Social CRM And The Keys To Customer Loyalty

Better customer loyalty is usually cited as a desired outcome of a Customer Relationship Management CRM implementation, and even more so as social CRM becomes a valuable tool for business. More knowledge about your customers and tracking your interactions with them can certainly help you know how to keep them coming back.

But there's a lot of work needed to go from the goal of CRM-driven customer loyalty and the reality of actual loyal customers. There are a many pitfalls that plague even the best companies in their efforts to engender loyalty in their customers. In spite of the fact that they are trying to influence an aspect of customer behavior, many loyalty initiatives never result in actions that impact the customer -- they end up as internal CRM activities that collect data, collate and analyze it, but then result in no actionable insights. Even worse are cases where insights are discovered but internal processes are so dislocated that businesses never act on them.

Building loyalty sets in motion activities that may result in improvements to business processes, but, paradoxically, this can be detrimental to your ultimate goal. If the goal was customer loyalty, those internal process improvements are not enough if they result in internal efficiencies but no external impact.

If your objective is long-term loyalty, it's probably a good idea to use CRM to chart the things you do to foster loyalty and to try to imagine and anticipate the factors you don't control that can impact loyalty from the customer's side.

In other words, chart the path from customer acquisition to customer loyalty (or a failure to establish loyalty). If you do that, you may well discover that there are lots of paths on your flow chart that come to dead ends - or at least head in unpredictable directions.

For instance, marketing automation is an obvious help in acquisition and drip marketing, but are you using the technology to continue to communicate with existing customers? Loyalty is not developed through monetary transactions; it's developed through the ongoing experience with the business.

Email is good not only to continue marketing efforts with the goal of upselling customers, but also to suggest ways to better use the products and services they may have already purchased. Adding value even when an immediate sale is not the objective is a great way to demonstrate your commitment to the customer and thus foster loyalty. It's also a great tool for steering customers to social media channels where you have a presence.

How do you know which customers to reach out to in this way, or what content you should provide them? Use your CRM and marketing data to find out.

Another often-overlooked way to improve loyalty, as well as your products and processes, is to pay attention to customer feedback, a neglected asset that often is already residing within the walls of your business. In 2008, Gartner found that a depressingly low 10 percent of companies said they used the insight they collected from surveys.

If a business has no process to make use of survey data, it's likely it also lacks a mechanism for using direct input from customers, like emails or responses to the social media channels the company uses. This is an enormous waste of an opportunity to listen and react to customers, and represents a failure to seize upon one of social CRM's great promises: a two-way conversation with the customer.

If a customer suggests a way for you to improve your products or services through a social channel, it's free consulting. Beyond that, it's a loyalty-building opportunity. The customer with the suggestion should be thanked, building one-to-one loyalty. You should also make the news of the suggestion known to your other customers through your social media channels and give credit where it's due.

While you're at it, emphasize how enthusiastically you receive such suggestions -- thus helping customers understand how their experience and input is valued. Just the feeling that you can have an impact on a business is a great loyalty booster.

There's one aspect of loyalty-building that probably won't show up on your flow chart, but which is really the foundation for your entire CRM effort. That's the attitude of your employees.

Whether you sell B2B or B2C, it's essential that everyone in your business understands the critical value of loyal customers, the importance of the customer experience to loyalty, and their key role in creating the customer experience.

If any one employee fails as a loyalty-builder, it will cancel out all the other loyalty efforts your business has invested in. This is an idea that you need to sell to each of your employees and keep reinforcing. You can use many of the same ideas you employ to keep customers loyal to your business to keep your employees loyal to the idea that they build loyalty.


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A recognized opinion leader in CRM, Chris Bucholtz was the founding editor of both InsideCRM and Forecasting Clouds before becoming editor in chief of CRM Outsiders. To learn more about how to empower your employees with Customer Relationship Management Software please visit http://www.sugarcrm.com