Page 12 - AeM_May_2014

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

Integrated

CRM strategies

needed

Social networks such as Facebook, as well as discus- such systems are really looking for are integrated solu-
sion groups on Linkedin, Twitter and blogs, are very tions which enable them to capture and analyze cus-
good grounds to explore customer needs and customer tomer feedback in a centralized manner. The user
experiences. Accordingly, virtually any marketing agen- would like to have it easy and see everything at a
cy offers social media monitoring today -combined with glance. Still, it will probably take quite some time until
the matching offers to the positioning in social networks. the customer monitoring of individual activities, spread
over several monitoring systems, which are not inte-
Winning "Facebook Fans" is a good idea, but still does grated with each other, will be a thing of the past.
not convert to money earned. Rather, this group of po- Therefore, the future users of such systems should al-
tential customers needs to be figured out and under- ready be on the lookout for integrated solutions today,
stood what they want in order to learn how to score with in order to be able to optimize their customer feedback
them. It is therefore imperative to be able to capture the processes. As it is now, whoever is able to offer such
moods of these groups through automated systems, solutions, will dominate the future in this field. After all
something that the leading systems in the market are we live in a very price sensitive period, and whoever
capable of already, by dissecting this information to cannot differentiate themselves through their service,
feed them into CRM systems. will be losing out.

At this level of sophistication the air is already consider- Apps offer an agile mobile support in this case: Loca-
ably thinner. As an example, Salesforce.com has made tion based tracking makes it possible to offer individual
the start in this field and now offers and sells software sales offers or lucky draws on mobiles and start viral
with such capability as an additional solution due to the marketing campaigns through the integration of news-
acquisition of Radiant6. Microsoft uses the purchased letters and social media interconnections.
tool "Netbreeze", which now belongs to the standard
feature set in "Dynamics CRM 2013". Using it, the cus- Therefore, by a better understanding of the used chan-
tomer can choose whether to use it online or offline. nels, this should lead to improved offers to the custom-
ers - for example, in terms of response time to tweets,
Fact is that whether social networks on the go, via hotlines, etc. Customer loyalty can therefore only be
Smartphone or simply all channels, companies must further developed, if these channels are used to the
develop integrated CRM strategies. customers’ satisfaction. So, technical and ethical chal-
lenges still have to be conquered at all touch points that
collect the relevant customer data. ◊
"Voice of the customer" analysis tools, however, are in
general still too often silo solutions. What the users of
By Roger Stadler

12 Asian eMarketing May 2014 - Multichannel Marketing— SoLoMo