In short this is what is mentioned:
The recent
updates from november 2011 added some social functionality, namely the wall
functionality in CRM and also the ability to leverage hash-tags to some extent.
Microsoft’s
focus is, as they usually do, on productivity in the sense that you should
spend more time closing business and less in computer systems, and this has
also been the guiding star when developing these new CRM features.
He also
talked about the new update coming in the end of the year with functionality to
enrich your data based on social intelligence. Brought in technology from
Inside View (http://www.insideview.com/)
to bring in data from social systems and
enrich the CRM data. Inside Views offer is to assemble social data from over 25 000
news sources and social media directly to the CRM system to give salespeople an
edge over competitors by knowing more about the customer.
They are
also adding integrations with LinkedIn which will add functionalities that
allow users to see the relationships that exists to contacts in the system. Ex A
salesperson can see that another salesperson has a connection to a potential
customer.
Also social
customer care, grab comment or similar in social media like twitter and make
cases of it.
Looking at
social from the perspective of three different categories
-
Managed
– internal social channels like for instance discussions in SharePoint
-
Semi-managed
– external social channels with a distinct precense, like SharePoint sites hosted
by a customer
-
Independent
channels like Facebook or Twitter where you mainly listen to what is going on.
Important
part of this is to be able to know what is happening so that the strategy of
the company’s marketing etc. can be adapted to this.
I look forward to seeing social media integrations in
CRM, some of it has been available in Outlook for some time now using the
Outlook social connector so from my perspective I have expected this for some
time.
How CRM
will be using Inside View is also interesting. I do now know if Microsoft have
bought full rights to their software to enable it in Dynamics CRM without extra
licensing or if it will be made available as some add-on license. Another
interesting aspect of this is how extensible it will be or if it will be a more
or less static functionality. I am personally hoping it will be very extensible
since I would expect many customers to appreciate this functionality but probably
ask for adaptions to it.
The integration
of the social media data, from Twitter and Facebook to CRM will also be
interesting. Since the amount of data available in these sites is no less than
vast and stored in databases that are not SQL-based there might be interesting
performance issues that might arise if the filtering of this functionality is
not set correctly. I also hope that this functionality will be extensible as I
would expect many customers to look for extensions or changes to this. Being a
bit cynical, I don’t expect there will be though.
The three
different categorizations of social channels seem logical, however, he didn’t
really mention anything on how they were to manage the first two in CRM, if at
all. Perhaps that would signal that there would be some adaptable functionality
where you can plug-in any social adapter of your choice where you could also
develop your own. But that is pure speculation, so we will have to see.
In general
I welcome all of these new functions as they do bring really good value to the
customers and let us just hope that our competitors are a few steps behind.
Gustaf WesterlundMVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
