Social Customer Relationship Management: Fundamentals, Applications, Technologies [illustrated] 3030233421, 9783030233426, 9783030233433

Table of contents :
1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks
1.1 Social Web as Third Stage of the Internet Evolution
1.2 Characteristics of the Social Web
1.3 Social Big Data
1.4 Key Terminology
1.5 Elements of Social CRM

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies
2.1 Cyberport
2.2 Dell
2.3 Spreadshirt
2.4 Deutsche Telekom
2.5 Case Comparison

3 Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities
3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems
3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

4 Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives
4.1 Strategies for Social CRM
4.2 Organizational and Technological Integration
4.3 Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality
4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

5 Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Management for Professionals

Rainer Alt · Olaf Reinhold

Social Customer Relationship Management Fundamentals, Applications, Technologies

Management for Professionals

The Springer series Management for Professionals comprises high-level business and management books for executives. The authors are experienced business professionals and renowned professors who combine scientific background, best practice, and entrepreneurial vision to provide powerful insights into how to achieve business excellence.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10101

Rainer Alt
Olaf Reinhold

Social Customer Relationship Management Fundamentals, Applications, Technologies

123

Rainer Alt Leipzig University Social CRM Research Center Leipzig, Germany

Olaf Reinhold Leipzig University Social CRM Research Center Leipzig, Germany

ISSN 2192-8096 ISSN 2192-810X (electronic) Management for Professionals ISBN 978-3-030-23342-6 ISBN 978-3-030-23343-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

After the World Wide Web and electronic commerce, social media may be viewed as the third stage of the Internet evolution. Today, some hundreds of millions of people regularly use social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, or YouTube. Like many key infrastructure technologies, social media imply opportunities and challenges alike. On the one hand, they promise new ways to interact with potential and existing customers as well as valuable sources to obtain data on opinions, attitudes, and habits of individuals. From the viewpoint of customer relationship management (CRM), this represents an important improvement, since relationships become more “one-to-one.” On the other hand, social media almost automatically provoke concerns regarding the privacy and the use of this data. An important eye-opener in this direction happened in 2018 when the misuse of Facebook data by the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica was revealed. This company analyzed large volumes of data from users without their consent and established detailed user profiles. The affair led to intense discussions about the rules and limitations of social media. Eventually, extracting data from social media platforms has become more restricted and platform providers have embarked on restricting commercial activities and put privacy protection on top of their agenda. The concept of Social CRM as explained in this book aims to present a balanced view. It conceives social media as a technology that companies need to take advantage of in their customer-facing business processes. At the same time, Social CRM needs to live up to high levels in terms of data privacy. A transparent and trustful relationship with a large base of users—also known as “friends”, “followers”, or “fans”—offers an opportunity to establish a target group or “community” of supporters that represents a valuable resource for CRM activities. The potentials go beyond merely establishing presences on social media platforms and include the support of business processes in the areas of marketing, sales, and service. The following chapters of this book summarize basic knowledge about the most important conceptual “ingredients” of Social CRM. They aim at a practice-oriented and concise form and provide practical insights from several case studies, which were also part of Olaf Reinhold’s Ph.D. thesis on “Integrated Social Customer Relationship Management.” These comprise four companies, which are applying Social CRM, and four companies that offer Social CRM software tools.

v

vi

Preface

Table 1 Case study companies and representatives Company (users)

Contact

Company (tool providers)

Contact

Cyberport Dell

Anne Raulf Martin Zábojník, Janine Wegner

Jesus Requena Jens Grambau, Andreas Klein

Spreadshirt

Andreas Milles, Dave Gorman, Eike Adler Oliver Stalp, Martin Greger, Oliver Nissen

Falcon Social Infoman (Microsoft partner) Viralheat

Deutsche Telekom

Resultados Digitais

Tobias Kemper, Suruchi Sharma Rafaela Blacutt

We are much obliged to all these companies and realize that without their cooperation the underlying research and this book would not have been possible. Therefore, we would like to thank the following individuals, who have contributed during the case studies (see Table 1). It goes without saying that within this dynamic market, the general state of social media developments as well as the cases and the descriptions of the software tools are snapshots and could have changed in the meantime. Substantial groundwork for this book emerged in a number of applied researches. We are grateful for the funding that was provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for the projects “Social CRM Intelligence (SCRM-I)” as well as “Shielding privacy within CRM (SPHERE)” and for the support of the German Central Development Agency of Saxony in the project “Social Content Quality Management (SCQM).” As a result of these projects, the Social CRM Research Center (SCRC) was created at Leipzig University, Germany (www.scrc-leipzig.de). This organization aims at providing an independent platform for the transfer of knowledge from research projects and at developing practical solutions in the field of Social CRM. Finally, we would like to thank all colleagues who have been part of the final steps of this book, in particular Janine Ankert, Douglas Ciqueira, Harry Cruz, Constanze Gräsche, Dr. Gunnar Hempel, Dr. Julio Viana, Laura Martin, Florian Nitze, Nico Pohlenz, Ingolf Römer, Christoph Stempin, Richard Stüber, and Matthias Wittwer. We hope that you find this book’s attempt to provide a design-oriented view on Social CRM interesting and useful for your social media activities. Following the idea of social media, we would invite you to also share your feedback on the book via the SCRC’s Facebook presence (SCRCLEIPZIG). Leipzig, Germany July 2019

Rainer Alt Olaf Reinhold

Contents

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks . . . . . . . . 1.1 Social Web as Third Stage of the Internet Evolution . 1.2 Characteristics of the Social Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Social Big Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Key Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Elements of Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

1 2 4 7 11 15 17

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies . . . . 2.1 Cyberport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.1 Company . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1.2 Use of Social Media . . . . 2.1.3 Social CRM Application . 2.1.4 Social CRM Infrastructure 2.2 Dell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 Company . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 Use of Social Media . . . . 2.2.3 Social CRM Application . 2.2.4 Social CRM Infrastructure 2.3 Spreadshirt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 Company . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Use of Social Media . . . . 2.3.3 Social CRM Application . 2.3.4 Social CRM Infrastructure 2.4 Deutsche Telekom . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.1 Company . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.2 Use of Social Media . . . . 2.4.3 Social CRM Application . 2.4.4 Social CRM Infrastructure 2.5 Case Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

21 21 21 22 24 26 26 26 27 32 36 37 37 38 40 43 44 44 44 47 49 50 55

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

viii

3 Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems 3.1.1 Viralheat/Cision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 RD Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Falcon Social . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Microsoft CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems . . 3.2.1 Social Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Analytics and Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Customer Relationship Management . . . 3.2.5 Management and Integration . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Contents

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 59 59 60 62 64 66 66 68 74 76 79 80

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Strategies for Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Organizational and Technological Integration . . . . . . . . 4.3 Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality . . . . . . . 4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. 81 . 81 . 83 . 86 . 92 . 101

5 Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Abbreviations

API AS B2B B2C BDSG BI Bn C2C CLV CMS CPM CRM CSV DPO DSL DT EC ERP EU FAQ GDPR GTC HR IPTV IS IT JSON KPI M OECD OLTP POS PR REST

Application programming interface Application system(s) Business-to-business Business-to-customer Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz) Business intelligence Billion Customer-to-customer Customer lifetime value Content management system Cost per mille Customer relationship management Comma-separated values Data protection officer Digital subscriber line Deutsche Telekom E-commerce Enterprise resource planning European Union Frequently asked questions EU General Data Protection Regulation General standard terms and conditions Human resources Internet protocol television Information system Information technology JavaScript Object Notation Key performance indicator Million Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Online transaction processing Point of sale Public relations Representational state transfer ix

x

SME SMM SNA SP TCP/IP TMG UGC UN WWW

Abbreviations

Small and medium sized enterprise(s) Social media monitoring Social network analysis Sub-process Transmission control protocol/Internet protocol Telemedia Act (Telemediengesetz) User-generated content United Nations World Wide Web

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.8 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11 Fig. 2.12

Fig. 2.13 Fig. 2.14

Number of internet hosts worldwide (left) (ISC 2019a) and EC turnover in Germany (right) (HDE 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . Social media principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Forecasted data volume of global IP traffic until 2022 (in exabytes per month) (Cisco 2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Options for data transfer between social media platform, Social CRM and CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Activities within the customer life cycle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social CRM process architecture model. Adapted from Alt and Reinhold (2012, p. 289) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cyberbloc with announcement of its first podcast . . . . . . . . . . . Cyberport in Facebook (left) and with link to the online shop (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Example of a Facebook posting (left) and an offer on Facebook (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Milestones in the early use of social media at Dell (Versteeg 2013) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social media platforms used by Dell (Versteeg 2013) . . . . . . . . Community en.community.dell.com (left) and IdeaStorm.com (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dell knowledge base forum (https://support.software.dell.com/ de-de/kb-product-select) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dell news on the Twitter channel @DellGermany and on Pinterest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social media presences at Dell (Versteeg 2013) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postings of Dell with offerings on Twitter (right) and Facebook (left) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dell forum with examples (left: questions about laptops, right: enquiry) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center (https://blog. dell.com/en-us/dell-s-next-step-the-social-media-listeningcommand-center) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Topics and discussions in the Spreadshirt forum . . . . . . . . . . . . Example for a posting in the Spreadshirt blog . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 5 8 9 13 15 23 23 24 27 28 29 30 30 31 34 35

