Small Business CRM Looks to Make Friends out of Customers

Small business customer relationship management (CRM) services face a unique challenge, one that larger companies can often ignore: the need to connect with customers in a timely manner. While big players in the industry are now doing this out of interest, forging social connections with clients and website visitors isn't a luxury for small and midsize businesses (SMBs)--it is a requirement. Without a CRM system that allows for timely and simple blog updates, Twitter account integration and Facebook links, small businesses can find their customer base migrating to competitors that offer faster or more personalized service. The proof of such need is not only in the growth of CRM for SMB cloud providers but their increasing use of social media in core management systems.

Tweet-Talking Customers

Web-based CRM was once little more than a buzzword, but companies like Salesforce have made this service a necessity for growing businesses. Now, these same CRM platforms are beginning to see the need for social media integration. Microsoft is integrating Twitter into some of its CRM offerings, and social media companies are meanwhile turning their communicative platforms into CRM apps. Thus far, the use of social media in CRM has been hit or miss: Companies can just as easily fail with ill-timed status updates as they can create positive buzz with tongue-in-cheek Tweets.

A recent London Evening Standard article discusses the increasingly powerful role social media plays in the everyday lives of customers. In 2007, for example, only 400,000 Tweets went out over three-month periods, many of them having to do with strange celebrity behavior or other equally banal topics. Now, over 200 million tweets fly out every day, and while many of them still fall into the category of less than exciting, their sheer number shows that this form of condensed form of communication has broken into the mainstream consciousness--and why CRM needs to catch up.

The New Media Market

A recent press release from SMB cloud provider made by Pardot via MarketWatch highlights the growing impact of social media on the financial success of such service providers as the market evolves. The company was able to post a substantial increase in the fourth quarter of 2011 in large part because it focused on adding social features to its CRM offerings rather than simply trying to sell a more streamlined version of standard CRM service. By integrating services such as social profiling and social posting, SMB cloud providers offer businesses a way to not only collect hard data with their CRM, but turn that data into meaningful social contact. And this market trend is rapidly gaining speed.

The Social CRM Future

Predictions for 2012 herald the continued rise of "social CRM," a hybridization of robust on-demand cloud systems and social media platforms that will let SMBs capture customer data and market their services appropriately while creating social relationships based on real-time data. This new class of management services isn't a guarantee by any means for a small business--while it's necessary to have access to social platforms in order to drive customer retention, how well a business uses these platforms lies beyond the scope of any CRM.

Web-based CRM systems are nothing new--they've evolved through various iterations over the past several years. What is of new, however, is the number of SMBs now seeking a reliable social CRM provider that understands the increasingly powerful role of social media in the online business world. Small business CRM is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, even as it broadens to include easier links between company and customer, or between reliable seller and (hopefully) loyal friend.