A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

By Bob Warfield, Helpstream CEO

Table of Contents

e World Changed While CRM Slept… 1

e New Social CRM World Order 6

e Social Media Big Picture for Business 8

You Already Know How to Be Social 10

e Social CRM Virtuous Cycle 12

Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service 16

Social CRM Strategies for Marketing 19

Social CRM Strategies for Sales 23

Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started 26

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield i

The World Changed While CRM Slept…

Is Social CRM a paradigm shi or just another channel like email, chat, KB, kiosks, and the like? If it’s just another channel, we can continue business as usual by just plugging that channel in without any major change in our strategy for engagement. If it’s a paradigm shi, we need to re-evaluate our overall strategy. Understanding this distinction is critical in laying our plans to deal with our Social Customers.

Since it’s always good to begin with definitions, here is mine (hat tip to Wikipedia): a paradigm shi is a change in a fundamental model.

Let’s look at a brief history of the CRM world and see if we can spot any paradigm shis:

CRM originally came into being with a bent towards “Command andControl.” It was all about ensuring that sales people were doing (and reporting) on their jobs via Sales Force Automation (SFA), and ensuringthat customers’ problems were actually being tracked and dealt with viaCase Management. As these systems were coming into being, we hadwhat I will call the “Dinosaur” era of the customer.

In this era, most of the power belonged to the manufacturers, hence myreference to Henry Ford’s original concept of not giving the customerany choices at all on the color of their motorcars. e customers them-selves were docile and thick-skinned creatures. e big ones could letout a mighty roar, but they seldom operated in groups and most ac-cepted whatever fates were dealt out to them by customer service. Aerall, there weren’t too many manufacturers, and if you needed the prod-uct you needed it.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 1

e friction of information exchange about the consumer experience was at an all time high during this era. Most of the information available to consumers was essentially the company’s marketing. e press was reluctant ever to bash a vendor too deeply, because they relied on the advertising dollarsfrom said vendors. Customers themselves had virtually no mechanism to spread the word, whethergood or bad. Companies invested fortunes in one way broadcasting of advertising to build brands.Inter-consumer communication was largely limited to brand signaling. “is is a good brand,” or perhaps, “is brand is cheaply made or unreliable.”

Knowledge Bases were introduced during this era as a means of equipping agents with more (ahem)knowledge with which to dispatch their cases (e.g. customer questions). Later on, the idea of self-service came to forefront. If Customer Service organizations were going to hire agents who were so ill-informed that all they could do was parrot their Knowledge Base, perhaps the customer themselvescould be prevailed on to answer their own questions by searching that same KB.

Note that self-service represented a major paradigm shi and is not just another channel:

u Users were helping themselves. e participants went from a 1:1 agent to customer, to 0:1.

u e economics of customer service were radically affected.

u e customer experience was (obviously) radically affected. When self-service is working well and the customer gets an immediate answer back that is correct, it’s a beautiful thing.

u e organizational support and infrastructure were similarly radically affected. Having a customerfriendly KB required a different approach than just letting the agents si through a private KB filledwith all sorts of garbage and old cases that might contain confidential information. Organizing these KB’s is a whole discipline in and of itself.

u Self-service introduced a radically different strategy for how customer service was approached. e goal became to avoid the phone call and all other channels, a strategy that came to be called “deflection.”

Let’s stop for a minute and compare and contrast that to an alternate channel: E-mail. Does email really radically change the rules of the game, or is it simply carrying on a conversation much as youwould on the phone (where it all started)? While email feels different to the customer certainly than aphone call, it doesn’t seem to me that it rises to the level of difference that the self-service KB did. Inparticular, it did not affect the economics, strategy, or organizational support and infrastructure innearly the way that self-service did. As such, it was an incremental benefit.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 2

CRM originally came into being

with a bent towards “Command

and Control.” It was all about

ensuring that sales people were

doing (and reporting) on their jobs

via Sales Force Automation (SFA),

and ensuring that customers’

problems were actually being

tracked and dealt with via Case

Management.

Towards the end of the Dinosaur Customer era and the beginning of the Neanderthal era a new paradigm shi started to be born called “Soware as a Service” or SaaS. I’ve talked at length about why SaaS is a paradigm shi (it’s a major theme of mine!) as have many others, so I won’t belabor that point. What’s interesting about the Neanderthal era is the shi in power from manufacturing todistribution. Companies like Dell and Wal-Mart were happily disintermediating manufacturers fromtheir customers. e World Wide Web exploded onto the scene and E-commerce via the Internet wasthe ultimate extension of all this. Suddenly, Customers had a lot more choices. Comparison shoppingcould be done from the comfort of one’s own home. Competition over price and features were essen-tial dimensions of the consumer experience. A lot of information about price and features was deliv-ered over the web, but we still lacked credible ways for consumers to communicate. ey simply hadmore professionally-prepared content about products and more distribution possibilities to enablethem to purchase more easily. is is a time when CRM really did go to sleep for quite a while. Asgood as SaaS is, it is ironic that it appeared in the distribution era and is essentially a new means of dis-tribution.

e next era was the era of Guitar Man, so named in jest over the man whose guitar was damaged byUnited Airlines. is is the era of the Social Web, and all things 2.0. is is an era where the very dynamics of the relationship between customers and their vendors has changed radically. Finally, thecustomer really is always right. Worse (from the vendor’s perspective), that customer is now equippedwith a mighty megaphone with which to tell everyone who is interested in hearing what they like ordislike about their Customer Experience. at’s right, not just about the products, but about theirwhole experience:u How was their experience finding the product?u What was it like to purchase (the part I hate about buying cars)?u Was it everything they hoped for once they got it into their hands?u How well has it held up?u And most importantly for this discussion, how was the service?

We’ve gone from Command and Control, to a situation where the customer is firmly in control, at least insofar as their ability to damage the vendor’s reputation out of all proportion to the revenues received by the vendor. As I put it in a recent post, the Web makes even little ice cubes into dangerous icebergs.