37 39 40 xi

xii

Fig. 2.15 Fig. 2.16 Fig. 2.17 Fig. 2.18

Fig. 2.19 Fig. 2.20 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9

Fig. 3.10

Fig. 3.11 Fig. 3.12 Fig. 3.13

List of Figures

Example of a designer shop (left) and a shopping cart (right) in Spreadshirt’s Facebook shop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FAQ web page with information on payment methods . . . . . . . Overview on DT Twitter channels (Deutsche Telekom 2014) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Example of a Telekom shop on Google Places (left) and of “Borders were yesterday” as a topic of the campaign “Life’s for sharing” on Flickr (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Offer for refurbished iPhones (left) and flagship store on Facebook places with campaigns (right) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Customer interaction on Twitter at DT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalities of Social CRM systems for the Social CRM elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Selection and configuration of specific sources (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2018) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples for query configuration (below, left) in Synthesio, content filtering (above, left) and source filtering (above, right) in Viralheat and content filtering in Earshot (below right) (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2018 and Viralheat Q4/2016, Earshot Q3/2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure and customization of an owned community in Lithium (screenshots from www.lithium.com, www.bt.com, www.sephora.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Example of a tagged posting and a positive sentiment (screenshot from Viralheat Q4/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dashboard for the visualization of sentiments (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Neutral marked posting in Synthesio (Q3/2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relevance score for postings and authors (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relationship analysis between postings and authors in Bottlenose (left) and NetworkedInsights (right) (screenshots from www.bottlenose.com and www.networkedinsights.com Q2/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Information on reach and influence of a social media platform from Alexa WebMetrics in Synthesio (screenshots from Synthesio Q4/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Template-based dashboard configuration in Synthesio (screenshots from Synthesio Q4/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carlsberg marketing dashboard in Falcon Social (2015) (screenshot from www.falconsocial.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data sharing function in Synthesio (screenshot from Synthesio Q2/2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

41 42 45

46 47 48 66 67

68

68 69 70 70 71

71

72 73 73 74

List of Figures

Fig. 3.14 Fig. 3.15 Fig. 3.16 Fig. 3.17

Fig. 3.18 Fig. 3.19 Fig. 3.20 Fig. 3.21

Fig. 3.22 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Scheduling of postings with marketing calendar in Falcon Social (screenshot from www.falconsocial.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . Impact analysis of postings in Synthesio (screenshot from Synthesio Q2/2019) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Configuration of a Facebook app via templates with Falcon Social (screenshots from www.falconsocial.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . Task assignment (above, left), communication template (above, right) and option to assign a posting with a sentiment (below) in Viralheat/Cision (screenshot from Viralheat Q4/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dashboard with social media analytics in Microsoft CRM (screenshot from cloudblogs.micorsoft.com) . . . . . . . . . . . Dashboard for reaction on a twitter posting in Earshot (screenshot from Earshot Q3/2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social campaign definition in Salesforce (screenshot from www.salesforce.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dashboard with ongoing interaction workflows across different channels in Microsoft CRM (screenshot from community.dynamics.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Group configuration of three accounts in Viralheat (screenshot from Viralheat Q1/2016) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social CRM strategies (based on Reinhold and Alt 2012, p. 156) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Technological elements of Social CRM (based on Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Option for data integration in Social CRM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analytical options in Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples of vocabulary lists (left, following Backhaus and Nissen 2014, p. 16) and ontologies (right). . . . . . . . . . . . . . Regulations affecting the ownership and the use of UGC . . . . . Customer-focused customer life cycle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Integrated Social CRM architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xiii

75 75 76

76 77 78 78

79 79 82 86 87 88 91 95 105 107

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 1.3 Table 1.4

Table 1.5 Table 1.6 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1 Table Table Table Table Table Table Table

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3

Table 4.4 Table 4.5 Table 5.1

Popular social media categories and platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . Content categories relevant for Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Data available via APIs from four platforms (depending on permissions and privacy settings, examples from 2018) . . . . Examples of services built around Social media and UGC (based on https://lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/ social-lumascape) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Number of fans of selected brands worldwide in January 2015/July 2019. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elements of Social CRM solutions (Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social media application areas at Dell (based on Mathisen 2013) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Evaluation of case studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Application systems for Social CRM (following Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalities of Viralheat/Cision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalities of RD Station . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalities of Falcon Social. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Functionalities of Microsoft CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tasks of Social CRM organizational units. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Criteria to evaluate data quality in Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . Relevant legal regulations in the field of Social CRM in four countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Criteria of an initial data protection check for Social CRM . . . . Examples for a data protection check in Social CRM . . . . . . . . Effects of Social CRM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

4 6 10

10 12 16 32 51 58 60 62 63 65 84 92 96 99 100 106

xv

1

Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Social CRM means applying social media technologies in the field of customer relationship management (CRM). After social media have initially focused on the networking among individuals, many companies now try to be active on social media platforms. Today, well-known brands have attracted a large number of members, which are referred to as “followers”, “friends”, or “fans” depending on the terminology of the respective networks. Although these relationships are rather loose, they represent a potential for CRM since each member has expressed an interest in a certain company and/or brand. This is an opportunity for all CRM processes, which comprise marketing, sales, and customer service or rather (after-sales) services. Social media contribute an additional interaction channel towards customers with a unique set of features. Compared to existing channels, such as call center, sales office or e-mail, social media are superior regarding availability, interactivity and reach. In the last years, numerous examples—positive as well as negative—have emerged for Social CRM, However, the concepts, methods, and information systems (IS) used for Social CRM vary widely. In particular, they often differ from established IS in businesses, such as systems for enterprise resource planning (ERP) or CRM. Whereas enterprise systems are developed in well-planned long-term projects, social media are often used ad hoc in a rather experimental manner. This is also due to the broad scope of Social CRM and important differences in data quality. The case studies in this book offer insights on how companies tackled the potentials of Social CRM. Together with an overview on typical Social CRM tool functionalities, they serve to establish a comprehensive understanding of Social CRM. Finally, this is brought together in the concept of integrated CRM and a collection of key challenges, such as automation, data protection and data mining, which businesses need to address.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3_1

1

2

1.1

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Social Web as Third Stage of the Internet Evolution

In the first place, Social CRM denotes the use of social media technologies by companies to interact with (potential) customers. Initially, social media have been referred to as Web 2.0 technologies, which have become known as a third stage of the internet evolution. The first stage goes back to the birth of the internet in 1962. Distributed transport protocols, such as TCP/IP, enabled a redundant and worldwide electronic transfer of data. In 1989, the World Wide Web (WWW) was developed, which allowed to publish and organize data more easily on the basis of hypertext pages. The WWW also formed the basis for electronic commerce (e-commerce, EC), initially via companies’ web pages and later via catalogs and marketplaces, such as Amazon or eBay. During this second stage, internet presences and transactions have increased exponentially, as illustrated by the number of servers connected to the internet and the development of EC turnovers (see Fig. 1.1). Today, there are around one billion (bn) Internet hosts (ISC 2019b) and an estimated four bn active internet users1 worldwide (We are Social 2018). In Germany, there have been about 44.75 million (m) hosts in 2019 (ISC 2019b) and about 63 m regular internet users in 2018 (Press Releases Destatis 2018). Today, 87% of all European Union (EU) households have access to the internet, which represents an increase of 45% compared to 2008 (Eurostats 2018). Since 2001, a third stage has emerged, which describes the rise of Web 2.0 and mobile devices that enable access to the internet from any location. The third stage adds to the previous stages and enhances the functionality of internet-based services. Similar to the first two stages, the technological innovations led to the creation of new businesses. Players of stage one and two (e.g. Amazon, Google, eBay) were complemented by social media companies, which offer services in the social web. The social web is broad term and covers all actors (e.g. providers and users of content, services, platforms and technologies, data protection organizations) that are involved in interaction by means of digital content. Social media (or social software) are more specific and include providers of digital platforms (see Table 1.1) based on Web 2.0 technologies as well as a variety of other service providers. Compared to the first two evolution stages, the social web is significantly more dynamic with the number of worldwide social network users having more than doubled from 1.99 bn in 2010 (Statista 2017) to 4.38 bn in 2019 (We are Social 2019). Many social media platforms have appeared since for different purposes (e.g. blogs, messaging, networking, media sharing). Today (Q4/18), millions of users are active on the dominant platforms. For example, Facebook reports 2.27 bn (Facebook 2018a), Twitter 325 m (Twitter 2018), WeChat 1082 m (Tencent 2018), WhatsApp 1.5 bn (Facebook 2018c) and YouTube 1.9 bn (Wojcicki 2018) monthly users. Over time, the functionalities of the platforms have continuously evolved (e.g. messaging on Facebook, media sharing on LinkedIn or livestreaming in Twitter (Kantrowitz 2017)). However, despite the providers kept adding new forms of 1 A user is person who uses or operates something. Users in Social CRM are persons that use or operate a system, tool or platform. Customers in Social CRM are users, but with an economical interest towards a product or company.

