In early 2007, PC maker Dell, which had pioneered the direct model of doing business, thought up a new way of talking to customers. It started making them participate in product development. In the website ideastorm.com, consumers could now engage in brainstorming sessions, nominate ideas they wanted to see in future products and vote for ideas others had posted. To date, the Dell Community has contributed 16,075 ideas that attracted 7,46,540 votes and 93,246 comments. More than 467 ideas have been implemented, including Ubuntu, a hot-selling laptop preloaded with the Linux operating system. ?Through IdeaStorm, our commitment is to listen to your input and ideas to improve our products and services, and the way we do business,? Dell tells in its website.
ideastorm.com uses what is now called a ?social customer relationship management (CRM)? product from Salesforce, a cloud computing company. In a way, the website defines the scope of CRM when applied to the fast growing and fast influencing world of online communities on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. Using technology, companies can now engage their customers in a conversation that is two-way ?not just sell, but also listen, engage, respond, learn and teach.
Social CRM has become a mainstream business strategy in advanced countries, with market research firm Gartner estimating the global market at $625 million in 2010. This would grow to $820 million this year and to $1 billion by 2012. It is very early days in India; the concept has just found a footing with vendors such as Salesforce, Talisma, Oracle and Microsoft currently active in evangelizing it. Many enterprises are only trying to understand how it works. Big technology users, such as telcos and banks, have implemented social packages in pockets.
?The Indian social CRM market is at the conceptual level; very few companies have adopted social CRM and those who have are influenced by their global parent organisation in the West. Very few firms have a roadmap that says that they would evolve from a traditional CRM to a social CRM concept,? says Sunil Padmanabh, research director, Gartner.
Nevertheless, vendors have little doubt that social CRM is a new enterprise trend that would catch on as companies in India realise the influencing power of online communities.
?Social CRM applications help real-time monitoring of customer conversations in social networks. They enable companies not only to resolve customer issues quickly, thereby averting a negative spiral on social networks, but also build a personal relationship with the customers by interacting with them individually,? says senior V-P of Enterprise Sales at Salesforce Asia Pacific, Steve McWhirter. ?By extending the reach of the company to the social networks and online communities, which are abuzz with brand conversations, the social CRM solutions offer opportunities to get real-time feedback, provide help, introduce new product/services and predict future trends,? he adds.
The most optimistic projection of where the India market is comes from Raj Mruthyu-njayappa, senior V-P and MD of Talisma Corporation. ?In India, the market should be close to $30-40 million now. By 2020, this is going to be a $200-million market in India. It will be slow till 2015; beyond that it would be significant growth as more people get connected,? he says.
Probe Mruthyunjayappa and he throws up an interesting list of early adopters in banking, which includes even public sector banks ? ICICI, SBI, HDFC, Bank of Baroda and Bank of India. ?Social CRM is becoming very important for banks, especially if they are looking at creating NRI accounts and while dealing with corporate clients. Most banks have a long way to go,? he notes. Insurance, he guesses, would be the next big wave adopting social CRM packages followed by non-banking financial corporations.
In evangelizing the market, IT vendors in India have started offering multiple products that define social CRM. Their packages are currently helping enterprises do sentiment analysis, tell what people think of their company, integrate the Twitters and Facebooks into a firm?s backend system, while enabling social media on the website. They are working to make their products more feature-rich.
?We believe that social CRM provides abilities to retain customers and attract new ones in a highly competitive scenario. As peers and communities remain the biggest source of influence for our customers, we are focused on integrating social interactions into the CRM environment. By enhancing collaboration, Oracle social CRM products provide a complete and accurate view of the customer which in turn enables relevant, real-time insight from both internal and external sources,? Sunil Jose, vice-president of Applications at Oracle India notes.
?While it is true that despite the numbers, social CRM represents a small part (less than 5%) of the global CRM market, we still believe that social CRM will be just the tool that organisations need to fully adopt for improved productivity. This is because social CRM takes advantage of socialized technology and business intelligence to provide organisations with abilities of genuine opportunities. In this regard, we strongly see social CRM evolving as a new enterprise trend,? he adds.