Telecoms, tourism and public sector offer great potential for social media CRM outsourcers

By Mark Atterby – Senior Staff Writer

According to a new report Profiting from Social Media in CRM Outsourcing, from Ovum, the telecoms, travel and tourism and public sector industries offer huge potential for CRM outsourcers looking to exploit the demand for social media services.

As the name suggests social media CRM (or Social CRM) refers to the ability of integrating the conversations customers are having about brands and products on the various social media channels with traditional CRM channels and processes.

Peter Ryan, Ovum analyst and author of the report, said: “There is certainly demand for social media CRM services that outsourcers can take advantage of, particularly in the travel and tourism and telecoms sectors. However other sectors also offer great potential for CRM outsourcers to grow their revenues.

“According to our survey, the third biggest user of social media CRM is the public sector, with 45 per cent. Coupled with the expected increase in outsourcing in the public sector in regions such as the UK due to huge spending cuts, this could be a strong growth area for outsourcers.”

Organisations in these sectors are struggling to address the challenge of how to effectively manage dialogue with the market in terms of sharing information, fast-tracking problems, and responding to questions, both internally and externally, with customers, prospects, employees, other stakeholders, and the public.

According to Martin Conboy, President of the Australian BPO Association, “Social media is no longer on the periphery; it’s very main stream. One of the challenges for most organisations is that the people who make the decisions about deploying social media strategies were born before 1960, and they simply do not understand it. However, the people who are clamouring for action are usually in the marketing department and social media is a part of their DNA as they were born after 1990 and they totally get it.”

He went on to say, “Anyone with teenage children understands that these people have never lived in a world without the Internet.”

According to the report, the main social media functions providing a growth opportunity for CRM outsourcers are in the monitoring of social media forums, blogs, tweets, etc. and customer service and business development. Ryan continued, “Many enterprises that are looking for social media CRM applications do not have a clear idea of what they actually need and are more concerned with being thought of as a market leader. This provides an excellent opportunity for CRM outsourcers to help their clients define what is needed for their business”.

Social CRM platforms and tools continue to evolve and improve. However, more attention needs to be given to process, ideology and roles in social media engagement and how it integrates with traditional channels.
Datacom Connect is an outsource provider of Social CRM Services. Managing Director, Kirsty Hunter said, “The demand for CRM functions and systems has never been more prevalent with the onset of social media. We’ve helped many of our customers implement social media monitoring and engagement frameworks. Our approach with our customers is to understand what key takeouts they want from this activity and we build upon that so they ultimately gain beneficial and quantifiable business outcomes from their Social CRM platforms.”

Ms. Hunter points out that monitoring and engagement is the starting point of how social media activity can provide real value to multiple departments – “knowing what’s out there is great but without an engagement model, we see so many opportunities lost. By developing a sound monitoring and engagement framework, integrating departments to that framework with clear scenario workflows, businesses can use social media as another channel to manage their all-encompassing Universal Queue.”

Martin Conboy agrees, “Nowadays people want to interact with an organisation on their terms, whatever the channel, telephone, web chat, SMS or social media. So organisations need to be in a position to handle all types of customers via the full spectrum of available channels. The openness of Australians for customer service dialogue presents organisations that get the social media channel right, with a unique opportunity to foster goodwill and if done well it will increase revenue.”

What roles need to be established to engage in Social Media CRM? How and when would online conversations get routed to customer service/support, and when would they get routed to PR, marketing or sales department? Just as important is establishing responsibilities and guidelines for engagement. When does a complaint get routed to the CEO, or a product idea go to your R&D group? In terms of process, outsourcers could help clients in developing a listening strategy as well as the roles and responsibilities that need to be established.

Hunter said, “That outsourcing social media CRM is not something that can simply be offloaded to a third party, then set and forget. Organisations must realise that resources should be deployed for various tactical roles, i.e. social network monitoring, populating social media sites, engaging the blogs and tweets, directing traffic and channel management. In some instances, resources can take on multiple tactical roles. Depending on resources available, businesses will do this in-house or if they have a bandwidth restriction, they come to outsourcing organisations like Datacom Connect.”

Conboy said, “Many are turning to software and there are over 80 tools available in the marketplace; however, technology measurement and monitoring (social media monitoring tools) solutions are just tools. Real insight comes from human analysts that understand how businesses work and know how to use these technology tools. For example technology tools really struggle with sentiment analysis.”

Ryan believes the greatest challenge that CRM outsourcers need to overcome to make a success of offering social media services is the development of a profitable business model, “There is currently much confusion among vendors about how to charge for these services, with many choosing a per time-unit or per transaction model. However, as the market matures, pricing models will need to evolve to ensure the highest possible margins are achieved.”

