Social CRM. Collecting the interest of Internet users

With this article I open the cycle - the description of Social CRM, i.e. software products aimed at working with the interest of users in social networks. Like other CRM, these products will help improve the performance of sales and marketing, will allow to carry out a clear control over the quality of staff, as well as increase the level of automation of employees.

I have been engaged in the implementation of CRM systems for quite a long time, and in almost every project there arises the task of collecting the interest of potential customers to the company, its products or services. Now almost every company has some pages in social networks, feedback forms, comments, discussions on the site, etc. And the question arises how to collect all this data if the company has several sites, for example, a website, a Vkontakte group, on Facebook, and several managers work with clients.

Today, the first software products called Social CRM have appeared. CRM-systems designed to work with social networks and user activity in them. Most of them are English-speaking, and the automation of work in them is mostly aimed at working with Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, work with the interest of users is quite realistic to implement in the framework of the CRM system that you use to work with leads and clients. Therefore, it is possible to start automating and collecting the interests of users of social networks at any time with minimal cost.
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What is user interest, and how does it manifest itself?

The active work of commercial companies in social networks has led to the need for new concepts and new tools. And today it is not enough to take into account and analyze only the leads, i.e. requests from potential customers received through the website or from another source, for example, by telephone. The success of working in social networks is determined by the interest of users.

The interest of users is any action, which may include likes, reposts, comments, requests and transitions to the site, demonstrating the interest of users of your product or service.

Even if the user of social networks is not your future customer, your interest in your company may serve to increase customer confidence and / or provide access to information about your company and its products / services to a wider audience. On the other hand, publicly negative from users or unanswered questions will reduce the level of trust, which can also negatively affect the level of sales and company profits.

Working with the interest of users is significantly different from working with orders and requests; a greater number of options for user actions implies a wider range of reactions from company employees. In principle, work with social networks is a large, separate and very important segment for any business, which is closer to working with the public than with potential clients (leads). And, nevertheless, it also needs to be automated, analyzed and improved performance.

Why is it important to collect this data?

Firstly, any activity, even if it’s just a like or a comment from the “I liked your product” series, and even more questions about the product, as well as how and where to buy it, can be viewed as a potential deal, as an interest. from a potential buyer to the product. And it is very important not to miss a possible deal and any manifestations of this interest.

In addition, each such manifestation of the activity of potential customers is the result of efforts, and, therefore, of the company's expenses. Therefore, activity accounting is important not only to increase sales, but also to increase efficiency.
Maintenance of the group, website performance, search engine promotion - all this requires effort, time and, of course, company funds. Therefore, it is also important to see the result of these efforts in order to increase their efficiency in the future without increasing the company's costs.

So, on the one hand, any activity is a potential deal, on the other - statistics on user behavior can improve the efficiency of customer engagement and even, in some cases, reduce costs.
Why do I put such emphasis on the second aspect? The fact is that many companies collect data only from the contact forms of the site, but at the same time activity in social networks is passed by. As a result, the picture of work statistics in different directions is distorted.

For example, if a person saw information about a product on a social network, wrote a comment, did not wait for an answer, and went to the site, where he filled out the feedback form, in this case, he will be counted among the people who became clients through the site. This will be a distortion of real information, and the company will focus on working with the site, instead of activating in social networks, from which, in fact, may come even more buyers.

Thus, the collection of statistics from different sources allows you to get the most complete information and, as a result, a realistic picture of work efficiency and costs aimed at different options to attract customers. Naturally, for any company this is very important.

What does user activity consist of?

It is important to understand how user activity is relevant to your company. I divide user activity information into the following parts:

1. User activity in social networks. This could be a Vkontakte group, a Facebook page, Twitter entries or Odnoklassniki. It all depends on your choice of social networks. At certain stages, you can also analyze them separately from each other to determine the most effective sources of buyers for your business. And when the work is already put on stream, they can be considered as total.
2. Users who have completed a callback or feedback form on the site. This activity is most often the most interesting, since only people who place an order in the online store are closer to the purchase.
3. Comments on the reviews page or product pages. This activity often comes from already established customers, but even here there are requests from people who are in the process of choosing a product, it is also important to keep track of them. And reviews about the purchase took place - this is your face on the Internet, it is very important that there are no unanswered requests or some kind of conflict situations.
4. Requests that come to the company mailbox. There are also often buyers, and, many of them, large. Representatives of legal entities often write to the post.
5. Various online chat rooms where potential customers also often ask questions, and working with them is just as important as with telephone queries.