Fig. 1.1 Number of internet hosts worldwide (left) (ISC 2019a) and EC turnover in Germany (right) (HDE 2019)

1.1 Social Web as Third Stage of the Internet Evolution 3

4

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Table 1.1 Popular social media categories and platforms Social media category

Examples of social media platforms (including year of foundation)

Blog Messaging

Tumblr (2007), myblog.de (2002) 1. Messages: Twitter (2006), WhatsApp (2009), Weibo (2009), Snapchat (2011), WeChat (2011), Telegram (2013) 2. Location: Foursquare (2009) 1. Individuals: Facebook (2004), VKontakte (2006), Google + (2011, shutdown in 2019) 2. Business: LinkedIn (2003), Xing (2003) 3. Science: ResearchGate (2008) 1. Images: Flickr (2004), Pinterest (2011), Instagram (2010) 2. Documents: Slideshare (2006) 3. Video: YouTube (2005), Vimeo (2004)

Social networks

Media sharing

interaction, such as “chatbots“ or virtual reality functionalities (e.g. and virtual reality in Facebook 360 (Kabroviski 2017)), the growth rate of the social media population is expected to decrease in the long-term. In view of a limited user base, crowding out-effects already occur where certain platforms grow at the expense of others. For example, contrary to Twitter, Facebook has experienced stable growth, which in turn is outpaced by messaging-oriented platforms, such as WeChat or WhatsApp. There is competition between platforms and an ongoing quest for active users (Alt and Zimmermann 2019).

1.2

Characteristics of the Social Web

Web 2.0 technologies are known since 2004. They are the basis for social media and allow users to create and share content via the internet. This is also included in notion of “user-generated content”, UGC. At the same time, they enable other users and services to reuse this data. Basic technologies of the Web 2.0 are Ajax, the Really Simple Syndication format (RSS), or microformats (e.g. microblogs). While so-called Web 1.0 technologies from the first and the second internet stage (e.g. HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP) focused on publishing and linking electronic content on the internet, Web 2.0 technologies were created for users to interact directly with each other. As mentioned above, the term “social media” denotes digital platforms that support creating, using, and sharing UGC. The dynamics on these platforms follow some basic principles (see Fig. 1.2), whereas users may not only (passively) read content, but also (actively) publish and forward this content as well as comment (or rather evaluate) on it. Depending on the respective social media platform, this occurs in communities (e.g. private communities like a WhatsApp group or professional communities like a nurse forum), which are either private or public in nature. The former consist of selected users that have connected themselves before (e.g. as “fans”, “followers” or through direct messages) and the latter make content accessible to all social web users (e.g. a public platform such as Youtube).

1.2 Characteristics of the Social Web

5 Social media (presence/contact)

Social media platform C connect connect Community A private

publish

Community B public

UGC

UGC P

R

Community C professional User

User

User P

forward

Platform A blogging

comment/ evaluate Legend: P: publisher, R: reader

P

R

comment/ evaluate

R

Platform B contacts Platform C networking Platform D sharing Platform A locations

Fig. 1.2 Social media principles

In addition to stationary devices (e.g. desktops), mobile devices enable users to easily connect, create and share UGC among each other. This has led to a transparent and broadly accessible representation of communication streams between the involved parties, which comprises content, metadata and other derived data, in particular the well-known “likes” (see Table 1.2). Data and information are often distinguished: Data denotes “raw resources” consisting of symbols that represent properties of objects, events and their environment. Information is inferred from data and gives meaning in a certain application setting (see Ackoff 1989). This distinction is also used in this book, which conceives UGC as data that needs to be interpreted for CRM purposes. Only then, it becomes information. With these properties, social media have several advantages compared to other customer channels. First, due to their 24/7 availability, they are accessible like webpages for customers and businesses alike. Second, interactions are initiated by persons that not only have an identity (ID) or name, but a rich profile (e.g. current location, personal interests, network of friends, activities, preferred brands). Third, they combine in one channel features for 1:1 communication (as in direct calls) and broadcasting to millions of users (as in television) at the same time. Fourth, users of social media may enrich the content (e.g. with simple likes that indicate the popularity of content, by commenting or by sharing it within communities). Fifth, automated features such as chatbots allow interactivity together with higher efficiency (Davydova 2017). The combination of these properties in one channel presents the value of social media for customer interaction. For example, companies may target micro-segments of customers, distribute individualized ads, provide a chatbot in case of basic questions and jump into a bidirectional interaction at any time for a price much lower than in traditional channels such as in TV, newspaper or sales representatives.

6

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Table 1.2 Content categories relevant for Social CRM Social media content 1. Sources Web forums/social networks (Posting)

Blog/weblog

Microblog/messaging

Feeds/podcasts

Sharing platforms

2. Content Text

Images/videos

Audio

Description Content (text, images, etc.) created by authors, that represents a current discussion, followed by a community in web forums. Typically, they are organized hierarchically and relate to other entries. In contrast to blogs, postings in forums or social networks are created by multiple authors Topic-related entries on a web page with a sequential feed of content in terms of a diary or a journal. Frequently, blogs are written by one author (first-person perspective) or a company (corporate blog) Postings limited in length or characters (e.g. 280 characters at Twitter, so-called tweets) aim at rapid interactions. In contrast to forums or blogs, the restriction of available characters favors the use of abbreviations (e.g. by the way, BTW), emoticons (e.g. smiley) and references (e.g. hashtags, ShortURLs) in microblogs. Messaging services (e.g. WhatsApp, Snapchat) for individuals and groups work in a similar fashion and are publicly available or restricted to personal networks or contacts Content of a web page that is processed in a standardized format (e.g. really simple syndications, RSS) and forwarded in so-called feeds (e.g. news ticker). Users register the RSS function at a web page, whereupon their client regularly checks the server of the web page for changes Rich content (text, videos, pictures, presentations, music, etc.) created by authors and published on a social media platform for the access and use of others. These platforms often combine features for interaction with the presentation of content, so that users can provide feedback by comments, likes or by sharing it. Often these platforms provide interfaces (API’s) for automatically accessing profiles and content Most frequent type of content in the social web that contains among others messages, opinions or news around specific topics, products or brands as unstructured data. The processing of large amounts of text marks a key functionality in Social CRM systems Medial data that includes products or brands. Images and (in particular streamed) videos are regularly subject to legal dispute about copyrights. While technologies in the field of machine learning allow the processing and comparison of images, Social CRM systems providers (see Table 1.4) have introduced features that allow the recognition of brand logos or products in images (e.g. Talkwalker, Linkfluence, LogoGrab) Audio files or audio streams with product-related mentions, reviews or opinions may contain data that is relevant for CRM and help in the identification of influencers. Features that inspect audio data in social media platforms are rarely available in Social CRM tools. However, the increasing popularity and maturity of speech-to-text technologies may lead Social CRM system providers to include basic functionalities in their tools (continued)

1.3 Social Big Data

7

Table 1.2 (continued) Social media content 3. Metadata Meta metadata (platform)

Metadata content (postings)

Metadata user (profiles)

4. Other Emotions

Links

1.3

Description When UGC content is created on a social media platform, additional information such as the time of the entry, the device type or geo coordinates of the user device are logged and associated with the entry. Sometimes this information is made available for third parties and can be used for optimization of the targeting process or improved usage statistics In addition to visible content (text, images, video), postings also include metadata, such as message ID, subject, news group, data source, and references to other postings (see Table 1.3). Metadata is per default data in structured form and amenable to be processed in online transaction processing (OLTP) or business intelligence (BI) systems Every social media user has a profile, which includes his/her real name or another kind of identity (user name or pseudonym) as well as some demographic data and data on the use of the account (group membership, friendships, subscriptions, likes, etc.). As metadata associated with content (postings), user metadata is also structured in nature Depending on the functionality of the platform, users may evaluate postings in the social web with a “like” (or e.g. +1, positive emoji) due to its utility (e.g. 3 out of 5 stars) or also with a “dislike” (e.g. report posting, negative emoji). These emotions may be followed and evaluated separately Connections between profiles and postings may be established, for example friendships between profiles or references between postings

Social Big Data

In view of the increased use of social media, the amount of UGC has risen in the last decade. In 2016, Facebook users have commented on postings about 3.3 m times per minute and the amount of short messages (“tweets”) on Twitter has increased from 347.222 per minute in 2014 to about 448.800 in 2016 (Allen 2017). Another example are media sharing platforms such as YouTube: while in 2010, a total of two bn videos was viewed, this number has doubled within two years. Since 2010, users provide YouTube with more hours of video material than they could watch within 24 hours. In 2015, this amount already climbed to an average of 400 hours of video material being uploaded per minute (Tubefilter 2015). WhatsApp alone reports more than 1.5 bn users that exchanged more than 60 bn messages a day in 2018 (Facebook 2018b). For Facebook, an estimated daily data volume of more than 500 terabytes was calculated based on the daily volume of about 2.5 bn pieces of content and 2.7 bn likes as well as 300 m photos in 2012 (Budde 2012).

