This excellent article by Eric Tsai is full of practical and useful information. I am glad Eric have addressed the issue of customer insights and how it can be used in an organization.

If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.  If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

In my experience this knowledge, even if it is available within an organization, is rarely utilized for a process of resolving customer problems with a specific product or in a new product development process. Product Marketing organizations often seem to be more inclined to use “customer” feedback they solicit, via panels and focus groups other then analysis of unsolicited voice of the real customers, who actually purchased their products. I suspect it is the issue of control, and in my opinion, it contradicts the notion of “Social” relationship with customers. Another potential reason of the disconnect is a nature of “soft” raw data, extracted from chats and and forums, does not easily translates into the structured information required by enterprise processes and systems.

This great question was posed by Jason Breed’s #socialmedia and moderated by Social Marketer Aaron Strout. The post raised some very good and specific questions, but the comments got me really thinking.  Particularly this one from Paul Greenberg:

The social CRM strategy needs to be consistently based on the best means to engage the customer, rather than just manage them. But it doesn’t mean DON’T manage the processes and data. It means use them differently to help you deal with this newly empowered customer.

I always had a problem with interpreting CrM as managing customers, as opposed to managing relationships (cRM), but in practice a lot of strategies were built on that unfortunate approach and Paul is right on the money again, as he usually is. Attempts to utilize existing (legacy) business processes to manage social customer engagements will be ineffective and uneconomical.

A more fundamental change may come from re-evaluating the reasons for engaging the customer – companies have always wanted to market to and to sell to, which both represent a push engagement model,  more effectively and to service (push/pull engagement) more efficiently. These are already being explored by a number of vendors and companies, with varying degrees of success.

The evolution of the customer’s role in a Social Media context also offers an opportunity to engage customers as  co-creators of value in product or service development and management processes on a larger and more meaningful scale than traditional Market Research and Competitive Intelligence practices.  There are a number of vendors offering tools for “listening” to Social Media, but I would like to learn more about methodologies, best practices and business processes, that show real returns on “hearing” what is said.

I read a very interesting post on the Wikinomics blog today called “A future vision of CRM”

I’ve heard the argument that traditional CRM “is dead,” but this is far from the truth. In fact, as Brian notes, Social CRM does not replace transactional CRM systems, rather it augments them. What CRM is in desperate need of is new data sources and tools that help integrate and analyze this data. The future vision of CRM also requires that companies get involved in new channels and cede a certain amount of control to the customer – it’s less about management and more about engagement.

and left a comment I hope you find interesting:

One of the challenges for Social Media channels and CRM integration, is the fact that they “speak” different languages – SM is mostly communicates in unstructured text, while CRM is using formalized data structures.

There is a potential for tremendous benefits and cost savings for Marketing, but scalability, transformation of data into knowledge, and new processes for translating this knowledge into measurable actions, still need to take place.
Your examples of corporations adopting SM channels, while sexy and newsworthy, may prove to be uneconomical in the long run as a Customer Service operation mechanism, unless the automation of these processes and work-flows, can be automated.

Let me know if you agree.