Social CRM: Yeah, Customers Are Starting To Expect It

Sure, you don’t have to listen to me. I’m just a dude who works with businesses and is right now sitting in his home office listening to Metallica, so feel free to tune me out if you want.

You may not particularly like what I have to say or you may take offense when I tell you you’re doing things the wrong way or have the audacity to tell you how to spend your daily minutes, but the problem with ignoring me when all I’m trying to do is help is that you get into a habit of ignoring other people and that’s a bad habit to get into.

You may not necessarily agree with everything I say (and that’s fine, by the way) and we may not always get along (especially if I consult with you), but there are people you should be listening to and those people are your customers.

“But Joey,” you say, “I DO listen to my customers. They are the lifeblood of my business and I’d be a moron not to listen to them.”

You’re right about that, you would be moronic not to listen to the people who give you money, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people from having the Henry Ford-ian viewpoint of “They’ll buy whatever I damn well TELL them to buy.”

Your customers are telling you they want you to have Social CRM systems and strategies in place.

Are you ready to listen?

A Change Is Gonna Come

I don’t know how closely you follow Facebook’s goings on, I expect not a lot, but recently they made an update to how businesses can target customers on the network. Facebook recently announced that they will roll out a feature for companies to be able to import their contact data lists and match them up with profiles on the Facebook network. Basically, a company could reach people by matching their email address or phone number with the one on file for Facebook and target ads to those people.

While the move is initially rolling out to help companies better target their Facebook ads, it has been Facebook’s pattern in the past to take the most useful tools from their ad platform and move them over to post targeting as well.

So, basically, before too long, you’ll probably be able to import your very targeted client phone list into Facebook and target posts specifically to those people and then import your email contact list and target different posts to them. Two people, living next door to each other that interact with your company in very different ways could see messages from you at the same time that speak directly to their individual situations and relevances.

Pretty powerful stuff.

Now, before you start going off the rails and commenting about how that will never happen because people care too much about their privacy and there will be revolts, etc, etc, keep in mind that 36% of customers have already said that they expect brands to use their social profiles to better target messages to them with more relevance.  As long as Facebook doesn’t start adding marketing-based strings to joining and using Facebook, all most people will notice is that the brand messages they receive are more relevant to their lives, which I doubt many people will complain about. This scenario will make it so much easier to applicably communicate with both your market influencers and your loyal brand advocates.

This situation HAS to be built into your Social CRM strategy and you HAVE to start listening to your customers. They’re telling you loud and clear what they expect. All you have to do is listen.

Thoughts?

Get our latest posts straight to your inbox!

[Get this widget]