Let’s have a quick look at the letters CRM and what they stand for.

• Customer – who you need to provide income and keep your business going

• Relationship – how you interact with C

• Management – provides a structure for your daily work routine bringing C and R together

A lot gets written these days about adding “Social” to CRM, but this really is nothing new. The common goals of Social and CRM are to attract new customer and provide the best customer service there is. It’s always been necessary to provide interaction on a social level in order to make the machine work, the three letters C, R and M still provide the backbone of a solid business structure.

There are many ways of using your CRM solution to interact with social activities and to capture this data to enhance your customer data, improve your marketing skills and to optimise your sales techniques:

• You can use the campaigns module in CRM to launch a marketing drive using data captured from any social media tool.

• You can store blog posts and ideas in the documents module of CRM, meaning you can dip in and out of articles and documents yet to be published wherever you are.

• Recording details of correspondence with customers on social media into your CRM solution helps build and maintain customer records.

• Good customer data held in your CRM solution means that all your workforce are able to maintain dialogue with customers on any platform

• Building your customer data is an essential part in establishing and maintaining strong social relations. This in turn can lead to closer personal partnerships with your customer base, increasing an affinity with your brand and encouraging customer loyalty.

Ultimately with the Social media world changing on a daily basis there is no one-size-fits all solution, and each organisation will have different levels and ways in which they choose to interact with the social world. The CRM tool remains a stable structure which an organisation can use to collate it’s social CRM efforts.

Sales Pitch: CRM has always been there to enhance the customer interactions, and good use of OpenCRM provides you with the framework to manage your social customer interactions too. With the recent development for Googlesync with OpenCRM this opens up a whole host of synchronising options for your CRM solution.