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My tire dealer’s Social CRM

June 21, 2010 By


My tire dealer (Western Tire) and my local car dealer are using social media in an innovative way – different from what people may think and very successful.

First what they didn’t do:
- No fan page
- No online community
- They have both no blog or any major “presence”

Now what they do:
- The majority of their team mates have an account in Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace
- They asked their clients if they are in the social web and if they may connect. In order to make it easy for all parties to exchange the sites and networks they asked them to share their Xeesm (a little free tool to keep all your social sites).

- The car dealer sales people start in the morning and visit all the clients they have so far and visit their profiles to know what is going on in their client’s lives. Some chat about vacation photos or whatever is appropriate. They do that until a client enters the store and then often get back to their laptop and again meet clients in the social web. It shifts the “image” of the ugly car dealer sales guy to a much more caring person. They use our Social CRM system to visit on average 50 contacts a day. With 4 sales people that is about 4,000 customer touch points a month. Is the social car dealer a new chance for the car dealer guild? This one certainly is.

- The Tire dealer is different as they have high noon early in the morning. Once the daily dose of tire repairs is in, they start to connect with clients like the car dealer above. The tire dealer is now thinking about renting an old airfield to let customers on it and “burn their tires” literally. Simply because they found that a lot of their customers are 19 year olds who secretly burn tires on the street and share their photos on Facebook. But only if you care about your customer you know what they actually do – once in a while ;) . The guys in that tire shop are very different. The live in their cell phone and push us hard to change the app to make it better work for them. There is only one computer in the shop.

Now this started a few month ago when one of my tires blew up and we chatted about our respective business. The next step now is building a fan page – but with a specific theme, content and purpose – not to just have one.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Edge, Flights, General, social crm

The Social Technology Cloud

June 17, 2010 By


The level of confusion around technology and technology definitions is increasing. The Social Media Academy together with Xeesm worked on a way to resolve confusion and help explain the major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud.


Social Networks
Social Networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Xing and many others serve a variety of purpose in business as well as private lives. They become instrumental in an engagement to create a better customer experience as it allows to meet and to listen to customers where they are. However Social Networks are not exclusive to sales and marketing teams to connect with clients.

Online Communities
While Online Communities had some ups and downs in the past, they will become a strategic play in a companies customer engagement strategy. All businesses will very soon want to provide a dedicated platform for their customers to meet and converse online – way above and beyond the classic support communities. While market leaders including Lithium, Jive and Ning will need to improve their community offering to serve a broader customer spectrum including SMB companies, online communities are an integrated part of a social business engagement.

Social Media Monitoring
A whole different type of solutions are Social Media Monitoring products. While most started out to identify sentiments in the market and learn what customers saying about their brand, Social Media Monitoring became a strategic solution in lead generation and opportunity identification. Social Media Monitoring tools help feed CRM and Social CRM systems and continue to be paramount to monitor brand attitude and brand value. Leading brands include Alterian/Techrigy, Scoutlabs (Lithium), Radian6 or Sysomos and many others. New applications in the SMM field will include influencer identification, business partner monitoring and other more granulate ways to better understand the needs of a given ecosystem.

Social CRM / Social Relationship Management
SRM and SCRM systems are again different beasts. They are built to help teams actively engage with customers, prospects and partners as well as other market constituencies. Sales Teams, Marketing Teams, Product Managers, Service Teams don’t ‘live’ in the SRM or SCRM tool but use it to quickly reach to their contacts and focus on specific objectives or goals while still socializing. SCRM and SRM tools provide the bridge between the external social web and internal systems. While a customer may never have direct access to an ERP or CRM system, they should have access to a Social CRM system. And like the traditional CRM systems also SCRM systems need to have functionality such as Forecasting, Opportunity Management and provide some work flow guidance to the sales, marketing or support teams. Market leader Xeesm.com and young companies like SocioToco or Gist try to enter this market with dedicated solutions to support business teams in their challenge to create a better customer experience.