Kirsty says, “For Datacom Connect, one piece of sustainable social media activity for a customer can very quickly evolve into multiple strings, as a result of multiple benefits gained from delivering the monitoring and engagement strategies. It’s important to take a flexible and customised approach, leveraging business models that first and foremost, deliver real benefits to our customers.”

Phil Hassey BPO Researcher muses over the Asia/Pacific BPO market landscape

My first BPO research was undertaken in 2000, when I wrote one of the first reports on the Asia Pacific BPO market focused on CRM BPO. The future was bright at that time as the big offshore providers of CRM services such as Teletech and Sitel increasing investments in offshore centres, particularly in the Philippines with a plan for focus on delivery of services to local Asia Pacific clients. At the same time in late 2000, IBM stated at an AP analyst briefing that they would not be interested in the BPO marketplace.

Whilst a lot has changed in the 11 or years since, embracing of BPO has not been as strong as anticipated. BPO across the Asia Pacific is still a market with clearly unfulfilled potential both in terms of market demand and service provider capability. Obviously the two are linked. IBM, driven by CRM outsourcing through the Daksh acquisition is now a leader in non-transactional BPO in the Asia Pacific region alongside Accenture. The call centre/CRM outsourcing market did not mature nearly as quickly as expected.
In Australia, the AP BPO market is at its most mature. However by US standards, unlike IT Outsourcing, it still clearly lags in terms of customer uptake. The last five years have seen a lot of interest in BPO, but ultimately limited commitment from enterprise. I like to joke that 2-3 years ago, there were more BPO pilots in Australia than at Heathrow or JFK airports. The reasons for the lack of enterprise commitment are varied, they include more organised labour forces in Finance and HR and customer care, and outsourcing fatigue through publicised IT Outsourcing problems. Highlighting the opportunity that exists in the market, the lack of providers means that supply side issues are just as important as buy side issues. Accenture and IBM aside, there are very limited services providers that have the requisite scale to successfully provide capabilities in markets in Asia Pacific. This is of course a chicken and egg situation. The deals need to be there to get the investment and I believe the deals will not happen until the investment is made. Some bold calls will be successful if researched well enough.

Across Asia more broadly, strategic BPO is even further from Australia in terms of maturity. The same issues as Australia remain, in a positive note increasing numbers of enterprises are becoming more familiar with the benefits of BPO. Many of the individual country markets do take their lead from a targeted number and type of companies; vendors should firstly identify these enterprises, and then focus on them in order to drive BPO adoption more broadly.

Naturally enough, it must be repeated regularly that Asia Pacific is a large and incredibly diverse market that does not take kindly to being generalised in sweeping statements. We have half the world’s population and workforce. A strategy that works in Singapore may not work in neighboring Malaysia; something that works in India will definitely not work in China. Understanding these subtleties is critical and without practical experience, my experience has highlighted that it takes time and several false steps before success can be enjoyed.

You can read more about Phil’s background here, email him at phil@capioIT.com

By Mark Atterby – Senior Writer

It wasn’t that long ago a call centre was a facility staffed by people for answering telephone calls. This quickly evolved to include other communication channels such as the web, email, IVR and speech recognition. So the call centre evolved into the contact centre, a facility for handling a variety of communication channels.

Many organisations are engaging with online communities (blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook etc.) to generate exposure, opportunities and sales. By linking social media marketing with the latest CRM systems they aim to reduce marketing expenditure while increasing brand awareness and sales.

Traditional marketing activities (advertising, direct mail campaigns, trade shows, etc.) are not delivering cost-effective results or the results are hard to measure. Many marketers and organisations are turning to the social media resources and networks associated with Web 2.0, as an alternative to the traditional marketing channels.

Though social media offers tremendous opportunities for organisations to market themselves and to communicate with their customers, they need to adopt a different mindset to the traditional marketing and CRM. Rather than viewing social media as a vehicle to reach a mass audience with a well-constructed corporate message, it’s more about targeting the people who are most interested in your products and services and engaging them in a meaningful dialogue.

Consumers increasingly expect effortless, seamless, integrated and interactive experiences from an organisation. To respond to these expectations organisations need to adopt CRM strategies and technology that facilitate integrated as well as extremely interactive experiences.  To maintain competitive advantage, organisations will need technologies that enable them to obtain detailed insight into consumer behaviour across all touch points.

Social Media Marketing

Traditional marketing is about delivering a message to an audience, whether that’s via a television ad, a direct marketing piece, or an email blast. Social Media Marketing is about generating conversations, the purpose of which is to create and improve understanding about one’s organisation and its products and services.

