I’ve just finished reading a couple of posts on Social CRM Strategies.  This prompted me to re-read Forrester’s “Topic Overview: Social CRM Goes Mainstream” (January 2010), by William Band, Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., with Connie Moore, Andrew Magarie … and so to this post.

The free Forrester document focuses on Forrester’s latest research on the rise of social web and the changes this has caused in the way “customers” interact with organisations. The authors relate this change to the hot topics of customer management, business process, and the business value of “Social CRM”.  The document introduces Forrester’s seven steps of Social CRM success – see below).

Many traditional CRM, pre-Social CRM, projects failed (some analysts reported failure rates as high as 60%) because they didn’t resolve the classic issues of cultural change, performance and incentives, integration, or that most basic requirement, that’s essential for any successful CRM implementation, of data quality. These traditional CRM solutions would have brought together sales and customer data from disparate parts of the organisation and provide a view of an individual customer (B2C), or company (B2B), to help sales and marketing. Traditional CRM will continue to be implemented and used to aggregate customer data, provide analysis of that data, and automate work-flows to optimize business processes.  Social CRM merely adds new layers of complexity – mainly collaboration, ideation, and (preferably) to enhance the overall customer experience.
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