In this installment of our Social CRM Blog Series, we’ll be turning from “Why” you should be looking at Social CRM to “How” you should think about it for your own organization. For that purpose, Helpstream developed a concept to help visualize this process—we call the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle:

The Virtuous Cycle is designed to convert Social CRM interaction into a variety of benefits that touch every part of the organization concerned with customers and prospects. The process starts with customer service, continuing cyclically and growing in strength with each rotation.

Why start with customer service?

I explained last week in my post “You Already Know How to Be Social” that much of what you need to know to be successfully social on the Web comes from a basic understanding about how to interact with people. This concept applies here too. If you need to be highly social, use any platform—social or in-person—to meet as many new people as you can and share your insights. Like any social situation, individuals are rarely able to do this individually. You would have to  seek the help of your friends and network. Although it may be easy to simply mobilize your employees, we live in a world where people trust their peers rather than their vendors. Your efforts will be much more likely to succeed if you start with your customers. To do that, you need to create an active and vibrant customer community—doing so requires you to deliver a lot of value to your customers. What better way than through customer service?

Along the way you’ll discover that customer service communities are one of the rare platforms resulting in a win-win situation. Our customers explain how these communities increase customer satisfaction, drive efficiency and catalyze crowdsourcing to help deliver customer service by having customers help other customers. JoAnne Ravielli, VP Customer Service and Support at InfusionSoft.com, explains this in a Forrester Case Study:

"Two years ago, we had approximately 1 customer service agent for every 55 customers and a 77% customer satisfaction rating. Today, that ratio is 1 agent to 172 customers -- and with an 87% customer sat rating. Customers love to contact us when it's convenient for them! And that's the power of social media. The answers are there for them 24/7. The net-net? InfusionSoft's social media initiative saved the company millions of dollars in overall support costs and produced a 10% increase in customer satisfaction."

It’s rare for companies to generate such great savings (a 3x increase in customer service rep efficiency) along with a parallel increase in customer satisfaction. However, JoAnne’s story is not unique for Helpstream’s customers. Such metrics drive a highly successful community adoption around customer service, and that’s why we like to say that customer service is the “on-ramp” for Social CRM.

Having established a successful customer service on-ramp, organizations are ready to take the next step on the Virtuous Cycle to marketing. Once again, a comprehensive Social CRM strategy produces tremendous benefits. Such results range from initiating word-of-mouth about your brand in the marketplace, learning the opinions of your customers (from the customer themselves), to bearing down on the bottom-line impact: generate more leads and nurture them effectively. Let’s look at each one of these a little more closely.

Understanding Your Customers and the Marketplace

Listening is an essential skill for every business function, and Social CRM gives you an unprecedented opportunity to hear what’s being said—both within your own customer community and throughout the broader Web through social monitoring tools. Hearing is the first crucial step, but understanding includes even more. Social is all about engagement and two-way conversations. What better way to understand than to engage in those conversations?  Listen first, then verify and refine what you’ve heard through engagement and conversation until you achieve resonance.

Getting the Word Out

Getting the word out is always high on the marketing agenda—Social CRM is a helpful vehicle for doing this. Word-of-mouth begins with your customers. It is important to make sure your marketing is delivering the right words to the right mouths; this begins with your customer community, which is built on the customer service experience. If your customers can’t tell your story, you’re lost. Also, don’t underestimate the value of your customers in shaping and refining your story. Embrace this before you try to sell it to strangers. It’s part of the understanding feedback loop. Your customers will tell you whether your messaging resonates with their experiences and they’ll give you real life stories (like JoAnne’s above) to add substance to your pitch.

Translating It to Leads

OK, you’ve got your messaging all tuned-up so it’s potent. You’ve gotten some word-of-mouth going through your customers. How does all of this translate into leads?  The answer is that you can’t limit your efforts at understanding and getting the word out to your customers.

Find a role for other Influencers and interested parties to play in your community. Invite them to join your conversations. Make sure you have discussions and content available that will appeal to those audiences. A proper social platform will give you all the tools you need to create a personalized experience that differs for customers, prospects, influencers and even competitors and naysayers—now you can minimize the downside and maximize the upsides.

On to Sales

Once you’ve got leads visiting your community, it’s time to look for opportunities to close. A properly configured Social CRM system and platform will have afforded you the ability to nurture the leads until they’re ready to be sold to. It’s a process of monitoring their activities in the community and across your other marketing vehicles until they’ve exhibited clear signs of interest before reaching out.

Remember, you’ve also got the opportunity to sell to your existing customers, assuming you have products or services they haven’t yet bought—it pays to keep an eye on their community activity to better understand their needs. Towards that end, we use the concept we call “customer awareness” to describe what must happen. To oversimplify, imagine if your salespeople could subscribe to something similar to the Facebook wall for all of their accounts and potential opportunities. On this particular kind of wall, they’d see what each target is doing in the community. What type of content are they drawn to? What kinds of questions do they ask? What do they answer in response to other questions in the community? This kind of awareness is extremely hard to come by in sales, and very valuable.

Aside from awareness, sales benefits from the three “R”s that communities can readily offer:  references, referrals and repeat business. It’s easiest to sell to an existing customer (provided they’re happy), so awareness leads to repeat business. In this day and age, everyone wants references. They won’t take the vendor’s word for anything. Immersing prospects in a community of happy customers is a fast way to deliver informal referencing-type benefits. This is a powerful sales tool if you’re set up to manage it. Do you know who in your community will give the best references of this sort? The Net Promoter-style surveys are one approach, but social platforms can collect an array of information that can promptly tell you who the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic supporters really are.

Last, but far from least, referrals are also extremely valuable. Do you make it easy for your customer community to give you referrals? Do you provide incentive for them to do so, or at least remind them to think about it?

Conclusion

That’s the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. It starts with customers, and if executed well, the cycle ends with even more customers from which to start the next cycle.

In our next string of posts in the series, we’ll be drilling down—with greater detail—how each function, customer service, marketing and sales, can extract value from Social CRM