Most vendors remain relatively small and unprofitable,
although many grew 50 to 100 percent in 2010. In order to thrive in the future,
analysts said that social CRM vendors will need to provide clear benefits for
companies and communities, demonstrating multiple use cases for sales,
marketing and customer service processes.
Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as
a series of experiments and tactical purchases. Few have a social CRM strategy
or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results.
Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of
applications for different purposes.
This lack of consistency among buyers keeps the market
fragmented into at least three segments – sales, marketing and customer service – with many small vendors taking various approaches to address one area,
approach or use case. The majority of vendors that survive and thrive in the
mid-term will offer tools that can address multiple use cases in more than one
department.
Today’s vendors differentiate themselves on the basis of
functions, process workflow, analytics and ease of use or superior experience
delivered through professional services.
The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM
vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when
enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM.
However, companies are asking for the integration of
social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer
service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with
applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel
campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web
analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office
applications.
By Telecomlead.com
Team
[email protected]