As Paul Greenberg has so eloquently put it: Social CRM is: “e company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.”

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 3

The World Wide Web exploded

onto the scene and E-commerce

via the Internet was the ultimate

extension of all this. A lot of

information about price and

features was delivered over

the web, but we still lacked

credible ways for consumers

to communicate.

How can a response to something as game changing as the Customer taking control be any less than aparadigm shi? No mere new channel can regain that control. It used to be said that a customer told1.8 friends, and an unhappy customer told 10. No longer. Guitar Man told over 5 million about his unhappy experience. at is so many orders of magnitude in change that we have to look at it as a true paradigm shi.

Let’s look at what all has changed in the Social CRM era:

u e players: Customers now communicate frictionlessly with each other. ese communicationsare not 1:1, they are Many:Many.

u e playing field: ese communications may go on in arenas completely outside the vendor’scontrol such as Twitter or Facebook. It is in the vendor’s best interests to sponsor venues of theirown as well as to visit these outside venues.

u e qualitative nature of the conversation: Social is as much about collaboration as it is communication. Traditional CRM in all of its guises until now had largely been communicative.Social Collaboration involves much more sophisticated signaling mechanisms, such as the elaborate expertise scoring and voting capabilities in these products.

u e concerns: Any loss of control brings tremendous concerns to the vendors, fear even.

u e economics: I have customers at Helpstream who say their agents are able to handle 3x as many customers aer installing our Social CRM suite as they could before with ordinary Case Management and Self-Service. ose are paradigm-shiing economics right there.

u e opportunity: At last, we are shed of command and control and we can really start to have acustomer relationship to manage with our Customer Relationship Management system. We canquit simply recording what happened aer it is already to late to change and actually do somethingabout it.

u e strategies: Clearly, with so many other changes, the strategies have to be changed to deal with the rest. Deflection was the watchword in the prior era. Systems and strategies were erectedthat isolated vendors from their customers behind walls of IVR menu trees on the telephones, call centers in far away nations, multiple tiers of tech support agents (so you had to escalate to get someone who could actually answer a question), and self-service KB’s whose aim was to avoid talking to you at all.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 4

We’ve gone from Command and

Control, to a situation where the

customer is firmly in control, at

least insofar as their ability to

damage the vendor’s reputation

out of all proportion to the

revenues received by the vendor.

e new era demands engagement. Try being silent in a social situation the next you find yourself inone. Imagine being in a large auditorium filled with your customers. You are up on a stage. ere arebright spotlights focused on you. Everyone in the audience has a microphone. Some of them are veryunhappy. Can you be silent when they speak? Can you fob them off on someone who doesn’t have anyanswers while the rest watch? Of course not!

Given all that, and we ain’t seen nothin’ yet folks, one has to conclude that Social CRM is the biggestparadigm shi the CRM world has ever seen. Do not try to look at it as just one more tool in the toolbox that you can take or leave.

Welcome to the age of Guitar Man!

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 5

Imagine being in a large audito-

rium filled with your customers.

You are up on a stage. There are

bright spotlights focused on you.

Everyone in the audience has a

microphone. Some of them are

very unhappy. Can you be silent

when they speak?

The New Social CRM World Order

Having awakened from a dearth of CRM innovation to discover the landscape radically changed and worse, to discover that as vendors our customers now control the conversation, we’re behind the eight ball!

e CRM world is in the middle of not one but two massive paradigm shis:

ose two paradigm shis are the shi to SaaS, already well under way, and new massive shi to Social. e amazing thing about the second shi is that our customers have already made the shi. Many companies think of Social as the new shiny thing. Meanwhile,their customers have been using Social for a long time now, and they’re wondering why their vendors still can’t manage to connect in the way that they’re already well accustomed to connecting withfriends and family.

Customer ink released a startling survey in June that said 2/3’s of US consumers are ready to engage with Social Media for service andsupport right NOW! Gartner says Web 2.0 will have transformative impact (their most impactful category) on the mainstream within twoyears. Let me say again, that is massive impact on the mainstream, not some bunch of Early Adopters still in the experimentation stage,within two years.

Some of the people hearing this asked me whether “Revolution” wasn’tthe more appropriate term than “Retooling.” My problem is we’re past

the Revolution. e Revolution ended and our Customers won the war. ey’re waiting on us to catchup and give them what they think of as table stakes these days. It’s a retooling problem in the samesense that manufacturing plants retool when they are no longer competitive with the old tools. I’ll goon record right here and now saying I can’t imagine any company that uses CRM today not having anactive Social CRM program in place within the next 5 years. It will become a matter of survival. Your customers won’t tolerate anything less.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 6

At the same time the web is driving a subtle shi in how we think about products. Everything is becoming a service. It has to be when you look at the ramifications of frictionless communicationamong customers. e old Product ink had us engaging up until the point of sale, and once we hadthe customer’s money, engagement became optional. It was an exception handling mechanism for thatvery small (we hoped) portion of the customer base that did not have a normal happy experience. Customer Service was a cost center, and that cost was to be minimized in every way we could. Mechanisms ranging from much higher quality control (so they wouldn’t have a problem in the firstplace) to various means of deflection so customers would self-service and not make an expensive call to an agent were tried. Companies got further and further from their customers, ultimately entrusting that engagement far offshore and outsourced to entirely different companies.

Today we have to reverse that trend of isolating ourselves from customers. No matter what you dosell—product or service—engage like you’re selling a service. ink about the emotional response customers will have to your service. Figure out how to use Social Media to facilitate and personalizethat engagement.

Related Articles

What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 7

No matter what you do sell—

product or service—engage like

you’re selling a service. Think

about the emotional response

customers will have to your

service. Figure out how to use

Social Media to facilitate and

personalize that engagement.

The Social Media Big Picture for Business

Ok, from our first two chapters it’s clear that the world has changed dramatically. Customers are readyto engage socially with their vendors, and vendors should understand they need to get on with that en-gagement and do it well. But there is still a bit more groundwork to be laid before we dive in to howthat is going to work.

