- Are you in market for a Social CRM, but don’t know what features to look for?
- Are you still not convinced about value of a Social CRM?
- Are you having tough time convincing your management to write a check because they don’t see the ROI?
If you answered yes to any one of the above, you are not alone. The good news (or, actually, the bad news) is that most of the companies that have actually made an investment in Social CRM do not leverage some of the basic features offered by the technology. So, what exactly does a Social CRM offer? The answer is complicated because feature set requirements of a Social CRM are dependent on various factors such as company goals, business functions involved, number of platform users, structure (centralized/de-centralized), industry, target demographic, use cases, regulation and compliance requirements, and many more. We can go into each of those in a separate blog post, but first, let’s get the basics right.
Here are the 3 baseline features offered by any good Social CRM:
- Coverage across Social Media Platforms – Well, it is called a ‘Social CRM’, so this is the most basic feature. But, some CRM systems are more tightly integrated with popular social platforms than others while others provide different tools for social and community engagement. So, you need to figure out which platforms are important for your business and how different CRM vendors provide coverage for those platforms. You need technology that makes it easy for your to manage all your social media accounts and marketing campaigns from a single system.
- Social Listening, Monitoring and Engagement – Ability to track all mentions and discussions around your brand or company is one of the most valuable features of a Social CRM. But, what do you do once you discover them? Your Social CRM should enable you to easily engage in these discussions regardless of where they are happening on the web.
- Data Analytics – The system should be able to analyze data it collects from social networks and present it in a way that can be practically used by Sales and Marketing. Insights provided by the system can help surface things like – content that is doing well, rich lead and customer data, demographic analysis, consumption and behavioral analysis, and other types of information that can be extremely valuable to your business.
As I said earlier, this is a list of baseline features. What features are important to your business? Please discuss below.
You can also contact me on twitter @jasmeetio or on my personal website – Jasmeet Sawhney.