Each of these points should be monitored and worked out by managers and other employees, for example, consultants or administrators of groups in social networks. In addition, each significant contact must be transferred to the manager for further processing.

In what form should this data be?

Some CRM-systems incorporate tools for working with social networks, but these cases are isolated, and the tools themselves, most often, are not very well implemented. In this case, data from different sources are sorted and distributed separately from each other. Requests via web forms from the site are summarized in one place, comments on social networks (I personally saw integration only with Facebook) - in another, phone calls - in the third, etc.

And I would like a certain summary report of the activity of potential clients on the Internet, where one could see both their total number and compare different types. It is quite realistic to implement in almost any CRM-system, even on its own.

How to implement it in CRM?

In order to get information about leads (interest) from different sources in a single consolidated form, you need to carry out some technical work.

So, first of all, create an Interest card, which forms a table consisting of 10 fields:

1. Source - a link to the site where the person came from, or a link to a page on the social network, mail, etc.
2. Date - when it happened.
3. Source type - specific social network, website, etc.
4. Author (better with a photo, if not, then at least his name).
5. Type of action (like, comment, feedback, request, etc.).
6. Text (the text itself, which was written by the client).
7. Product (for which product interest was shown). Link to the product (program, license, other product - link to the page).
8. Responsible. (who will be responsible for working with this lead)
9. Processed (tick - yes / no).
10. Button "Answer". It can be - answer by letter, comment, call, etc.

Sample interest card:

Each such card is filled according to the results of the interest shown. If it is a social network, then the notice of interest is usually sent to the email, if it is a website, the alerts can be implemented to email and / or to the phone and so on.

In order to automate the process, we collect a maximum of notifications on one email, after which this mailbox needs to be regularly parsed and automatically transferred to the CRM system to create “Potential Client Interest” cards.

At once I want to clarify why the collection of information from the mailbox is selected here, and not already so much beloved by most APIs. You can, of course, connect notifications from the same Facebook by API, if you wish, but with mail you can start much faster and more transparently for users.

In addition, a single mailbox can be used for different types of interest - it will be Facebook and Vkontakte, and other social networks, and notifications from the site about comments or requests, and direct letters from users. In general, mail allows different types of requests to be brought together, and a mailbox can be used as a kind of external storage of “interests from users”.

So, the request comes. What happens next? According to the result of the mail collection, an interest card is automatically created, the source, the link to the source, the name and photo of the author, the date the request arrived, the type of action, the text are also automatically filled in. If possible, the product is automatically filled in as well (if groups on social networks allow it or if the request comes from a specific page of the site).

The person in charge is not automatically filled. There are two ways to solve the issue:

1. Technology "ASAP", I call it "who had, he ate." Here, a tape of new interests is available to all managers, and the one who first showed interest in this request will be responsible.
2. The strategy is based on the distribution of responsibilities without the activity of the manager. For example, in the order of the queue or as the manager is busy.

The ticked “Processed” is most often put by the manager himself after he has worked on this interest, while the response report in the form of a screenshot is attached to the tick. Why do I need a screenshot? For quick control of the response quality by the manager directly in the CRM system’s tape, as well as for the manager himself, so that if he continues to work with this client, he can quickly refresh the beginning of the conversation. The screenshot itself can be implemented in any system. This could be Jing, Joxi, Dropbox link with this screenshot and so on.

The “processed” flag can also be set automatically. Here, the logic is as follows: if, when the card is saved, the system detects the presence of a screenshot of the manager’s response, the tick “processed” is set automatically.

Button "Answer" works as follows. The person should be able to respond quickly to the user directly from the CRM system So, if it is an answer to a comment in a social network, the "Answer" button sends the manager to a page with a comment for a quick response, if this letter - the transition should be in the mailbox to the answer form, etc.

All this should be in the table and highlighted in color, i.e. if the answer has already taken place, the button should be gray and not active.

Sample interest card:

What's next?

After the implementation of such tables, work with interest from users will be put on stream and will be able to be controlled in the same way as any leads in the CRM system. Comments will receive timely responses, requests will be processed, and the manager will be able to track the quality of the work of managers with the interest of users in various sources on the Internet.

Also, on the basis of these cards, it will be possible to create various reports that allow analyzing the effectiveness of certain actions aimed at promoting the brand, recognizing the company and increasing the number of sales via the Internet, and determine further strategy and resources that need special attention.

The technical implementation of collecting Internet user activity in the CRM system is relatively simple and can be implemented for almost any system known today. Of course, the programmer’s help will be needed here, but this will take a little time, and improving the efficiency of the sales and marketing departments after the introduction of such a tool will very quickly pay for all investments.