Presumably you’re out reading everything you can get your hands on about Social Media. It’s importantto provide some context and understanding at a big picture level about how it all fits together. For example, what is the difference between Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and Social CRM?

Here is a handy reference to make the distinctions clearer:

Social Media started out in the broad web among consumers. e term Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1996. She wrote:

e Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentiallystatic screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come.

While DiNucci’s concern was largely with Web design and aesthetics, Ifind her commentary an interesting parallel to the discussion of howCustomers have insisted on increasing control. Back in the day, theWeb was a one-way trip from content creator/owner to the contentconsumer.

e Web 2.0 term really took off in 2004 when O’Reilly Media hostedthe first Web 2.0 conference and the description of the term started toget even closer to the parallel I have drawn. Consider Tim O’Reilly’scomment:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused bythe move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understandthe rules for success on that new platform.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 8

Understanding the rules of the new Social CRM platform is what we’re all about with this series of blogposts. In 2006, TIME magazine made the masses of users participating in content creation on the webthe “Person of the Year”:

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before.

Of course any force this powerful is one that business will try to harness to create value, and so Enterprise 2.0 was born.

ere are actually two different classic definitions of E2.0. One has it as any use of Social Media bybusiness. e second popular definition of E2.0, and the one I’ll use here is that of Social Media used by business for internal collaboration among employees. I like that second definition better for a variety of reasons, but primarily because it fits better with the story being told. It’s nothing to be dogmatic about, just be aware that people may mean one of two things when using the term.

Business using Social Media to collaborate on producing content was a very logical extension of the original Web 2.0 movement. Content was becoming cheaper and more plentiful almost by theminute as this movement flourished both inside and outside the walls of Business. But at the sametime, something else interesting was happening.

e view that Social Media is about producing content was the original concept, but this was largely aresult of projecting paper and television content into the web medium. In fact, the web medium is ca-pable of much more. It’s not just a place to broadcast created content more cheaply. It is a place whereit is possible to hold a two way conversation. We don’t need to watch passively. We can be Social, andin fact the user of the Social terms is much more recent than the older concepts.

Once a two way exchange becomes possible, and indeed may be more critical than creating content forthe masses in many ways, a lot changes. e stage is set for Social CRM. If we’re going to be havingconversations, one of the highest value areas for conversation is with our Customers, potential Cus-tomers (e.g. Leads), and Influencers. Yes, we can continue beaming content at them, but if we can en-gage them in conversation, we’re much more likely to have a successful interaction.

In our next installment, I’ll start talking about how to go about being Social in ways that make those in-teractions more likely to be successful. It turns out you already know how to be Social, you just have todraw on that knowledge.

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The stage is set for Social CRM.

If we’re going to be having

conversations, one of the highest

value areas for conversation is

with our Customers, potential

Customers (e.g. Leads), and

Influencers.

You Already Know How to Be Social

What are you waiting for? Your organization already knows how to be Social, though you may not realize it.

It’s not a matter of the tools or finding people that are willing to usethem. Market research abounds that shows how pervasive use of SocialMedia is. Larry Dignan recently wrote that based on Forrester’s irdAnnual Social Technographics Profile, only 18% of the population is notusing Social Media. at represents a striking up trend that went from44% in 2007, to 25% in 2008, and now 18% in 2009. Clearly we’re wellpast the tipping point. In fact, we’re nearly done with adoption.

Perhaps it’s more about understanding how to think about Social Media.As we turn in the series away from the Why? of Social CRM and startworking on the How?, that’s the topic for this post. Let’s get started by looking for analogies in the real world:

Take blogging, which is one of the easiest ways for businesses to getstarted being Social. Blogging has a very good physical world analogy.A blog post is like giving a talk to a group of people where you acceptand answer questions at the end. Pretty simple, right? Your business

would know how to give a talk to a group, and thinking about your blog as a series of such talks is deadon in terms of informing your strategy and tactics for what to blog about, what sort of tone to use, andso forth. It’s easy to see how to blog when you start thinking this way.

How about Twitter? For me Twitter is like being at a crowded, noisy, and oh-so-hip club or party.ere is so much going on that you can barely hear yourself think. You struggle to catch little snatchesof conversations, and they’re all around you. It’s hard to keep them all straight, but you’re constantlybeing pulled towards one or another and you chime in with a few words of your own at the most inter-esting ones.

I liken Facebook to Lunch Room cliques at school or the Water Cooler conversations at work. You’rewith friends telling them what’s going on, laughing together, and generally having a good time. epace is a little easier than at that crowded noisy club we call Twitter. It’s less dense but with more depth.Still, it is the water cooler and you’re not allowed to hang out there for hours at a time getting reallydeep, though people do.

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Paul Greenberg gave me a great one along these lines, and that is Yelp. My family loves Yelp, because it helps us to discover interesting new restaurants wherever we go. But Yelp also has a Social Review aspect. Paul says that Yelp’s Social Reviews are like being at a restaurant and hearingabout your company from a conversation over at the next table. It’s an awkward moment. ey’renot really talking to the company, they’re talking to each other. It’s hard to respond directly to the individual, because all you can do is post your own review (e.g. talk about the business at your owntable and hope they overhear you).

It gets you thinking, doesn’t it?

What about Social CRM, which is really what we’re here to talk about?

e best face to face analogy I know of for Social CRM is that it’s like a User Conference that goes on24x7. Any business that has ever had a successful User Conference knows the tremendous value theyhave. Customers get a chance to rub shoulders with one another and with your experts to learn how toget more value from your products. Contacts are made. A good deal of fun is had and comraderie develops. Companies that invite their best prospects to the user conference will see the likelihood theprospects buy go way up as they are immersed in your customer culture and get to meet people just likethem who are getting tremendous value from your products.

ere are unhappy people too, who came to the conference looking for answers. But you’ve got such apowerful confluence of happy customers and readily available expertise (both from your business andyour successful customers) that they usually don’t stay unhappy for very long. It’s not uncommon tosee total transformations in attitude take place.

at’s what Social CRM is all about, providing an extremely leveraged many-to-many online experience that can do the sorts of things you’d never be able to get to with one-to-one calls or face to face meetings.

