In the next two years, 30% of the companies that carry out activities on the Internet, will include improvements in their services to customers, compared to 5% who did so during 2010, according to a report by Gartner Inc.
Today, most CRM focuses its efforts on the corporate marketing department, aimed at managing its brands, which means opening a page on Facebook or creating an account on Twitter. Gartner says that users use these social platforms as a back door to get customer service, getting answers and results faster than through traditional channels.
However, and despite the fact that companies are increasingly turning to social networks to provide services to their customers, they are identifying several obstacles that end up stopping this incursion. Although there is a great promotion of the advantages that the new platforms offer us in the face of customer service, there is a lack of underlying technology that supports these operations through them.
On the other hand, the unpredictable environment of social media means that CRMs have not yet been installed, at least until certain common practices are established in these spaces. This motivates that, during this transition, the marketing departments take the initiative in handling all the interactions that must be carried out in them.
Due to this constant and above all, rapid evolution, companies face a great difficulty in betting on one social or another. In this regard, Drew Kraus, Vice President of Research at Gartner, said in an interview last Friday that “companies as diverse as HP or Drugstore.com are at the forefront of social CRM. HP uses the tracking forums to solve approximately five million customer problems, while Drugstore.com uses Twitter as the main channel to divert its customers to the chats on its website. ”
On the other hand, Jeremiah Owyang, an expert in Social Media at the consulting firm Altimer Group, warned that “there is an excess of confidence in using Twitter as a marketing vehicle, since tweets are difficult to locate once published, thus losing their value”.
Owyang ended with a recommendation for companies: “rethinking their Social Media strategy”, pointing to the use of several tools and new Q & A services that appear every day, such as Focus.com. Its golden rule is “if you update Twitter more than 20 times a day, it should take place only in blogs”, adding one of the services mentioned above.