Instead of covering all the sessions I attended I’m going to focus this post on Paul’s’ keynote on social CRM because I believe there was a lot of valuable information and content that he presented. As I did with my recap of the first day of Sugarcon, my notes are in an easy to ready bullet style format. Let’s get to it.
- One of the biggest problems in the social CRM space is the definition. It’s time to move beyond that and start talking about what needs to be done and how to do it, instead of what to call it.
- We live in a customer ecosystem not a business ecosystem. Social customers don’t run your business, they run how they want to interact with you.
- What’s going on is a social communications revolution not a business revolution.
- Social customers are other people just like “you”
- 74% of all the people on the internet are tied to a social network (massive number)
- The social customer demands that you have to be like them in terms of their social interactions.
- Each customer wants a personalized experiences which makes social CRM a challenge, what do you do?
- give customers the tools to make their own experience
- give customers information that allows them to make informed empowering choices and thus provide value.
- you must understand how customers interact with you at every point and in every channel.
- CRM is no longer a model for managing customers but one of customer engagement.
- The value of any product is in the job that it does and not in the product itself.
- Expertise is crucial for SCRM, team must demonstrate expertise publicly.
- Where do we go when we want a problem solved? The internet We go to find answers from other customers that already “did it.”
- Authenticity and trust matters more than consistency.
- The one sentiment you can never measure is sarcasm
- Most important thing to remember is that your company culture has to change to allow social CRM to happen.
- The holy grail is “making a company like me.”
The session was very solid and you can tell that Paul is passionate about this stuff by the way he talks and makes his content engaging. Everyone was definitely paying close attention when he spoke. Paul also shared a very interesting story with audience about social CRM. Some people think that social CRM is all about social media/networks that you have to use to engage customers, which is absolutely wrong.
Paul was working with Coke in Mexico that was looking to build advocacy among their distributors and connect with them in a more personal way. There was lack of communication and experience between Coke and their distributors had a lot of room for improvement. The challenge however, was that these distributors were small shops in Mexico that were not connected to the web, meaning no twitter, no facebook, and no Google, so can you still develop a social CRM strategy to a large group of people without social media? Yes. How?
Paul said that he worked with the person in charge of Coke Mexico and developed the following plan.
- All truck drivers that distributed the Coke products needed to be hired locally to help make the experience personal and emotional. This meant that the drivers knew who they were delivering to.
- A newsletter was created to highlight the various stores and the community. This newsletter was printed and distributed by the truck drivers along with the Coke products they delivered. So the truck drivers were the “internet” that acted as the distributors of information (and product).
- Distributors that performed well were given family trips instead of improve signage (which was given to the better performers). So instead of distributors getting bigger and better signs, they were now able to spend time with their families, again making the connection between Coke and the distributors more personal and emotional.
I think this is a great story of how a large brand such as Coke was able to develop a social CRM strategy which was not centered around social media or social networks.
Again, I had a great time at the conference and had some great conversations and discussions with some of the world’s top social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 minds. I hope to attend (and speak at) Sugarcon 2011. If you want to see some recorded video from the event check out SCRM World.
