Applying the Eight Building Blocks of CRM to Social Media

The Eight Building Blocks of CRM Our very latest innovation emphasises the additional considerations that organisations but need to factor in across each building block from a social CRM perspective. Many of the social CRM projects Gartner has studied over the past three years have been in the "pioneer" phase, where individuals experiment and break new ground, now don't measure benefits. We are nevertheless seeing a desire to move to the "settler" phase, where a more structured approach is needed to get business results. Clearly, to achieve this settler status, commitment to all eight of the building blocks will be required.

Gartner defines social CRM as a business strategy that mutually benefits cloud-based communities and the business by fostering engagement during generating opportunities for sales, marketing and customer service. The key considerations within this definition that organisations need to take heed of are:

Social CRM Processes Customer process re-engineering to ensure each process flows down a logical path from the customer's perspective is a common investment area and a key influencer of the customer experience. When executing against a social CRM strategy, specific processes spanning sales, marketing and customer service will potentially be impacted. The key is to determine what processes are most appropriate to be driven socially, and where mass collaboration adds value, ensuring that there is an upside to the customer, as then as the business.

Social CRM Innovation Most, however not all, CRM initiatives require some form of innovation to enable the CRM strategy. Within the social CRM area, the marketplace is in the extreme fragmented, with over 100 vendors, each providing a specific functional capability. Most have annual revenue of less than $1 million and are not profitable. No one vendor can but provide a holistic social CRM suite that can facilitate execution of socially driven sales, marketing and customer service processes. All in all, over the then and there two years we expect significant market consolidation and much tighter integration between social processes and traditional processes across sales, marketing and customer service.