I hope you’ve been able to see by now that you really do already know how to be Social in productiveways. Now the question is how to be really good at it and how to maximize your effectiveness. To dothat, you just need a Vision, Some Tools, and a Strategy. Our next chapter will talk about the Vision.

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That’s what Social CRM is all

about, providing an extremely

leveraged many-to-many online

experience that can do the sorts

of things you’d never be able to

get to with one-to-one calls or

face to face meetings.

The Social CRM Virtuous Cycle

In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” to thinkabout it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:

e Virtuous Cycle is all about how to convert Social CRM interactioninto a variety of benefits that touch every part of the organization concerned with customers and prospects. It all starts with CustomerService, and it is a cycle that repeats and grows in strength with each iteration around the circle.

Why start with Customer Service?

I wrote in my blog “You Already Know How to Be Social” that a lot ofwhat you need to know to be successfully Social on the web comes from a basic knowledge of how to interact with people. at applieshere too. If you need to be massively Social, meet as many new peopleas you can, and influence them, do you try to do all that alone? No, ofcourse not. You surround yourself with your friends and activate yournetwork to help out. You could view that as simply mobilizing all of

your employees, but in a world where people trust their peers and not their vendors, your efforts will be much more likely to succeed if you start with your Customers. To do that, you need to create an active and vibrant Customer Community, and doing that requires that you deliver a lot of value to your Customers. What better way than through Customer Service?

Along the way, you’ll discover that Customer Service communities are one of the rare cases that really are win-win situations. Our customers tell us they increase customer satisfaction, drive increased efficiency, and enable them to Crowdsource help delivering Customer Service by having Customers help other Customers. JoAnne Ravielli, VP Customer Service & Support at InfusionSo.com, puts it like this in a Forrester Case Study:

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“Two years ago, we had approximately 1 customer service agent for every 55 customers and a 77% cus-tomer satisfaction rating. Today that ratio is 1 agent to 172 customers-- and with a 87% customer satrating. Customers love to contact us when it’s convenient for them! And that’s the power of social media.e answers are there for them 24/7. e net-net? InfusionSo’s social media initiative saved the company millions of dollars in overall support costs and produced a 10% increase in customer satisfaction.”

It’s rare for companies to generate so much savings (a 3x increase in Customer Service Rep efficiency)along with a commensurate increase in customer satisfaction, but JoAnne’s story is not unique forHelpstream’s customers. ese kind of metrics drive a very successful community adoption aroundCustomer Service, and that’s why we like to say that Customer Service is the On-Ramp for Social CRM.

Having established a successful Customer Service On-Ramp, organizations are ready to take the nextstep on the Virtuous Cycle to Marketing. Once again, there are tremendous benefits to be had from So-cial CRM with a comprehensive strategy. ey range from getting the word of mouth going around theBrand to hearing the Voice of the Customer in various ways to getting down to the bottom line impact of being able to generate more leads and nurture them effectively. Let’s look at each one of these a little more closely.

Understanding Your Customers and the Marketplace

Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedentedopportunity to hear what’s being said both within your own Customer Community and on the broaderweb through Social Monitoring tools. Hearing is the first crucial step, but Understanding doesn’t stopwith Listening and Hearing. Social is all about Engagement and 2-way Conversations. What better wayto Understand than to engage in those Conversations? Listen first, and then verify and refine whatyou’ve heard through Engagement and Conversation until you achieve resonance.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 13

You need to create an active and

vibrant Customer Community,

and doing that requires that you

deliver a lot of value to your

Customers. What better way

than through Customer Service?

Getting the Word Out

Getting the word out is always high on the Marketing agenda, and Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing that. Word of mouth starts with your Customers and making sure Marketing is delivering theright words to the right mouths starts with your Customer Community, which is built on the Customer Service Experience. If your Customers can’t tell your story, you’re lost. Also, don’t underesti-mate the value of your customers in shaping and refining your story before you try to sell it to strangers.It’s part of the Understanding feedback loop. Your Customers will tell you whether your messaging res-onates with their experiences and they’ll give you real life stories (like JoAnne’s above) to put meat onthe bones of your pitch.

Translating it to Leads

OK, you’ve got your messaging all tuned up so it is potent. You’ve gotten some word of mouth goingthrough your Customers. How does all that translate to leads? e answer is that you can’t limit yourefforts at Understanding and Getting the Word Out to your Customers.

Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your Community. Invite them to join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to those audiences. A proper Social Platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalizedexperience that differs for Customers, Prospects, Influencers, and even Competitors and other naysayers, so you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides.

On to Sales

Once you’ve got leads visiting your Community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properlyconfigured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads untilthey’re ready to be sold to. It’s a process of monitoring their activities in the Community and acrossyour other Marketing vehicles until they’ve exhibited clear signs of interest before reaching out.

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Getting the word out is always

high on the Marketing agenda,

and Social CRM is a helpful

vehicle for doing that.

Remember, you’ve also got the opportunity to sell to your existing Customers, assuming you have products or services they haven’t yet bought, so it pays to keep an eye on their community activity soyou can understand their needs. Towards that end , we use a concept we call “Customer Awareness” to describe what needs to happen. To oversimplify, imagine if your salespeople could subscribe tosomething like the Facebook Wall for all of their Accounts and any Opportunities. On this particularkind of Wall, they’d see what each one is doing in the Community. What kinds of content are theydrawn to? What kinds of questions do they ask? What do they answer in response to other’s questions? is kind of Awareness is extremely hard to come by in Sales, and very valuable.

