Customer relationship management (CRM) has always been a multichannel discipline. You should connect and bond with your customers through whatever mix of channels they use or prefer. That has traditionally meant that existing channels be supplemented and extended by whatever new technologies come along. Hence, any enterprise serious about multichannel CRM has begun to add social media to a strategy that includes point of sale (PoS), direct postal mail, agent-assisted telephony, interactive voice response, e-mail, portals, and text messaging—at the very least.
Social CRM is the newest craze in this arena. It refers generally to the convergence of social media with CRM. However, in the minds of some observers it seems to imply that social media will somehow become the most important CRM channel of all, marginalizing or obsoleting others. I take issue with that perspective, which threatens to turn social media, in all their billowing multiplicity, into a big new overstuffed silo in the CRM world.
I don’t deny that social-networking interfaces are all the rage in the CRM space. One obvious case in point is salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration platform, which looks and feels so Facebook-y that, navigating through it, I half-expect my cousins to be posting new vacation pictures to the community.
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