Customer Marketer, Digital Strategist, Dedicated Father. Passionate about the current & next web. Enjoying life online as much as offline. Eager to see how they converge.
I just came across a very interesting infograph depicting how crm evolved into social crm. I don't fully agree with the way the PR department is portrayed as a central player in all this, but the visual brings at least a crisp overview of the current state crm is in. Check out the full infograph here.
I see customer acquisition model as a mindset of ‘transactive’ elasticity. In other words your spend goes only as far as supporting each transaction. So, your spending over and over again to sell new products to the same target customer. And that tactical design can’t be treated as anything but an expense. Conversely, investments are nurtured over time, are less susceptible to cuts in a down market, and yield results at intervals or in perpetuity.
Contrast this with a model where you invest in relationships with your customers by engaging authentically with them in communities. These communities give the money you allocate to customer acquisition far more elasticity by spreading the wealth across the life of the relationship with relatively smaller spikes in expense that correlate with new product awareness. They center on investing in fostering and facilitating a dialogue with your customers, your partners and your prospects. Dialogues that far outlast single transactions. And via a platform to engage with them between transactions. Sounds like an investment and not an expense to me now.
We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction – or the data associated with it… Social CRM focuses on engaging the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. Social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.
