Throughout our Social CRM Series, we’ve enlisted the expertise and insight of Enterprise 2.0 thought leaders to shed some light on this evolving market. Today, we’re thrilled to offer a discussion with a major influential thinker and writer in Enterprise and Web 2.0, Dion Hinchcliffe.

Dion is truly on the forefront of exploring some of the most important business and tech topics on his ZDNet blogs, Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. Here, he shares with us his thoughts on how social models are evolving the customer's experience, how Social CRM can help to further engage customers, and the companies he feels are getting Social CRM right. Please enjoy this exclusive content, and share your reactions in the comments below.

1. What kinds of customer issues do you think Social CRM is best suited to address?

While almost all aspects of the customer relationship can be transformed by social models, some are a bit more of a natural fit than others. This is particularly true when it involves deep knowledge of specific products or services (which customers often know better than the companies that provide them) or when it involves deep customer needs and requirements in certain settings, verticals or industries. The implication is that customer service and support for example, is a natural fit for Social CRM. So too is product development, where customers can just tell you what they need directly from a large sample, and you can interact with them as need to refine and clarify vital new business knowledge. Less clear is whether Social CRM will help with business activities like the sales process, though evidence is mounting that there are benefits here as well.

2. How do you think customer engagement via Social CRM will alter the customer/vendor relationship?

The global economy is – in the large – moving away from a focus on business value coming primarily from  transactions and is moving towards a model that places the highest value on relationships. This is reflected now by the fact that the largest economic output of developed nations is increasingly knowledge, and not physical products. In this new business era, customers are demanding closer connection to the companies they depend on and want more control and transparency. This will have a profound impact in coming years to the relationship between vendors and customers. Those who want to acquire and retain the 21st century customer must be willing to think of them as a real and valued partner in their business. Efffective Social CRM can make this partnership model possible and scalable (it's hard to think about conversing with millions of customers at once without the right tools.) In the end, Social CRM is just going to become the norm in CRM and the primary practice. But for the next 5-10 years, it's going to provide significant competitive advantage for those that are willing to engage in these new relationships with their marketplace.

3. You've written in the past that Social CRM is asymmetric when it comes to levels of participation – can you delve into what you mean by that a little further?

Sure, it means that Social CRM engages and mobilizes a large segment of your customer base to problem solve, help each other and create knowledge. The number of customers for most companies greatly outnumbers the number of employees they have. Thus, by enlisting customers to form constructive communities around their concerns and tapping into the value they create, a virtuous assymmetry is created where the largest and most valuable resource companies have, their customers, can greatly improve their own outcomes with your products and services.

4. You've mentioned that the biggest obstacle to adoption for Social CRM comes from the companies themselves, and changing their mindset about traditional CRM. How do you see this playing out in the future?

The real challenge in moving to new, high impact social business models (which include Social CRM) is not technology at all, though having the right tools to support the transition is a vital prerequisite. Rather it's the cultural, bureaucratic and political changes required in most organizations that is the biggest obstacle to moving forward with these new approaches to business. The customer suddenly becomes much more valuable than just a unit of sales, where activities like support are purely overhead costs that must be reduced as much as possible. It completely changes the conversation when customers become an integral part of the business, almost across the board for most organizations.

This is not a change that most business leaders are ready to appreciate fully and it will likely take a some years yet while the implications of social business are fully felt and responded to. But companies that are unusually slow to respond may find that their customers have moved to companies that are willing to have more productive, honest, open and effective relationships. 

5. Can you give some examples of companies that have gotten Social CRM right?

There are a number of interesting examples but it's services such as Fixya.com that are some of the most interesting and show how the rules are changing. These are essentially self-service CRM sites that have decided to provide better support in a more social and Web 2.0 form than the companies that originally made the products. Fixya has more than 5 million monthly users who are looking for mutual support on the end-user products that the use and go there for help. Because Fixya has decided to provide a better form of customer relationship than the originating product companies, they are becoming the preferred intermediary for assistance and consequently the owner of a key aspect of the customer relationship. And it works because Fixya doesn't do any of the work, their customers do. There are other examples but this situation is particular is quickly becoming a major and unexpected competitive issue for companies that haven't yet learned the Social CRM ropes.

6. Can you speak to the importance of having business processes tightly integrated into any Social CRM efforts?

Businesses that don't have a good connection with the knowledge flows, awareness and activities taking place with their customers will find that they can't respond effectively and quickly to both short-term market situations as well as long-term strategic business intelligence that's accumulating in their Social CRM ecosystem. These all can drive forward vitally needed transformations and improvements to product development, sales, support and other business functions if this information is integrated into existing IT systems in a strategic and effective manner. This is easier said than done of course and figuring out the best ways to do this is still an emerging field, but a very important one in my opinion.

About Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe heads up Hinchcliffe & Company and is an internationally recognized business strategist and enterprise architect with an extensive track record of building enterprise-class solutions with clients in the Fortune 500, federal government and Internet startup community.

Dion helps lead the industry by evolving the thinking for next-generation businesses in various social media including ZDNet's influential Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog and the Web 2.0 Blog. He is extensively published in leading industry periodicals and journals including the Microsoft Architecture Journal, AjaxWorld Magazine, SOA/Web Services Journal and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Social Computing Journal. His thought leading work has been covered in BusinessWeek, CNET News, Wired, CIO Magazine and other major news outlets.