BUS631: Brand Management

Fig. 1

Project management and prerequisites

There are no substantial differences in the project management between a Social CRM Project and a CRM Project, both of which must be managed as an engineering project. However, in the Social CRM Project the following basic prerequisites for success should be taken into account:

• Viability of the project Before starting the project there should be an analysis of whether Social CRM can be viable in the company, considering different aspects such as whether Social CRM is appropriate for the sector in which the company operates, the technological level of the company and its capacity to increase it, the ability of users to use social software applications, resistance to sharing knowledge and resistance to technological change especially in older employees and customers, etc., as Social CRM will change the way of working.

• Profit estimation An estimate of both the quantitative and qualitative benefits expected to be achieved with the implementation of Social CRM must be carried out. When estimating benefits it is very important to think of not only the social objectives such as the number of fan pages and weekly tweets but to correlate Social CRM with the contribution of top business objectives. It is necessary to estimate return on investment (ROI), business value and budget justification for social projects before developing it.

• Risk management A risk assessment of the Social CRM must be carried out during this stage of the project in order to determine what issues need attention. First, the risks are identified, such as: possible misuse of the social software, posting of negative viral messages, privacy management, security of information, publication of private or confidential information, publication of misleading or false information, posting of negative comments, etc. Afterwards, every risk is assessed in relation to the frequency with which they may occur compared to the potential negative effect (financial, security, image, privacy, etc.) if they happen. Finally, priorities are established to mitigate the risks, addressing first the most severe and frequent events. Once the risks have been understood, the methods to be used to manage them must be defined, such as for example: Defining policies for users; Monitoring the social website to find out what is being said; Educating users on legal issues such as copyright and anti-trust; Educating users on the principles of social media; or Updating insurance policies to cover social media work.

• Assignment of roles The role of Community Manager must be assigned to an employee (or several employees) of the company (the marketing manager is recommended). His/her duty is to manage, build and moderate existing communities in the company by committing to social customers, making them feel part of the company and motivating them to take action, both on their own platforms, as well as using other public social software. Depending on the company's structure, there may be several Community Managers located in different departments (usually in membership, communications or government relations) who collaborate with each other. It is also necessary to consider whether other roles need to be created (such as content creator, data analyst, and so on) to cover certain duties and to work with the Community Manager on social media projects.

Organisational framework

In this phase, the analysis of the company's objectives and culture should be performed taking into account the different characteristics of Social CRM:

• Review of the enterprise definition The aim, vision, strategy, policy and values of the company should be reformulated, taking into account how the company sees and manages its customers to enhance the benefit of both parties. The following key aspects of Social CRM should be taken into account: (1) Corporate strategy has to consider social customer. (2) The relationship between business and the social customer focuses on a collaborative effort, and on social customer engagement and commitment, not social customer management. (3) Customers are immune to the complexity of the departments of the company, so that all departments should manage customers. (4) The customer is the one who sets the schedule, because if the company is not responding to him when he needs it, other companies will respond to him. (5) The customer already coexists with the multi-channel, and he expects the same from the company, that his information, the state of his products and services, or the processes in progress, are visible and can be interacted with from any channel. (6) The company must change its focus, from business transactions to managing customers and connected social communities with which they can maximise their business transactions and opportunities.

• Review of objectives It is very important to define the general objectives that can benefit from the use of social software, as well as the strategy to be followed in order to achieve them, and the role that primary users (staff and key volunteers) should adopt. An example of an objective is to increase customer loyalty by making use of social software.

Customer strategy

Social CRM is focused on social customer management, as well as on identifying, attracting and achieving new social customers. Social customers are those customers of the company that are managed using Social CRM. For them it is necessary to define the Social Customer Strategy, which is a part of the overall Customer Strategy.

Social customer strategy is defined by social customer engagement, not social customer management as in traditional CRM, which implies that there is a mutual benefit planned from the beginning. In order to define the Social CRM strategy, the company should take the following steps:

Identify social customers

First, the social customers must be identified from the current customers with whom collaboration and relationships of commitment by Social CRM can be set up. It is important to consider that building relationships with inappropriate customers is one of the main reasons for failure in projects of systems related to the customer. The identification of social customers can be accomplished by Big Data techniques of advanced analytics, since they help to discover trends, patterns and other insights, applied to historical information from past interactions with customers and public information on social networks.

Finding new social customers

One of the strengths of Social CRM is that it facilitates the search for new potential social customers that can contribute in the future to the enterprise in terms of branding, development or improvement of products or services, etc. In order to carry out this search it is very useful to perform social profile mapping, which is the process of collecting social data about people and their relationships, to know more about them and to analyse whether they or their contacts are potential possible customers for the company. Big Data tools of advanced analytics can be used to listen to and learn from the social media activity and apply the insights to identify possible customers.

