Why buying butter may impact your health insurance

Social CRM is trend that is picking up more and more momentum as companies look to develop a social strategy and integrate with their existing customer relationship management systems. But what does “Social CRM” really mean and what might it look like in an organization such as yours? Is it possible that a social CRM system would create a scenario where buying butter in the grocery store would have an impact on your health insurance?

First a look into some definitions:

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the process of managing relationships with your customers to maximize the revenue impact related to your organization. Typically the goal of implementing a CRM process is to turn short-term transactions with a customer into a longer relationship, driving future revenue opportunities over the customer life cycle.

Social media is about the interactions and conversations that consumers are having about your company and/or brand. Ron Lee recently highlighted a Forrester report that uses an analogy of ladder rungs to group consumers according to their participation (or not) in social technology that I believe does a great job of visualizing the impact that social has on an organization.

Social CRM is the blend of identifying and capturing the social conversations that are occurring around your brand, led by consumers, and converting these conversations into an experience with your company. These experiences then become relationships in your organization in which either support is provided or additional revenue transactions are nurtured. Social CRM is not about the tools that are used to create the strategy. Email as a marketing vehicle was never a game changer in the marketing channel, and social listening or monitoring alone is not going to be all that successful to you as an organization. It is your social strategy supported by tools which will enable you to monitor the market and react as necessary to the needs of your buying community.

So what might this look like in your organization?

It is early in the game when you look at social media and the role that it has played in developing a buyer-driven sales cycle. Capturing the essential information from your consumers could have a variety of results, some a bit scarier (to a consumer) than others. 

Respond immediately to social brand attacks
Twitter seems to be creating a culture where if you have the right makeup of followers, complaining via status updates may get you a response quicker than using the more traditional customer service models. You know the guy who budges to the front of the line, is loud and rude and essentially feels his time is the more important than all the others in line. Is this the culture that you want to be creating with your customers or will your strategy understand when to escalate and when to move people back into the queue?

Target high value customers
It is often the core strategy in a company to define and target a group of high value customers. Social CRM is the perfect solution to meet these needs as you will be able to use your CRM system to segment out these high profile customers amongst the ‘social noise’, and provide a level of service that you have defined. Have you defined your high value customers and are you able to differentiate them when interacting in a social conversation?

Tie customer behavior to business decisions
This last example might be a bit far-fetched, but it is worth thinking about. Jeremiah Owyang recently brought this topic up and I found it fascinating to think about what may be possible from a company’s perspective, and potentially threatening from the consumer’s perspective. Imagine having recently been diagnosed with high cholesterol and have been put on a strict diet by your doctor. The next time you are in the grocery store you purchase a pound of butter, which when scanned sounds an alarm to the clerk and prints out a waiver for you to sign. This waiver identifies that you are buying an item that puts you at higher risk based on the guidelines provided by your doctor and you must sign stating that this purchase may put you at risk for lack of coverage for future cholesterol related claims.  Can you think of any similar scenarios that you could tie an activity that a consumer does in their personal time, which if tied back into your system could alert or incent them to take an action?