Aside from Awareness, Sales benefits from the three “R”s that Communities can readily offer: Refer-ences, Referrals, and Repeat Business. It’s easiest to sell an existing Customer, provided they’re happy,so Awareness leads to Repeat Business. In this day and age, everyone wants References. ey won’ttake the vendor’s word for anything. Immersing prospects in a Community of happy customers is a fastway to deliver some informal referencing type benefits. is is a powerful sales tool if you’re set up tomanage it. Do you know who in your Community will give the best references of this sort? e NetPromoter style surveys are one approach, but Social Platforms can collect all sorts of information thatcan tell you in a hurry who the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters really are.

Lastly, but far from least, Referrals are also extremely valuable. Do you make it easy for your CustomerCommunity to give you referrals? Do you incent them to do so in some way, or at least remind them tothink about it?

Conclusion

at’s the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. It starts with Customers, and if you execute well, it ends witheven more Customers, from which to start the next Cycle.

In our next series of posts in the series, we’ll be drilling down with more detail on how each function,Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales, can extract value from Social CRM.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 15

In this day and age, everyone

wants References. They won’t

take the vendor’s word for any-

thing. Immersing prospects in a

Community of happy customers

is a fast way to deliver some

informal referencing type benefits.

This is a powerful sales tool if

you’re set up to manage it.

Social CRM Strategies for Customer Service

I’ve always liked the definition of strategy one of my Board members gave:

Strategy is what you do to make winning easier.

Formulating a complete set of strategies for a Customer Service organization to use in Social CRM is along topic and one that needs considerable discussion with the organization. In lieu of that, I will out-line the top level considerations and present a few of the real strategies that have worked with our cus-tomers.

Clearly Define Your Metrics

e first step in defining and choosing a set of strategies for Customer Service is therefore to definewhat exactly you mean by “winning?”

ere are many different metrics by which Customer Service organizations are used to measuringthemselves. Some have to do with delivering a better Customer Experience. Some have to do withmanaging and increasing the productivity of Service Agents. And some have to do with increasing theoverall efficiency of the Service Organization in terms of costs to deliver the level of service the com-pany wants to invest in.

In a Social CRM world, we might add metrics around creating a happy and vibrant community of cus-tomers where they are active participants who choose to help each other and to talk freely about yourproducts and services. In fact, it will be important to ensure that any metrics surrounding improvedService Agent productivity do not reinforce behavior that discourages the community from growing.

For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you’re trying to optimize a set of metrics around FirstTouch Resolution and minimizing Agent contact through cases or trouble tickets. In other words, we’regoing to try to maximize the self-service characteristics of the community.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 16

The prevailing sentiment is that

Social Customer Service is all

about having your customers

answer each other’s questions

so you don’t have to. This is an

important part of the process, but

that puts the cart before the horse

and does not tell the whole story

of how to optimize a Social

Service process.

Make Sure They Are Measurable

It’s hard to optimize a set of metrics and tell if your strategies have madeit easier for you to win if they’re hard to measure. Try to line up a systemthat makes it easy to measure the metrics automatically and in real-timeif possible.

For example, Helpstream’s “waterfall” dashboard displays a number of useful metrics that might be part of your Social Customer Servicestrategy:

Design the Support Experience to Encourage Social Service as the First Step

One of the first things to look at strategy-wise is how we present the op-portunity for Social Service. Customers can request service in a number

of different ways, some of which are more beneficial than others in terms of maximizing Social Service.For example, when customers call in for service on a toll free support number, it’s pretty hard to dogood Social Service. We’ve already failed there and will need to file cases for anyone that calls. So weneed to think about how we’re going to communicate to our customers the best way for them to goabout getting service.

is communication should outline a path that emphasizes the Social Service. We’ll want to minimizephone numbers and move self-service from the web to the forefront of the experience. Anotherthought is email. Many organizations have a support@mycompany.com style email account where cus-tomers can mail support requests. Oen, these emails are directly turned into Cases. More sophisti-cated Social CRM soware may provide better alternatives. For example, Helpstream makes it easy to create an email response system that will treat the incoming email as a search of the Knowledge Baseand Community. It will send back an email containing the top 3-5 search results and can include a link to the online Support Portal. is has been a powerful tool for customers who told us that beforeHelpstream they couldn’t get their customers to use a Web Portal. ey insisted on either calling oremailing cases directly.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 17

Make Sure Self-Service is the Best Possible Service

Now that you’ve created a Support Experience that pushes your customers to try Social Service, it is important to provide the mostpositive possible experience. e Customer Service world prettywell understands what that takes at a high level: we want our customers to get great answers as quickly as possible with the minimum of effort on their part.

ere are a lot of very subtle issues surrounding this area. e prevailing sentiment is that Social Customer Service is all about having your customers answer each other’s questions so you don’thave to. You’ll hear vendors talk at length about how to go aboutdoing this. At Helpstream, we believe this is an important part ofthe process, but that puts the cart before the horse and does not tellthe whole story of how to optimize a Social Service process.

Consider the Service Waterfall in the diagram, which shows the results from the same service organization as the one above aer an additional set of Social CRM Strategies were implemented to improve the results.

In a matter of a relatively few months, two huge changes took place:

u e First Touch Resolution through self-service is way up. Issues solved by Existing Content,whether content in the Knowledge Base or content created by the Community, went from 30% to79%. For reference, a well functioning KB-only system, without any Social inputs, will typicallypeak out at 40%. We can see the “Articles” component, representing KB articles, is 39%. So the extraperformance is the Community content.

u Problems that had to be resolved by agents as cases went down from 56% down to a mere 11%

Clearly that is an account where a set of Social CRM strategies have really made the difference. Next week we’ll go over what sorts of strategies led to this kind of improvement in the metrics.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 18

Social CRM Strategies for Marketing

In the last chapter, we covered Social CRM strategies for Customer Service. is week will be aboutMarketing. ere are a lot of different benefits Marketing can gain from Social Media. On our Virtuous Cycle, we list the following:

u Branding / Word of Mouth: e community can help spread the word about your brand. Brand is a lot more than just names and logos. It’s a set of values that customers can rely on.

u Voice of the Customer: Social Media will quickly tell you what your customers and others are saying about your brand. What do they like or dislike?

u Ideation: Ideation is all about asking the community for their suggestions (“Idea Storms”) about how you can improve the Customer Experience.

u Education: Marketing spends a lot of time educating all sorts of folks about all sorts of subjects.Enroll the community in helping you to get this valuable word out.

u Lead Generation: Use the Community as a source of leads.

u Lead Nurturing: Use the Community to nurture leads until they’re ready to be contacted.