8

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Despite the fact that the volume of UGC and the adoption of mobile technologies (e.g. smartphone, tablet) indicate a certain saturation in the future, new location and/or situation-specific services (e.g. fitness, travel) create an additional wave of data. Due to the heterogeneous nature of this data (see Table 1.2) the growing volume of UGC in social media is referred to as “social big data”. It is expected that the content from social media substantially contributes to the globally forecasted data volume in the next years (see Fig. 1.3). The processing of this data is challenging and features all characteristics of big data: it is large in size (volume), generated in real-time (velocity), often unstructured in nature (variety) and the participants are not always known (veracity) (cf. Zikipoulos et al. 2013). Obviously, this prevents the data from being analyzed manually and requires automation through sophisticated systems for data management, information processing and workflow automation. Data in social media platforms may be assessed and extracted in different ways (see Fig. 1.4). The basic form is to manually access data from social media platforms and to forward it to other systems, such as Social CRM or CRM systems. For example, social media managers may read and answer postings of followers in a social network. In case they identify relevant postings they may create a sales opportunity in the CRM system. More advanced is an electronic integration between the systems, which provides a basis for automation and handling an increasing number of platforms, profiles and interactions (see Sect. 4.3). Social media managers may then see postings in a Social CRM tool that has electronically extracted data from the selected platforms in a separate Social CRM database. This single point of access allows to browse and to answer postings or to define rules or alerts for specific events. The intermediate Social CRM system and database are

Fig. 1.3 Forecasted data volume of global IP traffic until 2022 (in exabytes per month) (Cisco 2019)

1.3 Social Big Data

9 Social media (presence/contact)

CRM

Social CRM

Social web Platform A blogging

CRM system

CRM database

Manual transfer

Electronic transfer

Social CRM tool

Social CRM database

Manual transfer

Electronic transfer

Social media platform

Platform database

Community

Platform B contacts

User

Platform C networking

P

R Platform D sharing Platform A locations

Fig. 1.4 Options for data transfer between social media platform, Social CRM and CRM

features in most Social CRM systems. They result from the separation from enterprise systems (e.g. CRM) and the different data quality that is present in the social media platform (tends to be low) and the enterprise CRM system (tends to be high). Electronic access is an important element in Social CRM and enables to efficiently address the big data challenge. Table 1.3 shows some examples for electronic access on data from social media platforms, which may prove relevant for CRM. This data is available via so-called application programming interfaces (API) that allow data extraction via electronic interfaces. However, the interfaces as well as the accessible data of the various platforms may change. New services (e.g. selling data for advertising) and new data fields (e.g. access to links between users at LinkedIn) may appear as restrictions to access data. Consequently, companies that obtain data and services via electronic interfaces or crawlers need to adapt these interfaces regularly. This involves continuous changes regarding the electronic interfaces. Above all, businesses need to realize that the extraction of data is inherently linked with the question of data protection. In particular, privately shared and personal data may only be collected when the necessary permissions are available (see Sect. 4.4). Since third parties may also access, process and distribute UGC, an extensive ecosystem of service providers has developed in addition to Social CRM tool providers (see Chap. 3). These service providers offer a variety of services related to Social CRM strategies and are based on the creation or processing of UGC (Brinker 2018) (see Table 1.4). For example, market researchers analyze the behavior of users for general trends, marketing agencies share and enrich UGC during campaigns or data analysts predict the sales success of products. Besides services, also providers for data have emerged. Such third party aggregators (e.g. Datasift, Promptcloud) continuously collect and pre-process public content from social media platforms and provide this content via unified interfaces for other companies. Businesses have the advantage that these service providers handle the

10

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Table 1.3 Data available via APIs from four platforms (depending on permissions and privacy settings, examples from 2018) Social media platform

Data available via API (examples)

Facebook

Facebook ID, name, link to profile, place of residence, user’s description, work, schools visited (including name, year of graduation and type of school), gender, time zone, language, state of data, friends, timeline entries, stream, images, videos, notes, likes, events User ID, contents (tweets, timeline, hashtags, private messages), number of tweets/retweets, relation between users (follower, following, blocked, ignored), followers, trends (due to location/country, nearby location/country) LinkedIn ID, user/company name, date of birth, profile headline, location, industry sector, position, picture, skills, certifications, courses, contents (current shares, picture, summary of the professional profile), links to other users (number of connections, following, related-profile-views) UserID, data about the user, content liked, comments, relationships (follows, followed by), data about the content (tags, locations, comments, likes)

Twitter

LinkedIn

Instagram

Table 1.4 Examples of services built around Social media and UGC (based on https:// lumapartners.com/content/lumascapes/social-lumascape) Service category

Service provider

Content curation Social commerce platforms Advocate platforms and social ad networks Social scoring Social shopping Data aggregators

Flipboard, Storify Fluid Social, Storenvy Speakr, RhythmOne, SocialChorus, LifeStreet Kred, PeerIndex Brandwatch Fancy, Wanelo Datasift, Promptcloud

electronic integration with the social media platforms and deliver ready-to use services and insights. Social content is an ambiguous data resource. Regarding the trust (veracity) in this data, studies suggest that traditional media, such as newspapers or TV, score above social media when it comes to truth (TNS Opinion & Social as a Request of the European Commission 2017; BBC News 2018; Ries et al. 2018). While young people put more trust in the truth of UGC than older people, most people are rather critical about the security of their data in social media (Holz 2016). The picture is different when compared to the general marketing of companies. Here, online media are regarded as more trusted resources and recommendations or positive reviews obtained through social media, are known to positively influence the buying decision. This might change as soon as businesses try to influence the discussion about brands and products with paid advertising or influencers. Even more critical are cases where businesses abuse data. Among the examples that surfaced since 2018 are the report of

1.3 Social Big Data

11

Greenwald (2013), which yields insights in the observation of UGC by special intelligence services. It not only shows the extent of available data, but that authorities make use of this resource to gain insights into behaviors, interests or opinions. The report also revealed that businesses may obtain UGC almost as easily as intelligence services and may use these insights to create highly detailed personal profiles that might even allow them to secretly influence a person’s voting behavior. Although research confirmed that the first event had only a small effect on the actual use of social media, the impact on public trust in social media was significant (Holz 2016). It emphasizes the need for transparency and privacy, which is the topic of Sect. 4.4.

1.4

Key Terminology

Availability, interactivity and reach were introduced as major improvements of social media technologies. These features offer many opportunities in the interaction with customers. To provide a deeper understanding of the Social CRM terminology, the key elements of social media and CRM shall be described in the following. Social media platforms are broadly used and allow businesses to interact directly with numerous potential and existing customers on a simple and cost-effective basis. This way, they represent an additional interaction channel with four specific characteristics2: – Targeted community. Interaction in social media is frequently topic-related and occurring directly between users. Social media platforms offer access to groups of individuals with similar interests, which means that communication/interaction is already occurring within a focused target group. – Multidirectional interaction. Social media may be used for contacts among customers as well as between customers and businesses. Depending on the situation, social media allow to easily switch between asynchronous postings and synchronous bidirectional communications via text, audio and video among multiple parties. – Individualized contact. Instead of a “one-to-many” marketing, which distributes the same content to many recipients, social media technologies represent a step towards a “one-to-one” marketing. The goal is to provide highly individualized offers and messages that have the potential to convey more emotions and closeness. – Electronic communication. In contrast to traditional (mass) media, social media enable interaction with (end) customers in real time. Depending on the design of the platform, communication threads are archived and available for further use by other users. However, many users are not using their real names or identities in social media. 2

This book conceives the terms “customer” and “consumer” (often used for end customers) as well as the terms “communication” and “interaction” synonymously.

12

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Table 1.5 Number of fans of selected brands worldwide in January 2015/July 2019 Company

Fans (m)

Company

Coca-Cola 92.65/107.43 Oreo YouTube 86.11/83.64 Nike Football Red Bull 45.80/48.88 Starbucks Coffee Converse 40.89/45.73 Pepsi Playstation 39.22/38.37 iTunes

Fans (m)

Company

Fans (m)

38.59/42.44 38.45/43.87 38.05/36.90

Skype Windows Nutella

32.61/27.98 32.61/45.90 29.89/31.60

34.35/37.80 33.04/discontinued in 2019

Pringles Angry Birds

27.70/24.18 27.53/24.01

In the beginnings of the social media era, communication was mainly among individuals and within their personal network. It was only later that companies have established presences in the social web. Meanwhile companies with well-known brands (see Table 1.5) were able to attract millions of users (“fans”, “friends”, “followers”). In general, the number of these users and the number of “likes” indicates a certain affinity to the company or the brand and thus, a willingness in obtaining news or offers. Businesses have slowly developed their social media presences since they became aware that attractive content needs to be provided continuously. Among the examples are corporate presentations, (micro)blogs, and videos (Parker and Thomas 2012). Many companies also saw social media as an opportunity to reduce costs in customer acquisition. In fact, social media promise a decrease in this respect with costs between $0.1 to $30 cost per mille (CPM) for simple campaigns compared against $40–$400 for classical channels depending on the industry (Chen and Hitt 2002). Since social media are primarily an interaction channel (with a number of additional functionalities), making it amenable for CRM requires an alignment with corporate CRM processes and strategies. Their overall goal is to create and maintain long-term customer relationships to increase customer lifetime value (CLV). Typical CRM areas are to be found in all customer-facing activities, i.e. marketing, sales, and (customer) service. These processes are usually supported by (one or multiple) CRM information systems (referred to as CRM system in the following). Typically, the CLV concept assumes a customer life cycle, where companies (or their products) attract (potential) customers from the anonymous market. This initiates a relationship, where potential buyer are “converted” to customers who undertake repeated purchases (see Fig. 1.5). To distinguish the various stages in this cycle, the CRM literature usually separates between the initial contact who is not qualified (contact or “lead”), the potential customer with a sales opportunity (“opportunity”), who receives a customized offer (“offer“) and the customer who made a purchase or signed a contract (“customer“). The customer life cycle has multiple touchpoints to the three core CRM processes and their sub-processes (SP) (see Chen and Popovich 2003; Greenberg 2009):

1.4 Key Terminology

13

Anonymous market

Covers all tasks for raising awareness and moƟvaƟng interacƟons in the market

Campaign management (SP1.0)

Marketing (1) Lead Cross-functional processes (SP4.0)

Lead management (SP1.1)

Opportunity

Covers all tasks for the qualifying iniƟal interacƟons into addressable persons and a sales potenƟal

Repeated purchases Offer

Complaint management (SP3.2) Covers all tasks related with complaints

Service (3)

Service case

Customer

Service management (SP3.1) Covers all tasks for solving all issues that arising from a purchase

Offer management (SP2.0) Covers all tasks that help to transform sales potenƟals into purchases

