Why Organizations Aren't Embracing Social CRM At A Faster Rate (Part 2)
There’s been some questioning in the Twitterverse and the blogosphere wondering why more organizations are adopting social CRM (combining social media like Twitter and Facebook with CRM technology to improve customer relationships).
In part one of this series, I blogged that many organizations were in a survival mode; that all they were able to do was to hang on attempting to ride out this brutal recession. I made the point that innovation was a casualty of the recession.
In this post I’d like to add three more reasons why organizations aren’t engaging in social CRM.
First, many organizations who’ve adopted a CRM business strategy are still struggling with user adoption and user satisfaction issues.. They have yet to get their employees to enter the data accurately and in a timely fashion. They may still be having problems capturing the data and analyzing it in such a way as to create actionable strategies resulting in better relationships.
In short, they’re not going to “upgrade” to social CRM until they get the bugs worked out of their first generation.
Second, if they are investigating social media as a strategy, they may not have linked it to CRM. To them, these are two separate strategies. For some, neither is proven. They’ll want to get better at both before they consider consolidation.
Third, no one has figured out a way to capture the critical social media data and integrate it into CRM software. Nor are there a lot of successful social media strategies which have resulted in increased profits.
But the 800-lb gorilla continues to be the the stranglehold this recession has placed on innovation. For social CRM to be adopted on a large scale, organizations will need to feel confident enough to come out of their “hunkered down” mentality and engage in risk taking. At the same time they’ll need to improve their user adoption issues and identify successful strategies that show a good ROI.
Meanwhile, the same needs to be happening on the social media side. Once they begin to gain confidence in their abilities to use social media, then they’ll need a place to store the data. Perhaps then, they’ll combine social media with CRM and engage in true social CRM.
Regards,
Glenn