Segmenting the social customers

The traditional methods of customer segmentation are based on characteristics such as age, gender, interests and consumer habits. However, Social CRM allows another form of segmentation, since it has a lot of information that can be gathered online and is growing quickly. To manage and analyse that vast amount of information in real time, with the aim of segmenting social customers, it is necessary to use Big Data tools (such as Apache Mahout for databases, and R as a programming language), with data mining techniques: clustering, classification, association, regression and visualisation. Regarding the types of segmentation, the most frequently used are: attitudinal, behavioural, demographic, loyalty and value-based.

Social customers can be organised in communities (social groups), which are groups of users linked by some kind of feature, relationship or common interest. To do this, Social Network Analysis (SNA) tools are used, which provide mathematical and statistical routines that are applied to analyse the social networks, the results of which are represented in a social network diagram. The SNA employs community detection algorithms using the social contacts of individuals.

By being in the appropriate community, social customers can (a) attract new social customers, (b) retain other social customers, and (c) acquire a new product or service by being influenced by other social customers of the same community. The segmentation process should be carried out as follows:

• First, organise social customer types into different segments based on the communities concept, using as criteria the enterprise products and/or services of interest to each social customer.

• Then, in the communities deemed necessary, other levels of segmentation can be considered to create sub-communities, using as criteria the characteristics that are thought to be appropriate, depending on each community.

• Finally, there is a last level of segmentation that identifies social customers who provide more value within the initial segment. Some possible criteria for segmentation at this level are: profitability, growth potential, volume, competitive positioning issues, access to market knowledge, market share goals, margin levels, level of technology, resources and capabilities, compatibility of strategies, channel of distribution, and buying behaviour.

• There must also be a periodic monitoring of the evolution of communities and sub-communities in order to better understand their life cycle and thus manage them more efficiently, and, if necessary, undertake the social customer segmentation once again.

Analyse the profitability of social customers

The profitability and potential of each social customer and community that the company has is analysed. The profitability analysis is carried out not only in economic terms but also in relation to the image, productivity or any other benefit that the company can obtain as a result of the relationship with the social customers.

Define the objectives of social customers

The objectives that will be assigned to each social customer and each community, in the short, medium, and long term are defined. These objectives are established based on the profitability and potential of each social customer and community. Examples of social customer objectives might be to improve the image, collaboration in the design and development of products, generating revenue with more effective cross-marketing, cross-selling and/or up-selling, to reduce marketing costs, etc. In order to achieve this, the company must develop strategies that enable social and business customers to operate as a true community, thereby generating some feeling of belonging and loyalty from the social customers. Social interactivity with social customers must be enhanced to obtain new ideas and different points of view. This will allow the social customer to be known from another perspective, understanding their preferences and also their demands and needs in order to provide a better service and/or product. After defining the objectives for each social customer or community, the level of fulfilment of these objectives can be analysed through Big Data advanced analysis tools.

System for assessing customer relations

The distinguishing characteristics of Social CRM compared to traditional CRM make it necessary to define new indicators that are not in the measurement system of a traditional CRM. These indicators should help to assess not only the degree of compliance with the needs and expectations of customers, as in traditional CRM, but also new aspects such as the degree of interaction, collaboration or commitment of social customers with the company, the involvement of company staff in Social CRM, or the business performance objective for Social CRM. The use of Big Data advanced analysis tools allows the defined indicators to be assessed both quickly and accurately. The indicator system of the Social CRM will be made up of:

• Traditional indicators like web page views, number of clicks, conversion rate and page or site "stickiness", although also taking into account aspects such as time spent on a page, the number of times a page has been visited by the same person and the number of page views per session.

• Generic social indicators such as:

  • Volume The number of times a topic is mentioned compared to historical patterns.

  • Tone The percentages of positive, negative and neutral opinions.

  • Coverage The number of sources that are generating the conversation regarding a particular topic.

  • Authorisation Classification of sources by their level of authority, and observation of how many rises or falls of conversations are generated by authoritative sources.

• Specific social indicators to monitor aspects of Social CRM of interest, such as: the resolution time for queries, the number of posts, the accuracy of the answers, the number of participants, etc. And also the number of times an issue has been read on each channel, when and by which social customer, as well as whether it has been shared.

• Finally, the cause-effect relationships between the above indicators and the business objectives are defined.

