I was quite surprised to read Gauravonomics’ depressingly pessimistic take on the state of social CRM in India, today. It was a response to Indus Khaitan’s blog post on the same topic.
Incidentally, I saw a link on Twitter, at the same time, about Arcopol Chaudhuri’s piece in DNA, titled, ‘Poor customer service? Don’t call, just tweet‘, where Gaurav is quoted too.
First, if we assume that the state of CRM in India is bad, in the real world, it is bound to be bad online too. There is no pressing reason why it should be any better online.
Second, in my opinion, social CRM is a misplaced and misdirected term.
I believe that CRM was and should be intended as a one-to-one communication. It is between an aggrieved (or excited) customer and a brand/corporate.
Traditionally, it used to happen via one-to-one communication modes like e-mail, phone or even face-to-face. And that gave comfort to brands since anything going wrong can only spread as much the aggrieved customer can spread it painstakingly through word-of-mouth.
Now, if you take the whole thing online, it’s a fallacy that they lead to better service just because it is being beamed to millions of people. Truth is, those millions are not tuned to those complaints at the same time, nor do they react with the same alarm given the kind of background they stumble upon them.
For all practical purposes, they may reach those complaints via a Google search while they are in the market (online, that is) for a similar product or service. In such cases, they are most likely to be under a deluge of positive, negative and neutral comments all over the web.
To give a personal example, I was looking for a reverse osmosis (RO) water purification system for my home. Eureka Forbes’ Aquaguard was on top of my mind, while actress Hemamalini’s mugshot in the Kent RO ad also breezed in, occasionally. I went online and there were comments of all nature – Aquaguard sucks; No, I’m ok with Aquaguard; Kent sucks; Kent is good, but service is not; XYZ sucks; they don’t sell you in time and so on. It’s a mess and not worth trusting when you’re trying to make up your mind.
What would have changed my mind, or rather focused my search? In my opinion, it’d be a response from a brand. Eureka Forbes has an official tie-up with Mouthshut and I noticed placeholder responses in a sponsored box below almost every complaint or review on Aquaguard. After seeing a few of them, I found that they are assembly-line messages with little or no connection to what has been said in the complaint or review. It was most probably a key-word based, impulse response by a bot or a software.
So, what can be done about all this?
I’ve already written about this extensively in my post on the shift from attention economy to opinion economy. Here are some suggestions.
1. There is no social CRM (I agree that it almost sounds like, ‘there is no spoon’). When CRM goes social, it becomes PR. If you may, social PR. In essence, customer relationship management, when taken to a one-to-many medium, becomes a PR responsibility. So, brands that understand and appreciate the value of PR are more likely to implement a social PR program.
2. CRM, by design, is scaled not via intelligence or customization, but by templates and stock Q&As. It works perfectly well in a one-to-one communication medium like email or phone – you get someone smart to think of ALL (well, as many as feasible) possible scenarios of what customers may ask and let a human use that flow chart to solve customer issues. It can be done by a software too, but a human doing it is perceived to be, well…more human! This approach will not work online, when it is a one-to-many communication mode like an online community or a user-review website.
Why? One, the customer is looking to influence an imaginary crowd online when he complaints on Twitter (for instance), not necessarily alert the brand he’s at loggerheads with. (See my post titled ‘Whine Flu’ for more on this). Two, any kind of well-oiled flow chart can becomes completely pointless when it is attempted in a melting pot like the open internet, where opinions are incredibly unpredictable.
Solution? Social PR.
When a brand encounters negative comments online, it becomes a PR responsibility. PR’s role is not to answer every single comment and query out there online – it is to use intelligence to find out which one of those can be useful to the brand, if addressed appropriately. Social PR also cannot afford to work with templates – it needs to work with words, on it’s own, much like traditional PR, based on a much broader guideline, and change opinions with the power of words used appropriately to each situation.
All this, while the actual, traditional CRM is in place and is assumed to be effective. So, if you see people complaining that some brand on Twitter is asking people to mail their problems to a mail ID, it is not deflecting the problem. It is merely pointing out to customers that there is a formal process to address complaints that has been formulated after a reasonable thought. That it works, not works or works slowly is a different debate.
Truth is, in a perfect world, every customer is equal. But if we agree that we don’t live in a perfect world on so many other counts, why should it be perfect when it comes to customer management?
So, the best that brands and corporates can start with, for a use case for social CRM, is to treat it as social PR and handle it based on PR’s principles of influence and it’s resultant impact. That will help in the scenario (that is more likely to happen) that prospects stumble upon a negative comment and see a human repsonse from the brand – not across the web, but selectively. If a brand can manage this all across the web without templatizing it, brilliant! My experience working with brands shows that it is next to impossible – from a investment and RoI point of view. They simply are not ready to plonk time, effort and money on something that would give them results in the l-o-o-o-o-n-g term.
The best way then is to treat is as PR…social PR, to be specific, and do it, at least selectively. That should help the brand build case studies on needles moved and scale it as they get more buy-ins.
Photo courtesy: standinginafield via Flickr.