Recently I posted this topic as a discussion item to get feedback from the members of Social CRM group on LinkedIn.

The following comments were posted:

from Jorge Avila:

I would think of it as:

1. a platform where people can act as your vendor, so they can capture and follow up opportunities for you
2. a platform where people can get/give information regarding a product/service without human interaction
3. a platform that allows people to socially interact while being in an opportunity process, like having a sales process where lot of people can share/ask

The part of success comes when it works and gives you benefits …

from Esteban Kolsky:

if you take it to the highest possible level, there are three success factors:

1. leverage existing and enabled social channels metrics and guidelines in place
2. measure end-to-end success and experience
3. convert measurement into actionable insights, convert actionable insights into better experiences

if you go one step lower, then

1. make sure that the business functions are delivered equally through any of the social channels as through any of the other channels,
2. make sure you measure (yeah, i am kinda repetitive on this) experience
3. make sure you meet expectations for the social channel by the customer

and if you want to go one step lower than that

1. make sure you have the right channel
2. make sure you have the right metrics that correlate to operational metrics
3. make sure you deliver what is expected, at the right time, in the right manner, in the right place

We can continue this forever, but would love some opinions before i continue

thoughts?

And here was my view on this topic:

Great comments.

I think that we need to split the overall SCRM success factors into at least 3 areas:
- sales;
- marketing;
- customer service/support.

And the addition of another dimension: social media channels will help to determine which ones should be used for what areas in a future.

Then we need to define KPIs for each area/channel.

And yes, documentation of as-is picture of course is required. Seems to me that trend numbers will be even more beneficial to compare to. The impact of any special events should be taken into consideration.

And if we did a good job with the steps above it will be easy to access the success/failure of the project by area/channel – did we meet our projected KPIs?

thoughts?

How about you? Have you done any sub-projects in Social CRM space? Were they successful? How do you know?