Sales (2)

Feedback management (SP3.0) Covers all tasks related with collecƟng, analysing and using feedback from the market

Legend: SP: sub-process

Fig. 1.5 Activities within the customer life cycle

– Marketing. Although the marketing of products and services may be influenced by all activities along the customer life cycle, a more precise understanding sees marketing primarily in the early stages of the life cycle. It comprises the initial phases with the sub-processes campaign management (measures for approaching target groups) and lead management (measures for qualifying market feedbacks to addressable contacts). – Sales. From a business perspective, the sales process starts with the formulation of a specific offer and includes the purchase transaction itself. The sub-process offer management covers negotiating and arranging activities via one or more interaction channels and ends with closing a contract or sale and the settlement of the transaction with delivery and payment. – Customer service or “Service”. The service process contains interactions between customers and businesses after purchasing and during possessing or using a product. It covers the sub-processes complaint management, activities connected with maintenance or defects (service management), as well as the handling of feedback from customers about the company or its products and services (feedback management). Although revenues are typically associated with the sales process, the service process often yields stable service fees and is vital for customer satisfaction. In addition to these CRM core and sub-processes, cross-functional processes may be distinguished. They either apply to more than one CRM core or sub-process or link a CRM process with other business processes. Among the latter are the management of target groups (or “customer management”), brand care and

14

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

development (brand management), the development of new products and/or services (innovation management), as well as market research or decision support. Besides the core and cross-functional processes, a second dimension exists that emphasizes four possible design areas of a CRM solution. Following (Alt and Puschmann 2004; Peppers and Rogers 2004; Alt and Reinhold 2012) these are: – Operational CRM. Among the structured routine task processes in marketing, sales and service are call center conversations in campaign management or a ticket system3 for complaints or service enquiries. Operational processes have a high potential for automation (“workflow”) and information from social media may often be added. For example, additional information on the company or its products that is shared by customers may be included in campaigns or a support enquiry may automatically be forwarded to the appropriate department. – Analytical CRM. Based on operational interactions occurring via various channels, analytical CRM creates the basis for decision-making on CRM activities, such as customer segments or campaign definitions. Social media often represent additional sources for market knowledge or customer segmentation. – Communicative CRM. Since the goal of CRM is a consistent and individualized interaction with customers, it requires the provision of services across several channels and a coordinated management of these channels. Social media are additional channels and communicative CRM is usually responsible for seamless cross-channel interactions (“journeys”) at defined touch points. – Collaborative CRM. The fourth design area refers to the interaction of multiple product and/or service providers. This is necessary when customer problems (or customer processes) involve a bundling of various offerings. For example, various providers collaborate in mobility (e.g. rail, air, road carriers), fitness (e.g. trackers, shoes) and medical solutions (e.g. doctors, hospitals). Social media may serve as platforms for collaboration in open or closed communities. Social CRM now combines social media and CRM. The concept dates back to the second development stage of the internet (see Sect. 1.2) before the social web came into being. Social CRM solutions have emerged within the third stage around 2007and brought a new quality to CRM with a stronger and more direct interaction potential with individual customers. By definition, Social CRM denotes the use of social media in the relationship of customers with companies. Compared to other terms, such as social networking or social media management, Social CRM focuses on applications in the field of CRM and the link to CRM processes and systems.

3

A ticket system compiles a case (“ticket” ) for every user enquiry, which guarantees the workflow until it has been revised.

1.5 Elements of Social CRM

1.5

15

Elements of Social CRM

A generic view on Social CRM reveals four actors and five elements as the main conceptual building blocks. Users share content in the social web via social media platforms, which are hosted by one or more platform providers. Individuals as well as companies have presences on these platforms and this is where they interact with other companies and service providers. In addition to the four actors, Social CRM solutions feature five technological elements (see Fig. 1.6; Table 1.6): social media, analytics, interaction, CRM, and management/integration. The first element refers to establishing a corporate presence on a single or on multiple social media platform(s). These platforms offer functionalities that enable the interaction between actors (e.g. employees, customers, partners, traders, fans, sponsors) and the extraction of the raw data for Social CRM, such as opinions, experiences, and enquiries. Depending on the operation model (owned, hosted) and the openness of the platform (internal, external access-restricted, external open), different types of social media platforms may be distinguished. Owned platforms are within the responsibility of the company while hosted platforms are operated by external platform providers, such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. Openness refers to community membership, which might be restricted to members of the organization (internal), to registered users outside the company (external access restricted) or to all users without restrictions (external open). A key condition for Social CRM is that platform providers define the terms of use. This means that businesses are able to influence these conditions (e.g. regarding a subsequent processing of data) only in the owned model. The second element refers to analytical functionalities, which use data within the social media platforms to derive insights on customers and/or markets. Most platforms offer members to analyze the activity on their social media presence with tools that are integrated in the platform itself. This comprises data about the interactions of users with content (e.g. number of likes, comments, impressions) as

Companies and service providers

Platform provider

Users

Social CRM CRM

Process level

Opera tional

Analytical

Communicative

Cooperative

Management / Integration

Social media (presence/contact)

Campaign management

Owned Hosted

Lead management

Analytics

Offer management

(monitoring/mining)

Service management Complaint management Cross-functional processes

Interaction (proactive/reactive)

Feedback

Questions

Internal External restricted

Feedback management

Social web content

External open

Experiences

Opinions

Recommendations

Fig. 1.6 Social CRM process architecture model. Adapted from Alt and Reinhold (2012, p. 289)

16

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Table 1.6 Elements of Social CRM solutions (Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290) Social CRM elements

Description and objectives

1. Social media

Social media platforms, such as forums, wiki and communities, enable the distribution and the joint generation of information Objective: establishing a presence in the social web, networking with (potential) customers Analytical techniques allow to monitor, filter, search, aggregate, enrich, transform or create business objects (e.g. lead generation, service tickets) Objective: identification of relevant content, key actors and services in the social web, impact analysis of customer-oriented activities, interpretation of social web content Interaction techniques enable dialogues via publishing and sharing of content (e.g. recommendations to contacts or notifications of relevant internal departments) Objective: external communication and proactive and reactive communication with social media users Integration with internal systems (e.g. CRM as well as other back-end systems) that supports lead, contact, campaign or service management Objective: functionalities for operative, analytical and collaborative CRM activities and for using social content (e.g. contact details, postings) in CRM activities (e.g. analysis, campaigns) Establishing an overall perspective on multiple social media and internal activities, such as moderation of multiple presences, cross-platform processes and workflows Objective: strategic and operative control of social media channels and activities, integration between systems and establishing capabilities to (re)act in the social web

2. Analysis

3. Interaction

4. CRM

5. Management and integration

well as basic analytical functionalities (e.g. campaign success, target group segmentation). Although manual monitoring of social media platforms is possible and yields first insights on activities in the social web, the big data nature of the social web calls for an automated extraction and evaluation of UGC. Via electronic interfaces (API, see Sect. 1.2) offered by many social media platforms, UGC may be imported in dedicated software tools, which offer advanced analytical functionalities for monitoring and processing. This automatic acquisition of data is elaborated in more detail in Sect. 4.3. The third element comprises functionalities for interaction between companies and social media users. They are important to publish news about the company or its products, to answer individual postings or requests (see Sect. 3.2.3) as well as to support a community with additional services (e.g. apps for social media platforms, provision of a sharing platform). The social media platforms already provide basic functionalities such as alerts, scheduling functions and different types of interactions (e.g. broadcast, private messages, likes), which might be extended by additional software tools. Simple tools for interaction allow the posting of content across different platforms, whereas more advanced tools also feature functionalities

1.5 Elements of Social CRM

17

data enrichment. In the latter case, data from the social web (obtained from the platforms or from third parties) is added to the postings. For example, product descriptions are often enhanced either by evaluations or by suggested solutions from other users. Valuable contributions to the interaction element are recent technologies in the area of conversational interfaces (“chatbots”). The fourth element is CRM (see Sect. 1.4), which provides key functionalities in the four CRM design areas (operational, analytical, communicative and collaborative CRM). Operational CRM is responsible for supporting the processes along the customer life cycle and aims at a completing a “360 degree view” on the customer. For example, the interaction with customers via social media may be recorded in their customer profile similar to activities on other channels, such as past requests to the call center or offline branch visits. Analytical CRM links to the analytical element in Social CRM and contributes categories (e.g. customer segments) and metrics (e.g. campaign success), which are helpful in assessing and planning customer-oriented activities. Communicative and collaborative CRM include functionalities to align multiple interaction channels and, thus, to integrate social media in the company’s channel mix. UGC could, for example, be published on the company website, used in the call center database or displayed in the company’s (electronic) shops. The final element provides functionalities for management and integration. For example, management allows to maintain a coordinated presence and content on multiple social media platforms. Integration predefines processes (“workflows”) how the company reacts to certain (critical) situations. This may occur manually as well as on a (partly) automated basis. In this respect, incidents may be forwarded to the respective department (e.g. services, customer intelligence) within the company, which again requires an integration with the company’s internal systems. Overall, the goal of the element “management and integration” is to avoid redundant processes and to ensure a coherent customer knowledge base.