Social media marketing is, in many ways, related to viral marketing, where word of mouth is generated through social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or other Web 2.0 resources such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, as well as video and photo sharing websites. “These methods enable organisations to communicate in a personalised manner to an audience, and also enable ‘unofficial’ communications (peer-to-peer rather than brand-to-consumer) that many users accept as more relevant, more authentic and more credible than the official sources”, says Kristin Moyer from Gartner Research

It’s about distributing and sharing content quickly and cheaply in the hope that customers or prospective customers start conversing about ones products and services where they then pass that information onto their networks.

The benefits of Social Media Marketing

According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report1, 81 per cent of marketers believed that their social media efforts have generated exposure for their business, with improving website traffic and growing lead generation lists being secondary benefits. Another significant benefit has been the building of new partnerships.

The report also highlighted that organisations engaged in social media marketing experienced a rise in their search engine rankings, which have resulted in improved business exposure, more effective lead generation efforts and a reduction in overall marketing expenses. “About one in two marketers found social media generated qualified leads. However, only slight more than one in three said social media marketing helped close business”2.

Traditional CRM versus Social CRM

Traditionally, CRM has been used as a management tool to help drive direct marketing campaigns, monitor the success of those campaigns and track the sales pipeline. Allen Duet, Senior Product Manager for Sage, comments, “In the past CRM was employed by management to track the sales pipeline rather than a solution to help sales people complete the sale. It’s been technology focused around centralised databases, driving marketing, sales, service and contact management automation.”

Social CRM aims, by linking traditional CRM systems with social media marketing, to empower sales users to be more effective by leveraging knowledge and experience of the broader sales and business community. Sales and marketing professionals can use Social CRM and media marketing to help get inside the mind of their customers and prospects.

• What social networking websites are customers visiting?
• What topics are important to them?
• How do they get that information?
• Who are they talking to?
• What are they saying about one’s products and services?

Social media sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn and the information posted on blogs and wikis, allow marketers and salespeople to engage in the market conversation about their products and services. Duet asserts, “The main benefit of linking CRM with social media activities is the ability to track interactions across a variety of mediums to provide context to the relationship that a
CRM user or the business they represent have with prospects, customers, or marketing targets.”

“The richer the capture of interactions the more actionability a business has in terms of communicating with these contacts”, adds Duet.

As well as the ability of correlating this data with customer information held in a CRM database, social media can also provide a public data warehouse, allowing marketers to identify trends and hot topics along a variety of lines (demographic, publisher type competitor, etc…). Duet says, “These sites are like a data warehouse in the sky and the application of BI tools to help identify trends and hot items should marry up well with CRM’s actionability and contextual consumption of BI”.

Where does one start? And how much effort and money does it take?

There are numerous social media tools out there for marketers to use including Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other video sites, social bookmarking sites (Del.icio.us), Forums, StumbleUpon, Dig, Reddit, Friendfeed, etc. If you are new to it, it may appear an extremely daunting task to figure out where to start. Which tools are going to deliver the best results? How much time or effort needs to be allocated? Or how do you measure the success of what you are doing?

To some extent this depends on the type of industry that you are in and the nature of your organisation. If you sell business-to-business products and services, then Facebook is unlikely to be of much use to you as compared to LinkedIn or Twitter. If the products and services you sell require extensive education or a consulting element to them, then producing whitepapers, customer success stories, news updates and other content for blogs with sound advice and helpful tips may prove to be the most effective tool to start with.

The Social Media Marketing Industry Report highlights that Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and LinkedIn are the top four tools by far, used by marketers3. The more experienced social marketers and those who spend a significant amount of time on social marketing, will tend to start investigating and using other tools.

Engaging in Social Media isn’t so much about cost as it is about time commitment on the part of your sales and marketing teams. And how much time you spend is up to you. However, it does take time to develop relationships from conversations that lead to actual business. However, a large percentage of marketers who take the time find great results. Over 60 per cent of marketers who have been using social media for years report it has helped them close business. More than half who spend 16 or more hours per week find the same results4.

It also requires a cultural shift in the organisation and how it promotes its products. Rather than viewing social media as a vehicle to reach a mass audience with a well-constructed corporate message, it’s more about targeting the people who are most interested in your products and services and engaging them in a conversation. People in productive conversation don’t repeat what they’re saying over and over. They learn from each other and move topics forward. In social media marketing brands are not simply emblems, but living entities that evolve and change as people interact with them.

The future of Social CRM

At present most CRM solutions offer some form of integration with social media, typically where they have a function to associate an online web page or resource to a contact record. “However”, as Duet points, “no Solution at this stage can fully capture and aggregate that interaction information into traditional CRM information buckets such as history”. This is where the real business value of social media and linking it with CRM lies. By capturing and aggregating the information gained from conversations people are having in regards to your products, services and brand should allow greater opportunities to close as well as generate sales.

The conversation about the realities of cloud computing took an interesting turn last week as technology vendors, customers, analysts and service providers came together at Fox Studios in Sydney to debate just how quickly the game is changing in the local market.

