In the last post we looked at what the difference between CRM and SCRM is (with visuals). Today I want to talk about how CRM is actually evolving to SCRM. There have been several images and diagrams which have attempted to depict the shift or evolution from CRM to Social CRM. Chess Media Group in collaboration with Mitch Lieberman decided to break down how CRM has evolved by taking things back to basics and addressing the questions of: who, what, when, where, why, and how. We feel that taking this simple approach will really help shed some more on SCRM without making the topic confusing or convoluted.
This image clearly depicts what CRM is (or was) and how it has changed or evolved into SCRM. For those out there that continually refer to SCRM as a tool or a technology hopefully this helps clarify things a bit and show that SCRM is not about a technology at all. Technology and tools don’t address strategy and changes in communication and interaction that we are currently seeing. A tool will hopefully allow you to support a strategy that adapts to the changes that we are seeing above, but again the shift we are seeing is behavioral and interaction based not technology driven. We can see from the diagram above what this evolution means to both the company and the customer.
After looking at this evolution organizations need to then ask themselves, “knowing that this evolution is taking place, how can we adapt to serve the social customer?” Organizations are used to doing things a certain way, and that “way” has remained relatively constant over many decades. But how can organizations today communicate and interact with customers the same way they have been even 10 years ago? The answer is they can’t.
This image was taken from the whitepaper, A Guide to Understanding Social CRM, which can be downloaded for free and provides in depth information and discussion around Social CRM.
Hopefully this image makes sense and simplifies things a bit. Any comments or questions? Let’s hear it!
Warren Knight thanks Jacob Morgan