References Ackoff, R. L. (1989). From data to wisdom. Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16, 3–9. Allen, R. (2017). What happens online in 60 seconds? http://www.smartinsights.com/internetmarketing-statistics/happens-online-60-seconds. Retrieved May 3, 2017. Alt, R., & Puschmann, T. (2004). Successful practices in customer relationship management. In 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). https://doi.org/10.1109/ HICSS.2004.1265415. Alt, R., & Reinhold, O. (2012). Social customer relationship management (Social CRM)— Application and technology. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 4(5), 287–291. Alt, R., & Zimmermann, H.-D. (2019). Electronic markets on platform competition. Electronic Markets, 29(2), 143–149. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-019-00353-y. BBC News. (2018). Only one in four trust social media, says survey. http://www.bbc.com/news/ business-42771740. Retrieved February 1, 2018. Brinker, S. (2018). Marketing technology landscape supergraphic. https://chiefmartec.com/2018/ 04/marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-2018/. Retrieved May 22, 2018.

18

1 Social CRM: Evolution and Building Blocks

Budde, L. (2012). Facebook big data: Das gigantische Datenaufkommen des Social-NetworkRiesen [Facebook big data: The enormous data volume of the social network giant]. http://t3n. de/news/facebook-big-data-gigantische-410203/. Retrieved August 15, 2015. Chen, P. Y., & Hitt, L. (2002). Measuring switching costs and the determinants of customer retention in internet-enabled businesses: A study of the online brokerage industry. Information Systems Research, 13(3), 255–274. Chen, I. J., & Popovich, K. (2003). Understanding customer relationship management (CRM): People, process and technology. Business Process Management Journal, 9(5), 672–688. Cisco. (2019). Cisco visual networking index: Forecast and trends, 2017–2022 White Paper. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-indexvni/white-paper-c11-741490.html. Retrieved March 21, 2019. Davydova, O. (2017). 25 Chatbot platforms: A comparative table. https://chatbotsjournal.com/25chatbot-platforms-a-comparative-table-aeefc932eaff. Retrieved January 1, 2018. Eurostats. (2018). Households—level of internet access. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/ show.do?dataset=isoc_ci_in_h&lang=en. Retrieved November 30, 2018. Facebook. (2018a). Facebook Q3 2018 results. https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_ financials/2018/Q3/Q3-2018-Earnings-Presentation.pdf. Retrieved November 30, 2018. Facebook. (2018b). Fourth quarter and full year 2017 results conference call. https://s21.q4cdn. com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2017/Q4/Q4-17-Earnings-call-transcript.pdf. Retrieved April 20, 2018. Facebook. (2018c). Number of monthly active WhatsApp users worldwide from April 2013 to December 2017 (in millions). https://www.statista.com/statistics/260819/number-of-monthlyactive-whatsapp-users/. Retrieved March 3, 2018. Greenberg, P. (2009). CRM at the speed of light: Social CRM strategies, tools, and techniques for engaging your customers. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies. Greenwald, G. (2013). XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘Nearly Everything a User does on the Internet’. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data. Retrieved April 20, 2018. HDE. (2019). Handel digital—Online-Monitor (2019). https://einzelhandel.de/index.php?option= com_attachments&task=download&id=10168. Retrieved July 10, 2019. Holz, W. (2016). Sicherheit und Vertrauen im Internet [Security and trust in the internet]. https:// www.bitkom.org/Presse/Anhaenge-an-PIs/2016/Oktober/Bitkom-Charts-PK-Vertrauen-und-ITSicherheit-13-10-2016-final.pdf. Retrieved January 1, 2018. ISC. (2019a). Internet domain survey. https://www.isc.org/net-work/survey/. Retrieved July 10, 2019. ISC. (2019b). ISC distributions by top-level domain name (by name). ftp.isc.org/www/survey/ reports/current/byname.txt. Retrieved July 10, 2019. Kabroviski, R. (2017). Virtual reality and the future of social media. http://digitalmarketing magazine.co.uk/social-media-marketing/virtual-reality-and-the-future-of-social-media/4745. Retrieved March 1, 2018. Kantrowitz, A. (2017). Twitter plans to broadcast live video 24 hours a day. https://www. buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/twitter-wants-to-stream-live-video-programming-247?utm_term=. vd8wvw1MO#.rjm6W678l. Retrieved March 1, 2018. Parker, G., & Thomas, L. (2012). Wave 6: The business of social—Social media tracker 2012. http://www.universalmccann.de/wave6/. Retrieved May 15, 2012. Peppers, D., & Rogers, M. (2004). Managing customer relationships: A strategic framework. Hoboken: Wiley. Press Releases Destatis. (2018). 90% of Germany’s inhabitants online. https://www.destatis.de/ EN/PressServices/Press/pr/2018/09/PE18_330_634.html. Retrieved November 30, 2018. Ries, T. E., Bersoff, D. M., Adkins, S., Armstrong, C., & Bruening, J. (2018). 2018 Edelman trust barometer. New York: Edelman. Statista. (2017). Number of internet users worldwide from 2005 to 2017 (in millions). https://www. statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-internet-users-worldwide/. Retrieved August 4, 2017.

References

19

Tencent. (2018). Tencent announces 2018 second quarter and interims results. https://www. tencent.com/en-us/articles/15000721534381804.pdf. Retrieved November 30, 2018. TNS Opinion & Social as a Request of the European Commission. (2017). Media use in the European Union. http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/Survey/ getSurveyDetail/instruments/STANDARD/surveyKy/2143. Retrieved January 1, 2018. Tubefilter. (2015). YouTube now gets over 400 hours of content uploaded every minute. http:// www.tubefilter.com/2015/07/26/youtube-400-hours-content-every-minute/. Retrieved August 26, 2016. Twitter. (2018). Number of monthly active twitter users worldwide from 1st quarter 2010 to 3rd quarter 2018 (in millions). https://investor.twitterinc.com/static-files/b9402133-be92-4ea4ac2b-db20be19d1cd. Retrieved November 30, 2018. We are Social. (2019). The state of the internet in 2019. https://wearesocial.com/blog/2019/01/ digital-2019-global-internet-use-accelerates. Retrieved July 9, 2019. Wojcicki, S. (2018). Mid-year update on our five creator priorities for 2018. https://youtubecreators.googleblog.com/2018/07/mid-year-update-on-our-five-creator.html. Retrieved November 30, 2018. Zikipoulos, P., Deroos, D., Parasuraman, K., Deutsch, T., Corrigan, D., & Giles, J. (2013). Harness the power of big data. New York: McGrawHill.

2

Social CRM: Four Case Studies

The following four cases from various industries represent snapshots that provide insights into the potentials, the different options and maturity degrees for integrating social media and CRM. They are common scenarios that may be observed in practice. After introducing each company, the case descriptions elaborate on the use of social media platforms, the support of Social CRM processes and the technological infrastructure. A cross-case comparison concludes this chapter.

2.1

Cyberport

2.1.1 Company Founded 1998 in Dresden, Germany, Cyberport is a distributor for home electronics and lifestyle products, such as notebooks, tablets, smartphones, photography, televisions and other domestic appliances. The company offers a range of approx. 45,000 products and had more than 4.8 m customers in 2016. It employs approx. 640 people with a turnover of €673 m (2015) that has shown an average growth rate of about 21% per year over the five years before. Being an investor since 1999, Hubert Burda Media completely acquired Cyberport in 2017. The main operational resources are the online shop (www.cyberport.de) with approx. 4 m visitors in 2015, 16 physical stores in Germany and Austria, a shop-in-shop cooperation with Galeria Karstadt-Kaufhof as well as a distribution and logistics center in Siebenlehn, Germany. In some cases, products are also sold via third-party platforms, such as eBay. Over the years, Cyberport has received several awards for its multi-channel strategy as well as for its online shop.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3_2

21

22

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

2.1.2 Use of Social Media The overall goal of Cyberport’s social media activities is to sustain the company’s perception in the market as a qualified and customer-orientated distributor. Social media are not seen as an additional sales channel, but as an instrument for strengthening the brand as well as the relationship to customers. Cyberport has established a dedicated social media team within its marketing department, which is in charge of the presentations of the company as well as its physical stores and manages social media activities during working days. Outside of working hours and at weekends, a monitoring of the social media channels also takes place in regular intervals. This centralized coordination of the social media presence has replaced formerly independent presences of various stores. Cyberport operates and uses various social media platforms, which allows to specifically address relevant target groups and to support different interaction forms: – Owned social media (external open). Related functionalities for the evaluation of products, the live chat or the blog (Cyberbloc.de) are integrated into the online shop and enable users to interact with Cyberport. Users may share their experience and thoughts about the product and evaluate them within a scale of one to five stars, which is available for every product in the online shop. During the purchase, customers may contact employees via the live chat for questions about the product or the order (e.g. delivery time, availability). The public Cyberbloc (see Fig. 2.1) reports about current trends (e.g. insights from trade fair visits of Cyberport employees), innovations (e.g. new smart home devices), product tests (e.g. by external Cyberport testers) or information about the company (“Inside Cyberport”). Users may comment on these topics or discuss them. – Hosted social media (external open). Established in 2009, Cyberport’s second most important social media presence is on Twitter with approx. 20% of all social media customer enquiries. This represents three to ten enquiries per day. Some 200–250 weekly tweets refer to Cyberport or to connections via hashtags. For example, special offers shared by Cyberport via #Cybersale, #DealsDerWoche (i.e. deals of the week) are forwarded (“retweeted”) and discussed by its followers. Cyberport’s YouTube channel with about 17,218 subscribers (as of 7/19) primarily serves to reinforce the brand, for example with videos about testing and unboxing products that are frequently commented or discussed by followers. Cyberport reviews current technology and lifestyle topics once a week in a podcast on Soundcloud. This podcast is also advertised via other channels, such as Facebook. Due to content-related and legal concerns Cyberport has not intensified its presence on Pinterest. – Hosted social media (external restricted). Facebook is the most important social media channel for Cyberport. With some 167.210 fans (as of 7/19) it has a share of 70% of Cyberport’s social media communication and one or two postings are published daily with the overall goal of meeting a proportion of 80% content-oriented and 20% advertising-oriented postings. Cyberport analyzes Facebook postings regularly and uses Facebook Ads to promote its own offers

2.1 Cyberport

23

Different tech-oriented topic categories of the blog

Registration feature and login for external users that want to contribute

Blog post with the announcement of the new “Cyberbloc OnAir” podcasts

Fig. 2.1 Cyberbloc with announcement of its first podcast

Article about the introduction of NESTProducts in the shop

Links to related photos, videos, tests, job offers and events

Option for an interactive chat

Community feedback about the product

Link to customer opinions and reviews

Integration with social media platforms

Fig. 2.2 Cyberport in Facebook (left) and with link to the online shop (right)

24

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

(see Fig. 2.2 left) and for redirecting users from Facebook to the webshop (see Fig. 2.2 right).