A lot of these topics have been covered elsewhere. For example, the use of Social Monitoring andIdeation to understand the Voice of the Customer is widespread. For this post, I want to focus on Lead Generation and nurturing, which have not been talked about so much.

Lead Generation is the art of finding people who are interested in your story. Old School marketing relied on PR and Advertising to do the job in various guises. e Social School can bring a couple ofnew tools to bear: Social SEO and Social Monitoring.

First up is Social SEO, or Social Search Engine Optimization. e goal is to find people who want tohear your story based on what they are searching for. As such, you will want to put as much content as possible up in a format that is susceptible to indexing by the search engines. Content can consist ofboth article-types (videos, white papers, Wikis, and so on) and Community-types (discussion threadsabout your topics of interest).

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 19

Try to avoid being too “slick” in your content. Social Media is all about authenticity, transparency, andhonesty. In fact, given where credibility lies, try to draw on your customers and other well-wishers toprovide as much content as possible. e best way to attract them is to start with a Customer ServiceCommunity. It’s hard to be a Social Marketer until your own customers are happy and social too. epurpose of your content should be to inform and educate, not to sell. Early leads are not ready to besold to yet. Use all of your traditional analysis tools to tell what sorts of content are attracting the mostincoming search traffic and produce more content along those lines.

e goal of Social SEO is to get folks to read enough content in the public portion of your Communitythat they request a full logon to gain access to more content. When they request a logon, you can havethem fill out a questionnaire similar to what many marketers already use before giving folks a whitepaper or webinar access. Be sure it’s obvious that they will need to request access, and tell them how togo about doing that. Popup messages that aren’t too annoying are one approach, as is messaging in thepublic part of the community. Give away a significant critical mass of content without requiring signup.Remember: this is the content driving the SEO traffic to your site!

You’ll quickly find as we have that the opportunity to join a community of your peers that you can askquestions of about the area you’re trying to learn more about is a powerful inducement. Conversionrates to get people to request access are much higher than the typical White Paper because it’s a morepotent offer.

OK, that’s Social SEO. Now let’s look at another approach: using Social Monitoring to drive Lead Generation. Social Monitoring is all about finding people who will be interested in your story based on what they are already talking about using Social Media. Look for keywords with which to search for conversations that will reveal those that are compatible with your story. For example, Helpstreamcould use “social crm”, “social marketing”, and “customer service.” Cast your net broadly in terms ofwhich feeds you will monitor. Twitter is a great starting point, but you’re missing out if you stop there.

Having created a series of feeds that are filtered by keywords to ensure a target rich environment(sounds like TopGun!), it’s time to start converting them to leads. Your goal is to expose them to yourCommunity content, and hopefully this will serve to invite them back to your Community for deepernurturing. I’ll just use Twitter as an example, but you could send individuals whose Tweets seem promising a response inviting them to take a look at related content within your Community. Consider also sending them an invitation to join the Community.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 20

The goal of Social SEO is to get

folks to read enough content

in the public portion of your

Community that they request

a full logon to gain access to

more content.

Beware of Spam! ere will be a temptation to overly bombard individuals, whether in an effort toget them to visit your community or in an effort to send them non-Community marketing messages.Resist the urge! If your Social CRM strategy is too spammy, it will immediately be noticed and you’llbe marginalized. You need to be offering valued content on a user-metered basis, not Spam. It’s allabout self-service in terms of content consumption. Leave your leads to graze at your Social ContentBuffet at their own pace. Initially, only they know if their projects are near-term or whether this isjust curiosity.

I say “initially”, because there is a way for you to know too, and it is crucial to successful Social Marketing. e proof is in the pudding, as they say, and in this case, the “pudding” is the leadspropensity to seek more information. Marketing Automation experts will tell you that a typical leadneeds to touch between 20 and 25 pieces of content before they’re ready to become an opportunity.at’s a lot more than most people suspect.

With Helpstream’s Social Marketing module, it’s possible to send this activity stream of contenttouches to your Marketing Automation soware. Using the reports in that soware, you will receive a holistic view of every bit of contact your leads have with your content, whether that content is byvirtue of marketing landing pages, corporate web site, or Helpstream Community. Marketing Automation soware applies a concept called “Lead Scoring” to these content touches. Different content receives different lead scores. For example, looking at a price list shows a greater propensitytowards buying than simply looking at a particular feature description. You can even apply negativescores, for example, to reduce the scores if the individual goes away for 2 weeks without looking atanything.

Your ideal candidates will absorb a lot of content in a very short time, indicating they feel a sense ofurgency in coming up to speed on your offerings. Ideally they will ask questions of your communitythat will also give you insights into their individual interests. Once their Lead Score reaches criticalmass (you’ll determine that over time based on who buys and who doesn’t), it’s time to step awayfrom self-service and reach out to the Lead. ere are lots of ways to do this including sending thememail or calling. One particularly smooth option that’s available is to use the Community itself.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 21

Social Monitoring is all about

finding people who will be inter-

ested in your story based on what

they are already talking about

using Social Media. Look for

keywords with which to search

for conversations that will reveal

those that are compatible with

your story.