Process map

Initially, Social CRM was mostly a concern of marketing, but it now affects every customer-oriented discipline, from marketing and sales to customer service and support, as well as other internal company processes such as design, research, innovation, etc. Each of these enterprise business processes must be analysed, defining how they can benefit from Social CRM through Web 2.0 and Big Data technology. This will involve redesigning the processes, modifying or adding new activities within each process to consider the contributions of the social customer. These contributions can come from both direct feedback as well as in an indirect form by extracting knowledge about their emotions and behaviour from the profiles and maps of experience that are stored by the technological part of Social CRM. As an example, Table 2 shows the business processes of different departments which have been improved as a result of the implementation of the SCRM-IRIS methodology in the company of the case study.

This Social CRM Computer System Architecture is composed of three levels:

• Content This level allows both structured and unstructured data to be gathered from different sources. At this level the links with the data sources are made by applying the necessary filters and patterns to obtain only valuable data for the company. Data sources can be both traditional computer systems (like corporate ERP, BI, structured databases, etc.) and social software that supports and stores human information and communication. The latter represents a major technological challenge because it makes it necessary to work with complex, unstructured, ubiquitous, multi-format and multi-channel information.

• Enrichment This level works with the data gathered by the Content level. The objective is to enhance the data and to identify and to extract valuable information for the company CRM from those data. For this purpose different advanced data analysis techniques are used. These techniques are organised in four groups: Inquire, Interact, Investigate and Improve. The result is valuable social data obtained from social software, links to valuable corporate data, and valuable new data (metadata) generated from the analysis of the previous data gathered at the Content level. These data are stored in a Social CRM structured database. Metadata are used to simplify and reduce the complexity and processing time at the next level (Modules level).

• Modules The enriched information extracted from the Enrichment level and stored in the Social CRM structured database is processed by the three main modules of the Social CRM software, using different techniques like data mining, predictive analysis or machine learning: (1) Transactional Social CRM (Operational). This supports the business processes that can be improved with the Social CRM: Marketing, Sales, After-sales, Design, Research, Innovation, etc.; (2) Analytic Social CRM. This allows data from social customers to be used to manage and improve relationships with existing social customers and achieve business objectives. Moreover, it also carries out an analysis of online social communities to find new potential social customers in these communities. Finally, it also allows measurement of the indicators of the Social CRM performance measurement system; and (3) Strategic Social CRM. This permits each social customer (profile, contacts, etc.) to be assessed and grouped in segments depending on their characteristics. In addition, it allows the definition of objectives for each segment in the short, medium, and long term, as well as definition of the strategy to be used in each segment to meet the proposed objectives.

Implantation

The person in charge of the implantation should be the Community Manager, who should always be available to solve problems or queries arising from users, both in the implementation as well as when the system is operating. It is important that the response time in resolving problems or concerns is short.

Implementing a Social CRM system is very similar to the implementation of a CRM system; therefore, the steps to be followed in implementing a Social CRM system are the same as those shown in Chalmeta. The collaboration of all Social CRM users in the implementation is critical, so it is essential that they change their mentality and assume that the centre of Social CRM is the social customer. On the other hand, in order to take advantage of Big Data advanced analysis tools, it is necessary to have good quality data. To ensure that the data are of good quality, organisations must maximise the following properties: (a) Existence. The organisation has or can get the data; (b) Validity. The data values are within an acceptable range; (c) Consistency. The same data has the same value regardless of where it is located; (d) Integrity. Completeness relationships between data elements; (e) Accuracy. The data describe the properties of the model; and (f) Relevance. The data are appropriate to achieve the proposed objectives.

The person in charge of the creation and maintenance of the continuous improvement system is also the Community Manager, as he/she is the one who knows the entire system best and, therefore, is also better able to identify potential future improvements.

Monitoring

Social CRM must be monitored throughout its entire lifespan. The Community Manager is in charge of carrying out this monitoring process. The characteristics of Web 2.0 and Big Data technologies allow the monitoring to be carried out quickly and effectively, while providing great control over the system.

In order to establish an effective monitoring system, the following tasks must be carried out:

• To monitor the indicators defined in stage four of the methodology so as to be able to carry out a follow-up of the system in order to measure its performance. To do so, the following technologies (which are based on Big Data advanced analysis tools) are used: Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management/Marketing Systems and Association Management Systems.

• To adapt or modify the functionalities required, in order to fix errors and improve the system.

• To generate and maintain a system of periodic motivation for users, to reward users that make good use of the Social CRM system, since the participation of users is essential for Social CRM.

• To carry out a control of accesses and input from all users, as it is very important they make good use of the system.

• To carry out periodic user surveys to assess their level of satisfaction with the Social CRM, and to ascertain the level of acceptance of the system and compile their suggestions for improvement. After the results of the surveys have been obtained, they are studied and the relevant modifications are made.

• To periodically carry out an analysis of the system's stability, which checks whether the Social CRM system is working properly, if it reacts correctly to the data it manages and if users use it properly.