2.1.3 Social CRM Application In the area of marketing, social media primarily address campaign management and the identification of leads (see Fig. 1.5). The main emphasis is on monitoring and interacting with customers via open and access-restricted social media. Analytical functionalities assist Cyberport in identifying trends and preferences within their communities (see Fig. 1.5, SP1.0). In addition, the online shop and trending keywords, such as “Samsung GalaxyS7”, are constantly monitored on various technology blogs in German and English (SP1.0), which also allow to obtain insider information on technical issues and developments. The results are used for social media campaigns (SP1.0), such as product offerings in Facebook (see Fig. 2.3 left and right). To generate leads, pinned postings1 complement regular offers (e.g. deal

News about new MacBook which received mixed feedback

Link to the full article on the Cyberport blog

Information about a test by cyberport

Offer for a NEST device (translated by Facebook)

Promotion with link to offer-related landing page

Fig. 2.3 Example of a Facebook posting (left) and an offer on Facebook (right) 1

A pinned posting remains fixed at the top of a thread or a timeline of postings. In Facebook, this option allows to highlight this posting for one week.

2.1 Cyberport

25

of the week, monthly brochure) (SP1.1). These campaigns are analyzed for their reach and the conversion as well as the share of customers who took notice of products and made purchases (SP1.0). Cyberport aims to turn the generated leads from campaigns or ads into customers by adding direct links to related products in the web shop. Among the three primary use cases in the area of sales are: – Advisory services (SP2.0). Cyberport has observed that customers increasingly submit product-related questions during the offer phase not only via traditional channels (phone, email, shop), but also via social media. The social media department responds to them directly or forwards the questions to the customer service for further advisory services via social media or phone. In addition, customers may interact before or during the order process with a customer service representative in a live chat. – Sales support (SP2.0). For supporting the transformation of leads into customers (see Chap. 1), several social media platforms are linked to Cyberport’s online shop. For example, product tests are positioned at the start page and the latest video may be shared on Facebook or Twitter via the “like” or “share” button. In addition, the online shop provides a social login via the Facebook account and social media postings (e.g. monthly brochure, offers or “deals”) frequently include a link to a landing page2 in the online shop, where leads may be handled more effectively (e.g. users have to login into shop with their Cyberport credentials). – Online shop (SP2.0) with social links. As a multi-channel trader, Cyberport shows the product’s availability in the central warehouse as well as in its different stores. Besides searching for products, the online shop also allows to compare products or save them on a memory list as well as to share them via Facebook or Twitter and to recommend them to friends or colleagues. In the service domain, Cyberport aims to process customer enquiries efficiently and to analyze and evaluate customer feedback: – Service management (SP3.1). Many of the social media enquiries refer to single products, orders or services. The social media department responds to these enquiries directly and publishes responses in a FAQ section if they promise to be relevant for other customers. – Feedback management (SP3.0 and SP3.2). Customers provide regular feedback across various social media, e.g. via the Cyberblog or the presences on Facebook and Twitter. Feedback on all platforms is regularly analyzed and included into reports for management and other departments. It provides Cyberport additional insights and allows to quickly recognize critical situations in terms of an “early warning system”. An example is an issue that occurred in 2014s “Black Friday” campaign, where prices were initially listed with a higher discount. These issues 2

A landing page is a web page that includes further details about a specific campaign.

26

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

were first observed by the reaction of social media users and only later in the call centers and the stores. The social media team could quickly react and provide recommendations to internal departments and to customers, who ordered to the wrong conditions. Finally, the case shows a contribution to cross-functional processes in two areas: – Brand and reputation management (SP4.0). Cyberport communicates news and product presentations (see Fig. 2.3 left) regularly via Facebook and Twitter to support its position as an expert in the field of the advertised products. These postings often link to other blogs and podcasts to provide supplementary and professional edited content. Monitoring them allows to draw conclusions about their effects and the audience in the market. – Product management (SP4.0). While product management had only little customer contact in the past, it now receives feedback from the community, which may be useful for decision-making on product pricing and the product portfolio. Relevant information emerges from a weekly analysis of social media channels, campaigns, web pages, blogs and the like.

2.1.4 Social CRM Infrastructure At the heart of Cyberport’s Social CRM infrastructure is a social media monitoring and management system. It serves to plan, coordinate and publish postings as well as to answer enquiries by responsible staff from the customer service department. While this technological infrastructure allows for basic web monitoring, the social media team uses the analytical functionalities offered by the individual social media platforms (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) for deeper insights. Moreover, the touch points with the customers, such as the online shop or Facebook, are connected to support lead management activities and to increase insights into the customer journey. Two examples are links in postings that lead to landing pages or the Facebook social login for Cyberport’s online shop.

2.2

Dell

2.2.1 Company Dell Computers was founded in 1984 and has temporarily become the largest distributor of personal computers (PC) and PC equipment worldwide. In 2019, the company ranged third behind Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard with a market share of 17,6% (Q1 2019, source: Costello 2019). From the beginning, Dell’s direct and

2.2 Dell

27

build-to-order business model was based on the internet and strongly customer-oriented: customers could not only configure their products, but also track their orders and obtain after-sales self-services online. Although Dell has started selling its products via distributors since 2008 as well, customer participation and customer feedback from online-channels are still core for decision-making on the products and services offered. The product portfolio comprises business solutions, software, peripheral equipment, end users solutions, and services. These are offered to four main market segments: large-scale enterprises, public organizations, SMEs and end users. Following its traditional internet-based direct sales model, Dell entered the social web already in 2006 and established a dedicated corporate “Social Media Listening Command Center” in 2010.

2.2.2 Use of Social Media The main goal behind Dell’s use of social media was to improve its understanding of customers and markets, to establish a dialogue, and to actively involve customers (see Fig. 2.4). For example, social media were regarded as a channel that allows customers to efficiently contact the company in case of problems, questions and comments. The ability to monitor these activities is recognized valuable in quickly reacting to critical incidents and in obtaining detailed insight into market sectors and the perception of products. Dell also informs its customers proactively about

Fig. 2.4 Milestones in the early use of social media at Dell (Versteeg 2013)

28

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

specific topics on a daily basis (so-called seeding3) and responds to emerging problems (e.g. via Twitter). Social media allowed Dell to create an internal and external knowledge base, which improved customer self-service and reduced recurring questions within the traditional services channels. This way, customer service representatives are able to concentrate on customers with complex problems and customers that were unable to find a solution themselves. Dell defined three basic principles for using social media: – Engage. Following a “friends recommend friends” strategy, Dell expects that satisfied customers would recommend Dell to their friends or help them in case of problems. The company aims to sustain this behavior with the daily seeding of information, pictures, and videos related to the company and its products. – Syndicate. A coordinated use of all channels is regarded necessary to strengthen the relationship with the community. For example, Dell customers are encouraged to use social media channels “offline” (e.g. at events) and to publish postings “online” about these events with a hashtag to enable other users to comment on it or to share it. – Monetize. Finally, the use of social media should contribute to commercial success and lead to increased sales (e.g. via purchase recommendations, brand loyalty) as well as to improved efficiencies (e.g. in customer self-service, market research). Dell pursues a broad approach that combines various audiences from different social media platforms (see Fig. 2.5):

Fig. 2.5 Social media platforms used by Dell (Versteeg 2013) 3

Seeding means to inform the community proactively to achieve activity and visibility.