Developed to offer a frank and fearless environment for the honest exchange of ideas and opinions, ‘theCircle LIVE’ attracted chiefs, integrators, customers and experts from across the business spectrum. The audience included industry heavyweights such as EMC, Cisco, VMware, SAP and CSC, with the conversation moderated by respected IT journalist Mr. Mark Jones.

“Consumer-oriented cloud services have promised a lot and opened our minds to stretch what can be achieved. All our data and computer services live in the cloud and just like a utility we flick a switch and everything just works. Yet there is still much debate around how this will actually be delivered – even the very definition of ‘cloud’ is disputed,” explains Clive Gold Marketing CTO of EMC Australia and New Zealand, the world’s leading provider of information infrastructure solutions. “So theCircle LIVE presented a rare opportunity to bring some brilliant minds from the industry together with customers, in order to get a genuine conversation started.”

The big issues of the day were covered in a broad ranging debate, with experts from the health, legal and security fraternities weighing in to argue the relative merits of private vs. public cloud models. Security, privacy and compliance concerns were recurrent themes amongst the audience, with members of the health, legal and security communities weighing in.

The future of Cloud BPO was tabled by legal firm Truman Hoyle in relation to new Australian Privacy Principle 8, which will – if adopted in 2011 – require organisations storing information about Australian citizens in offshore data centres to ensure they select providers that meet Australian privacy standards in the absence of informed consent by each “affected individual.” That informed consent will have to be obtained after advising customers (or “affected individuals”) that there will be no obligation on the Australian company to take reasonable measures to ensure that the overseas provider will meet equivalent standards of privacy protection.

Absent this informed consent: “There is a specific issue for organisations using offshore operators because if an Australian company puts its consumer data – its private data – into the cloud, it has to make sure that the service provider can be shown to have an equivalent number of safeguards in place as required under the new Australian Privacy Principles,” Mark Vincent, Partner at Truman Hoyle said. “Organisations that suffer a breach can also be held strictly liable for that breach even where proper due diligence was conducted to ensure their offshore cloud provider was compliant to the required level, something that is currently not the case under the existing Privacy Principles.”

“The legal intricacies of utilising public cloud service offerings that are based offshore is just one of the many complex and important conversations that theCircle LIVE is facilitating in the market,” said EMC’s Clive Gold.

“What is clear is that when something this disruptive hits, it is vital that industry engage in open and rigorous critical thinking and debate. It is good for the industry and it’s valuable for the many customers in the market that are looking to vendors and integrators for honest answers.”

According to industry research, a sizeable proportion of CRM projects fail.

So, the question is why do these CRM projects fail? More importantly, how do you make sure that your project is not one of the failures? The good news is that those that are successful usually report double-digit growth in revenue, improved productivity, improved customer loyalty, and consequently increased customer satisfaction.

Every business is different, and interacts with their customers differently. For example, if you are a company that relies on relationship sales with a longer sales cycle, you will not want to implement business processes that are designed for quick sales.

Even if the CRM provider has implemented the software within the organisation previously, it is prudent to properly scope out the project to make sure that processes align with the CRM strategy.

Any technology that is worthy of the name CRM will have been designed taking into consideration the best practice processes of many companies in different industries across their marketing, sales, customer service and reporting requirements. The best benefits will accrue from the adoption of new processes that leverage the information, speed, and integration, lower operating costs and improved service resulting from new CRM tools.

It is important to ensure that you take advantage of these revenue, service and productivity enhancements rather than implementing existing processes, which may be counter-productive to what you are trying to achieve.

This is where external Business Process experts will really add value. Although your particular challenges may be unique to you, it’s likely that they will have experienced them many times before and can bring that analytical ability to bear. They will work with you to review your processes and do a lot of the heavy lifting that in turn allows your customer facing staff to focus on doing what they are best at – solving customer problems as well as allowing you to benefit from expertise gained from previous projects.

An often seen example of a misaligned process is where information is restricted to a specific account manager of the client, or to the specific person who made the call or sent the email. A small improvement on this is where the sharing of information is done by copying many people on an email (commonly called pushing information) that leads to many people just ignoring vast quantities of emails – they still do not receive the information when they need it.

The best processes are those which enable the customer to be in charge of the relationship and this means that the relevant information must be available to whoever requires it when they require it – the user should be able to quickly access the required information.

Business Process experts will be able to recommend where automation will pay for itself in time saving by allowing your staff to focus on your clients and where analytics will deliver appropriate information at the time it is required.

Conclusion

CRM projects can and do succeed. There are experts who want to help and support you, and those organisations that are the benefactors of such successes see a lot of upside in their business.

This article was written by Opsis Pty Limited www.opsis.com.au