.

TAGS: business problems, Business Problems that Social CRM Helps Organizations Solve, business use cases, customer relationship management, scrm, Social CRM, social crm solutions, social crm use cases

The Business Problems With Social Media ROI

11 COMMENTS
September 1st, 2009

business-problems-social-media-roi

I’d love to have a follow up post to this on the technical problems with measuring social media ROI, so if you’d like to somehow contribute to that please let me know (since I’m not a very technical person).  I’m not going to go over every single business challenge, just the major ones that I believe I true obstacles for large organizations.

CMO Lifespan

The average lifespan of a CMO is around 2 years.  This means that by the time a social media strategy is researched, developed, created, launched, and measured; that the CMO may not even be around to see results; therefore why fund it?  Many CMOs would much rather focus on investing dollars where they can see a return while they are still employed at their company.

No Metrics

Lots of companies still don’t know what the average price per transaction is, what the customer purchase cycle is, how much time support people spend on the phone, etc.  This means that for a lot of companies there is no place to start benchmarking from.  So, before you can even start a social media strategy you have to worry about getting benchmark numbers and data.  A lot of companies are lacking in the tools and approach to measuring ROI and any sort of impact from social media.  This makes it virtually impossible for someone such as myself to come in and help an organization.  Neither myself nor any other consultant or agency is going to be able to measure any type of ROI for you unless you know where you are starting from.

Corporate Culture

Some companies love social media and other companies fear it.  A lot of companies want social media but they don’t know why they want it or what it will mean for their organization.  Companies need to have realistic expectations and time frames for social media; companies also need to realize what social media means in terms of making their organization social, transparent, and authentic.  Legal departments and many senior level executives fear social media because it means they are losing control of their brand and their image.  Other senior level employees believe that social media is a waste of time and that their employees should not be spending their time on sites such as facebook or twitter.  Addressing the issue of corporate culture means looking at all of these issues and more to see how the company views social media and what changes need to be made before the company can adopt it.

Focus on Social Media and not on the Product or Service

It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on marketing, if you don’t have a great product to market that people want then you’re just wasting your time and your money.  I think at this point a lot of consultants are just taking on any and every project they can get their hands on, regardless of the quality of the product or service.  This isn’t helping anyone.  Companies have money to spend on marketing and many consultants have money they want to take regardless of the project; this is a lose lose situation for the company, the consultant, and the industry.

Corporate Fragmentation

Among executives and senior level employees there is still a very big gap in terms of understanding and expectations from social media.  There is a lack of communication and collaboration for social media efforts.  Ownership, budgeting, leadership, accountability, and data/metrics are things that a lot of execs and senior level folks can’t seem to agree on or talk about.  Changing your company into a social organization is going to take time, I’m talking 1 year+ (if you’re lucky); you’re literally changing the way you do business and that’s not going to happen in a month or two.

Semantics

A big problem I see today is that we have way to many definitions, acronyms, and jargon to describe things in the social media space.  We’ve all heard at least 3-4 definitions for ROI, and we keep making up more on a daily basis.  We have influence scores, sentiment scores, indexes for influences and engagement; and a plethora of other things.  The problem is that instead of us speaking in business terms we are speaking in social media terms (which are oftentimes made up) which don’t make sense to executives that are the ones funding these initiatives.

Tools

I think it’s great that we have a few tools out there such as Techrigy and Radian6 that are helping companies measure and monitor the social media space but they are still not near being able to show or understand how companies can measure ROI.  Right now the focus is on sentiment, brand mentions, conversations, etc which is great; but we need to tie in all these things to a dollar amount at the end of the process.

These are some of the big business issues I see in the social media space that are really hindering our ability to understand and to measure social media ROI; I’m sure you can think of a few others out there so please share them in the comments!

TAGS: business problems, measuring social media, social media roi