Imagine a Community that monitors Lead Scores based on contentconsumption. When the scores reach critical mass (as determined byreal closed sales cycles), the Lead is automatically assigned to a SalesRep. at Rep subscribes to the lead’s Activity Stream. ink of the Activity Stream as being like the Facebook Wall. It tells the Rep whatthe person is doing in the community. e idea is to look for a chanceto jump into a Community discussion that the lead is involved in. eRep will have considerable insights into the interests and motivations ofthe individual by looking at their past history. It will be very natural toanswer a question, identify themselves as being from Sales, and askwhether a deeper discussion would be helpful.

at’s the full Social Marketing Lead Generation Cycle.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 22

Social CRM Strategies for Sales

Having implemented your Social CRM Marketing Strategies, it’s time to complete the Virtuous Cycle by implementing some strategies around Sales. e Marketing to Sales handoff has always involved acertain amount of drama in my experience:

VP of Sales: “I don’t have enough leads!”

VP of Marketing: “You’re not following up on the leads I gave you!”

A lot of this discord seems to relate to the definition of a “lead”. And no, I’m not going to dive into theeven more contentious definitional world of terminology over what we call these things we give toSales. at’s up to the individual organizations to decide, but unless Sales and Marketing are on thesame page, there’s going to be trouble.

Clearly, Sales is expecting the “lead” to have reached a level of discernible buying interest. We’ve seen that tools like Lead Nurturing Communities with Lead Scoring can help identify that buying interest before Sales contacts the Lead. I will suggest that in addition to having discernable buying interest, there is another operational difference that comes into play when the lead moves from Marketing to Sales: the lead is ready to receive more personalized information about the product or services being sold.

What do I mean by “more personalized information?” e idea of question asking comes readily to mind, but I am not talking about all questions. Many times leads will ask the same kinds of questions because the information they seek is not readily available. Answering those questions that are common across the entire market or at least across vertical markets should more likely be the purview of Marketing.

But there will be some questions or information needs that are personalized. ey go to the particularcombination of business problems the prospect wants to solve in the context of how they’re thinkingabout things. When the need for information becomes sufficiently personalized that the answers areless and less useful to a broader audience, Sales should take over.

Providing a Social Business Process that facilitates the asking of the questions and the sharing of the answers is an excellent function for Social CRM, BTW. All of the strategies that relate to Social CRMfor Customer Service come into play for this application. Aer all, you’re trying to efficiently share theexpertise of your best Subject Matter Experts just as in Customer Service.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 23

Providing a Social Business

Process that facilitates the asking

of the questions and the sharing

of the answers is an excellent

function for Social CRM.

Imagine a living Social “RFP Answering” Community. What if you took every question that came withan RFP and put it into your online Community as a question, along with the answer, and the ability forothers to ask more deeply about the question, or to answer and discuss? You’d have a powerful tool inyour Sales and Marketing process! Ideally your prospects and leads could self-service this rich infor-mation buffet, but even if you’re filling out detailed RFP’s, such a Knowledge Base makes your own peo-ple that much more efficient at it.

Clearly some RFP questions would not be appropriate for this kind of treatment, others would be thesorts of things you would make available only aer you validated who was asking very carefully (don’twant to give up too much proprietary information), and so on. But being able to rapidly gather anddisseminate the best possible answers would be a rich source of content. We follow similar practices at Helpstream. For example, aer holding our Geoffrey Moore Social CRM Chasm Crossing Webinar,we published all of the questions asked, including many we didn’t get to answer during the webinar,along with the answers, as part of our HelpExchange Community.

What to do about the more personalized information that doesn’t make sense to go into the mainstream “RFP Answering” Community? Another concept we’ve used to good effect in our Communities is that of the VIP Room. We create them for all our customers as repositories for thework products of Professional Services engagements and Training. It beats the heck out of email, andcreates a nice personalized information store where each customer shares their Helpstream-specificknowledge in a way that they can collaborate with us and any participating SI’s.

e same principle can be applied to the Sales process. Imagine delivering RFP’s, Price Quotations,Professional Services SOW’s, Marketing Collateral, Contact Information for Key Players, and all of the other materials that make up the personalized responses to a prospect’s information needs. By gathering such information in one place, it becomes easier for everyone participating in the buying cycle to share information. When the prospect becomes customer, the same VIP Room can search for the ongoing needs of private collaboration I’ve already described. e Sales Rep effectively becomes the coordinator and manager of the VIP Room during the Sales Cycle.

A good Social Platform needs a variety of capabilities to carry off such a vision. At the very least, it will need very fine grained permission to control who sees what. You don’t want to have to create full communities for each VIP Room. Rather, these should be easily created (hopefully automaticallyprovisioned) gated sub-communitees.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 24

Imagine a living Social “RFP

Answering” Community. What if

you took every question that came

with an RFP and put it into your

online Community as a question,

along with the answer, and the

ability for others to ask more

deeply about the question, or to

answer and discuss? You’d have

a powerful tool in your Sales and

Marketing process!

Imagine a process that works like this:

u e Lead is nurtured until their lead score reaches a critical mass threshold (a Lead Score) of buying interest based on the content consumption in the Nurturing Community.

u Once the Lead Score triggers the threshold, a Sales Rep is assigned to that Lead. e Rep is automatically subscribed to the Activity Stream associated with the Lead so they can see what they’re doing in the Community. is makes it easy for the Rep to start naturally engaging right in the Community as needed.

u When the Rep decides through direct observation and interaction that it’s time, the Lead is promoted to an Opportunity. A VIP Room is automatically provisioned and the Lead is notified of their new VIP Room.

u Interaction proceeds with all the normal channels—email and phone, but the VIP Room is alsothere to facilitate. Ideally, all Slide Decks, Webinar recordings, and other work artifacts go into theVIP Room for reference by the Prospect.