Social CRM is a solution that supports a “Business Strategy” (not a social crm strategy) that most likely is set to create a better customer experience measured by increased advocacy for brand, products and services. Social CRM needs to interface with Social Networks, Social Media Monitoring, Branded or non branded online communities on the outside and traditional IT on the inside. Only if the actual customer has access to that Social CRM system, the attribute ‘Social’ is appropriate.

Tools
In addition to the four major pillars of the Social Technology Cloud there is a large offering of tools. Currently more than 5,000 tools support the above core systems and many of the core systems establish themselves as platforms to support and host those tools.

An industry in the making
The Social Technology Industry will be a Billion Dollar industry by end of this year. While the majority of the revenue is generated through advertising and sponsorships, many of the services and tools for professional usage is sold as subscriptions or consulting services and trainings.

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Filed Under: Edge, Flights, General, industry, Partners, SCRM, social crm, Social Media, Social PRM, Social Technology, sPRM

June 12 release – Xeesm Update

June 15, 2010 By


Several cool updates on Xeesm!
- New Dashboard for none subscription users
- Report on who is following you in Xeesm
- Updates on XNotes
- Enhancements on Flights with “Space Dominance Report”


1) See your followers / favorites

On the xeesm homepage you see now clickable links to the respective statistics.

One is the people who added you as a contact / favorite.

Click on the number of people you are favorited by and you see a list of people that added you as a contact. You can add them to your “Social Address Book” by simply clicking the add button. If you have an active Flight! open, you can add them to the active Flight

(this feature is currently only available to Business Edition Users)

2) Major Enhancements On XNotes


XNotes have now much more details and clickable references. You see them in the Xeesm Dashboard page. References include the Flight! you contacted a person from or the Opportunity in Edge! you worked on.

If you click on a person from within Edge! or Flights! you see the notes that you did from other Flights! or just in general. That way you now have a full view of all the activities with the respective person and the corresponding reference. For instance if you made a note in a Flight and you visit the person later on in Edge! you can see that note and better track other activities.

The other enhancement we made is that we record a visit to a persons site in XNotes as well. That way you don’t have to type like “left a note on LinkedIn”, instead we capture the visit and you’ll see how long ago and in what context.

3) Major enhancements on Flights!

We also did quite some work on Flights! We talked about the “Template Builder” before.

Flight Goals:

We now added an additional field where you can define a “Goal” of any Flight. This is in particular important when you share flights with others. A goal may be “Win 20 prospects” or “Get feedback from 15 top customers” or “Identify 3 top candidates for a sales search etc.

The Goal of a Flight! is copied over to a new flight and also part of the template maker.

NEW: Space Dominance of a Flight:

We now report the space dominace of a Flight. This is a simple yet very strategic report. You see where most of the flight members are and may direct your engagement towards ‘where your customers are’. It shows you the top ten sites where your flight members are.

You may see a number bigger than the members. That is if several members have multiple presences on the same network.

4) Social Finder Update

We updated SocialFinder so it adds photos to a profile if it can find a photo and no photo exists in Xeesm. In the first version Social Finder “updated” social sites if it found a record and another record already existed. We removed the ‘update’ and always ADD a new record if the site URL doesn’t exist.

Social Finder Success Rate

After some first reviews, we’d like to provide some initial feedback:

If you know the persons personal email address the success rate is typically above 80% in the US and around 60+% outside the US. In some areas however it may be rather low.

If you use SocialFinder with a list of webinar attendees you may find the success rate below 20% because often times users provide an email address they only use for registrations but not for their social presence.

Face lifting

We did some minor changes like a bit larger input fields and replaced the “old” buttons with “xeesm style” buttons.

Several Bug Fixes

And as always we did some bug fixes like:

- When going to your Dashboard the active Flight is no longer reseted
- Recognizing the checkboxes in the contact dispatcher
- Fixed some rules bugs when using a non subscription version
- Fixed an intermittent access issue with Notes 2 Contacts
- Added a message if an image can’t be read by Xeesm

And a few others.

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Filed Under: Edge, Flights, Product News and Updates, Product Update