Socialise your Dynamics CRM System

Louise Alderton, 16 October 2010

Social Media has undoubtedly become a phenomenon. It allows for anyone to publish or access information on almost anything – and they do. As it can now be considered an integral part of many people’s lives it has become an essential strategy to be included in any business. Also having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy and system is another prevalent strategy in today’s business world and so it makes sense to integrate the two. In this post I will talk about some of the benefits your organisation can gain from such an integration.

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Open up a new social world.

By creating a social community through various social media for your organisation, product or service you will open up a whole new audience and new avenues of communication. If you then link this with your Dynamics CRM system you can gather vital customer contact information as well as preferences and opinions that are honest and immediate which can be leveraged for the next time you communicate with them.

Let your social community do the work for you.

This type of integration is a great way to improve and extend your existing Dynamics CRM system. Social media being interactive it provides an indispensable feedback loop between you and your customers. This non-invasive, playful medium means more customers are likely to get involved and express their unsolicited opinions.  You can now communicate with customers on a more personal level, which aligns well with a great CRM strategy. It has the ability to be the new ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing as customers freely promote you engaging the rest of your social community in a viral way.

Target more customers, more effectively.

With your new social world, not only does your number of prospects skyrocket your quality of targeting marketing can dramatically improve. As the popularity of using social media increases you now have hundreds of thousands of individuals you can reach in one hit. As each customer becomes more involved in your social media efforts not only can you collect contact information to relay into your Dynamics CRM system but you can all continue to build their profile shaping a true 360 degree view and allowing for high quality interactions.

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Inexpensive and truthful market research.

Connecting your Dynamics CRM system to your social media platforms can give you a cheap and effective market research tool. You can get product development input and discover what people like and dislike most about your organisation, product or service, gain early warnings for product concerns, and measure the online influence of each contact based on follower counts and postings. One tool that is particularly useful is sentiment scoring. This allows you to monitor the sentiment of what people are posting about your organisation and brand. For example you can monitor twitter hash tags of your organisation. This tool will score each comment as positive, negative or neutral depending on its content. The great benefit of this is that you are instantly made aware and can act in a timely manner. To take this even further, if you find a negative issue you can instantly convert it into a case in your Dynamics CRM system and address the issue through a problem resolution process. And you can extend your gratitude to those individuals who are praising you. All of this allows you to continue to build your customer relationships and overall enhance your business.

What should you take away from this?

Firstly, be present. There is no denying the social community so embrace it and use it to your advantage. Second, get connected. Use the abundance of insight social media can provide you. Listen to what people are saying, analyse the conversations and engage with your social community. Better yet, connect this information with your Dynamics CRM system for timely and consistent data that can be leveraged and actioned quickly.

Discover the CRM social media super power!

* Image 1 from http://kozinets.net/archives/396

** Image 2 from http://blog.redzilla.com/