At Helpstream, we refer to the opportunity for Sales to understand much more context as “CustomerAwareness.” Interaction with a Community brings about an unprecedented opportunity for CustomerAwareness. Used properly, it makes it much easier to understand who is a near term focus for newbusiness, and who should be nurtured further before engagement. e days of being able to badgerCustomers into becoming new business through constant hard selling are drawing to a close. Smart organizations are helpful, and they certainly ask for the sale, but they never badger.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 25

Social CRM: 5 Steps for Getting Started

rough the previous eight chapters of the Social CRM Manifesto, we’ve covered a lot of ground including:

u How the world has changed to put the customer in control of the conversation

u e Big Picture for Business of the different types of Social Media

u Gut level ways of thinking about how to be Social

u e Virtuous Cycle and how to start with Customer Service as the On-ramp for Social CRM

u Specific Social CRM strategies for Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales

By now you’re hopefully excited about starting up a Social CRM initiative for your own organization.How should you go about that?

1) Start With Customer Service; it’s the On-Ramp for Social CRM

You have to make sure your house is in order before inviting guests.

Customer Service is the on-ramp for Social CRM. It will be a lot harder to succeed if your own customers are not happy and social. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, the person your potential prospects are most likely to trust is “a person like me.” Without the strong backing of yourown customers (those people who are like your prospects), you won’t be maximizing your credibility.

e second consideration is that your own customer base and Customer Service are the easiest places to drive traffic to your community. Getting strangers to engage leaves you with much lower engagement rates. e familiar Rule of 10’s says that for such communities, 1 in 100 people will ask aquestion, 10 of 100 may answer, and everyone else just watches. At Helpstream, we see engagementrates 3 to 10x higher for Customer Service communities. Take advantage of this to accelerate thegrowth of your early community efforts to get to critical mass.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 26

2) You Need a Community. Don’t bet the farm on Twitter or Facebook.

It’s attractive to think about getting started right now with Twitter or Facebook. So easy to just startTweeting or subscribing to feeds of various kinds. But this is not an organized effort that is focused onproducing long term results. It’s just riding on the hype wave those hot properties have going for them.It’s not a strategy, it’s a tactic. As such, it’s better than nothing, but not much.

I’ve likened Twitter to the crowded bar you may go to in order to meet new people. at’s great, but ifyour only relationship with them is in the crowded bar, how deep is it going to be? And don’t forget, we also talked about starting with your own customers. Why would they want to talk to you about anything substantive in the crowded bar?

3) Be Conscious About Strategy and Culture: Social CRM is a lot more than Products and Technologies

Let’s face it, Social Soware is very cool. I love working on it at Helpstream. But soware alone is notenough for you to succeed. It’s probably not even the first step, although there is an argument to getstarted with Social and not spend too much time in a paralysis of analysis.

Ultimately, to succeed, you will need two ingredients just as much as great technology. Your organiza-tion must have a good idea of what strategies it will pursue with Social, and it must have a culture that is capable of supporting that execution.

If you have no idea why you are engaging with customers using Social Media, it will be hard for the engagement to be a successful one. If nobody in your organization wants to engage, or if they’re terrible at it, it will be equally as hard for the engagement to be a successful one.

ere is one offsetting advantage Social has over conventional CRM: the feedback loop is much more pronounced. It’s much easier for the old Centralized Command and Control CRM to go onabout its business of droning out messages than it is with Social CRM where the customer controls theconversation, but it is also a lot less effective.

Social CRM is not a black box. If you poke it, it pokes back. Eventually, it will train your organizationwhat it needs to know to succeed, or it will convince you to quit poking the box at the very least!

It’s really not that hard to be Social though. Remember the gut level ways in which we already know how to be Social.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 27

4) Put a Program of Measurement and Continuous Improvement of Best Practices in Place

It’s very hard to achieve repeatable results, show an ROI, or improve from where you are unless youhave some metrics to steer by. What metrics should you choose? at depends on the business resultsyou’d like to achieve. Get a clear idea of what those are and then figure out how to measure them.ere are well-understood methodologies for all of the obvious ones like customer satisfaction or call center efficiency.

Also, make sure your metrics are layered. Start from the highest possible level metrics. If you want toimprove your call center efficiency, don’t start out defining that with things such as how long agentsspend on the phone. Rather, measure that efficiency at as abstract and high a level as possible, whilestill making it measurable. Perhaps something like cost of service per customer is an approach. AtHelpstream, we have customers who have tripled their customer base without adding a single addi-tional service agent while raising their customer satisfaction at the same time. Obviously they’re doingsomething a little different than optimizing call times (for example, they’re persuading their customersto participate in the community instead of calling at all).

Be true to the highest layers in the metrics hierarchy. In other words, don’t change them oen. Annually at most is a good guideline. e lower the level of the metric, the more you should be willingto experiment and even ignore the metric in hopes of identifying new ways to optimize the overall.

Lastly, where metrics are concerned, look for benchmarks. Can your vendor provide you with benchmarks that give an idea of how others do on various metrics? Can they help you to understandthe Best Practices needed to improve your results relative to the benchmarks? Helpstream answers“yes” to both.

5) Your Social Platform Needs Business Process

A number of vendors talk about Business Process capabilities, but few deliver. You will need BusinessProcess to optimize your results, and in many cases, even to successfully collect the metrics you’ll want.Business Process means control over your workflows, data (custom fields and custom objects), andbusiness logic. Integration with your existing CRM systems is another important consideration. Without Business Process and deep CRM Integration, your Social CRM project will wind up a siloed island. It will help, but it will never deliver optimal results because you’ll have too little control over the user’s experience where it really matters.

A Social CRM Manifesto: How to Succeed with the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle • Bob Warfield 28

Conclusion

So that’s it then: 5 steps to getting started down the path to Social CRM. It’s actually not all that hard,but it does take a certain amount of determination and a sense of where you would like to get to. We’ve tried to fill in as many of the details as we could in this Social CRM Manifesto. I’m sure you have a lot more questions, and we’d be happy to answer them. Let me suggest you start by joining our HelpExchange Community, which is our place for talking about Social CRM at a high level anddisseminating our thoughts on Best Practices. You’ll get a chance to ask your own questions there aswell as learn from what others are saying. When you’re ready, get in touch with Helpstream. We’d love to help you with a successful Social CRM project.

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