Tim Barker, Senior Director of EMEA Product Marketing at Salesforce.com, believes that technology has not “developed to replace” more personal client business relationships, it rather just “augments” them.
While Tim’s parents may still choose to communicate directly with a company's call centre, the early adopters of today may share their thoughts about a brand on Twitter. The point is to be available in the places where your clients and ultimately the information that keeps your business relevant can be found.
Salesforce is in the business of Client Relationship Management and “allows for people to run business applications in the cloud rather than as software.” They’ve found customer service and support to be their “fastest growing sector”. As Salesforce base all their tools online, they focus on integrating everything into the overall CRM process in order to ensure the entire business is on “the same page”. This is why they offer tools like the upcoming Twitter integration and Faceconnector (a tool that pulls information from Facebook into the Salesforce system to assist in the client support process).
Businesses are realising that these are the kind of spaces they need to be in. A study done by Netimperitave in March this year suggests that a third of the managers surveyed are concerned that they will lose customers if they don’t “get better at using technology to communicate with them." Responding to requests, gathering information or cosying up in a way that makes your client feel cared about can be a tricky thing to negotiate when there are so many channels to use and so much information that is potentially accessible.
Tim has added clients as friends on Facebook, but qualifies that he "works very closely" with a lot of them. A brief (and very informal) poll I did with the client service team here at Quirk suggests that there is no rule for how one should interact and that it is largely dictated by the needs of the specific client. While our UK team relies heavily on Skype (as they interact with a more international base) and IM communication gets used a lot for client interactions by a few, others may rely mainly on email. Twitter again, is used increasingly at Quirk and Tim says he uses it to help people out when he can (@TimBarker).
Tim believes that the main thing to understand is that Social Media and these kinds of tools must be used more for “retaining clients” than for finding new business. Tim says you should use the information gathered to figure out which sales person is "going to make this customer successful”.
“I would encourage people to dive in and evaluate. You don’t have to commit, but you can see what others are doing”. Our chat gave me the impression that we’re all still figuring these areas out, the point is to get involved early rather than late.
What challenges have you encountered when interacting with clients and customers through online tools?
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I like the concept of the wooden desk, which is something a bit different, but the brown post bakground and yellow text are quite ugly. Why not use scattered sheets of lined or unlined white paper as the post background? That would enhance the theme too.
Posted by Ian on 2009/04/08