2.2 Dell

29

Options for engagement and contribution to customer service

Links to related social media, the community and different forums

Option for users to submit own ideas

Featured contributions of the community

Highlighted community members

Fig. 2.6 Community en.community.dell.com (left) and IdeaStorm.com (right)

– Owned social media (internal) primarily serve to support operational business processes. For example, Dell uses the hosted solution Salesforce Chatter for communication among employees and the owned discussion platform “Employee storm” for discussions on possible product and services innovations among employees. Originating from “Dell IdeaStorm” (see Fig. 2.6 right), the concept intends to enable a fast, worldwide exchange of ideas and problems. In addition, Dell provides its employees (and partly also its customers) with presentations on products or processes via SlideShare. – Owned social media (external open) exist at several points. The main portal is the “Dell community” (en.community.dell.com) (see Fig. 2.6 left), which offers access to all community services, such as support forums, blogs, groups, sales support and bonus programs (“owners club”). The dedicated customer support at www.dell.com/support is a wiki-like (self-help) knowledge base for technicians and customers (see Fig. 2.7). In addition, country-specific support forums exist, which are subdivided into product categories. Registered users may publish topics and comment on other users’ entries. Topic-related blogs, such as Direct2Dell, or collaboration platforms, such as IdeaStorm, allow to crowdsource ideas or product innovations (see Fig. 2.6). The corporate platforms are often interconnected and linked to open social media (e.g. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook), which makes Dell services available via different channels and allows customers to choose the preferred platform. – Hosted social media (external open) include support via Twitter and other platforms. It is available worldwide in eleven languages. In Germany, presences are @DellHilft (i.e. Dell helps) for the support, @DellGermany for news, slideshare. net/Dell or storify.com/Dell for information material (e.g. lectures on the company, new concepts or ideas) as well as various video channels on YouTube

30

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Resources for selfservices including video tutorials

Link to product- or service-related content in the user forum

Fig. 2.7 Dell knowledge base forum (https://support.software.dell.com/de-de/kb-product-select)

The @Dell Twitter channel with news about Dell and current activities

Pinterest channel which is linked with content on other platforms

Fig. 2.8 Dell news on the Twitter channel @DellGermany and on Pinterest

(e.g. Dell employees thank customers and followers at #DellLove and initiate new conversations). In 2012, Dell started a Pinterest page (Sirur 2012) to publish new “pins” on different boards on a weekly basis, such as infographics, re-pins, heritage, lifestyle, or entrepreneurship (see Fig. 2.8). Furthermore, Dell operates a presence on Flickr to support its business communication and is also active on the Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

2.2 Dell

31

Fig. 2.9 Social media presences at Dell (Versteeg 2013)

– Hosted social media (external restricted) are broadly used, in particular Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and RenRen. All Dell’s Facebook presences worldwide are structured alike, but have country-specific features (e.g. local customer enquiries, polls). In 2019, the German Facebook page alone has had more than 12.45 m fans and has proved valuable for marketing purposes, such as product news, polls, lead acquisition with an electronic catalogue or distribution of offers for specific products. For example, Dell advertised the XPS product family in 2012 with dedicated information, videos and feedback forms. Users were able to share these postings and retrieve opinions about this new product line on Twitter via the hashtag #XPS. In China, Dell operates a page on RenRen, the Chinese version of Facebook, where it links to offers, chats and information on the call centers. At the end of 2014, the forum featured more than 1 m followers and in 2009, Dell started its LinkedIn page as a platform for seeking new employees. It turned into a target group-specific communication channel, which distributes helpful tips, news, and offers for professional users. This page grew to almost 1.19 m followers (as of 7/19). The mix of social media platforms (see Fig. 2.9) allows Dell not only to deepen its relationship with customers and opinion leaders, but also to increase the share of voice4 of topics relevant to the company, the presence of Dell in search engines, and

4 The share of voice (SoV) describes the market coverage of an advertising measure, i.e. the share of advertising contacts (e.g. the share of mentioning the company) of the total amount of contacts (e.g. all mentions of companies of a target/product group).

32

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

the page visits at Dell.com. The social media strategy is based on the support of the employees and Dell actively promotes the use of social media internally. For example, courses help to introduce the social media channels and their benefits for different tasks to a large number of employees. A separate “Social media and Community University” (SMaC U) (Heiss 2014) program as well as a supportive social media team were established for qualifying employees to act in social media on behalf of Dell. The corporate guideline for social media provides some guidance to these employees by five principles (Dell 2015): “(1) Protect Information, (2) Be Transparent and Disclose, (3) Follow the Law, Follow the Code of Conduct, (4) Be Responsible, (5) Be Nice, Have Fun and Connect”. Furthermore, leaderboards and individual scorecards in the “Social Media Expert” (SME) program help to identify employees, who use social media successfully, to follow them, and to learn from their activities.

2.2.3 Social CRM Application The activities on the social media platforms strongly support Dell’s CRM processes. As shown in Table 2.1, this comprises not only the processes marketing, sales and service, but also cross-functional processes, such as product development, online presence and communication. Two main application areas for Social CRM are present in the area of marketing: – Campaign and event management (SP1.0). Dell uses social media to target specific groups (e.g. gamers, consumers, middle-sized companies) with their marketing campaigns or to combine social media channels with other channels (online and/or offline) in cross-channel campaigns. For example, Facebook campaigns are enriched with videos on YouTube, pictures on Flickr or are

Table 2.1 Social media application areas at Dell (based on Mathisen 2013) Social media application area (corresponding CRM sub-process, see Sect. 1.4)

Usage scenario

Product development (SP3.0, SP4.0)

Feedback loop, early warning, new product ideation Demand forecasting, lead generation, message reach Ratings and reviews, communities, customer stories Collaboration, thought leadership, blogs Listening, support widgets, outreach Rich media, brand reputation, influence, reputation

Marketing (SP1.0, SP1.1) Online presence (SP1.0, SP3.0, SP4.0) Sales (SP1.0, SP1.1, SP2.0, SP4.0) Customer service (SP3.1, SP 3.2, SP3.3) Communication (SP1.0, SP3.0, SP4.0)

2.2 Dell

33

coordinated with physical mailings. Via social media, campaign managers are able to track the success of campaigns from the beginning and almost in real-time (e.g. reached age segment, spreading via hashtags). Dell’s qualification program includes a training of employees in creating content to ensure that marketing measures have more success and a wider reach. – Lead generation (SP1.1). Social media increase awareness about offerings and stimulate buying decisions through incentives. Dell posts coupons and special offers, which users may share and forward to existing as well as to new followers on various platforms. Forwarded postings (“shares”), likes, and status updates enable friends to take notice of the offer and to participate as well. Since detailed information on the campaign is available, insights on the reached target group and on a campaign’s costs and revenues are possible. For example, in 2012 consumers were able to win coupons or discounts for a certain product within a game on RenRen and cash it directly in the connected shop, which resulted in the direct sale of 3,887 computers (Mslgroup 2012). Similar to Cyberport, the sales process is supported rather indirectly: – Target group-specific distribution channels (SP2.0). In general, social media enable a regular contact with (potential) customers, who are known to belong to a certain target group. For example, LinkedIn is a platform where Dell addresses professional users to create a pool of potential buyers. These target groups regularly receive helpful postings and may follow moderated topic-related interest groups. Remarkably, Dell’s analyses indicate that LinkedIn followers are more likely to buy than other customers when campaigns are launched. – Support of channel partners (SP2.0). Dell connects its own social media pages with those of distribution partners to inform and support the partners’ actions (e.g. events, offerings). An example is the cooperation with BMW in 2012 where a joint campaign concerning the products Dell Streak and BMW Mini was launched (Sayers 2011). – Lead qualification (SP2.0 and SP1.1). Potential customers receive links or hashtags that point to landing pages with special offers, to the online shop, or the chat with sales employees to give them the option to ask questions about the products, the right product selection, or about the further sales processes. This allows to advise potential customers individually and to retain close contacts. – Offer management (SP2.0). Dell launches focused sales campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. For instance, @DellOutlet (see Fig. 2.10 left) offers selected products at a low price for a limited time via Twitter and contributes to the sales process with qualified leads. Social media are believed to strengthen existing distribution channels and to increase the access to specific target groups, such as spontaneous buyers or first-time buyers.

34

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Tweets from Dell Outlet with links to special deals

Fig. 2.10 Postings of Dell with offerings on Twitter (right) and Facebook (left)

Further application areas for social media are present in the field of services: – Product and service requests (SP3.1). In service management, customers may receive fast responses to their enquiries via Twitter and Facebook. If a receiving Dell employee cannot solve the service issue directly, the request is forwarded to an appropriate service department. To support this process, Dell developed the “fusion” application, which helps to save relevant information from social web interactions, track the history of the service request and to integrate the case with the CRM system. Usually, the requests are answered in the same media and only in case of more complex issues Dell reverts to other communication channels. This way, the issues and their solutions are visible to a broader audience. – Customer feedback (SP3.0 and SP3.2). Dell has implemented a permanent monitoring of social media platforms (“listening”) that also helps to identify problems with products. When launching or introducing new products, Dell may react quickly within the communities. Product management/development is informed as soon as possible to provide updates or to contact affected customers pro-actively. For supporting this process Dell developed a tool called “Social net advocacy” that combines internal data and external feedback and allows to drill down from the product level to each single posting (“data drilling”). – Cooperative support (SP3.1). The community platform reduces the workload in customer service because customers can help each other concerning their questions on Dell products without the involvement of the service department. If users are unable to answer or the process takes too long, customer service employees take over and answer the enquiries (see Fig. 2.11). The community complements the knowledge base, which is extended and refined with each new enquiry. – Proactive support (SP3.1). Aside from supporting its own forums, Dell employees also analyze questions about products on external platforms. In case

2.2 Dell

35

Post about a touchpad issue and reply of a Dell employee Latest topics in the user forum

Reply from a Dell employee asking for further information

Fig. 2.11 Dell forum with examples (left: questions about laptops, right: enquiry)

they identify relevant content or questions, these postings are either linked with the support forum or forwarded as a message to customer service employees. Finally, social media also contribute to cross-functional processes at Dell: – Brand and reputation management (SP4.0 and SP3.0). Monitoring of UGC and the respective actors (e.g. bloggers) delivers information that Dell uses to improve its brand and reputation in the market. Examples are postings of users who had positive or negative experience or published ratings and reviews in connection with Dell. This evaluation also serves to forecast the demand of Dell products, in particular, if an increased demand is expected for a new product that has received good feedback before. Tools, such as “Social net advocacy”, help to evaluate social web data context-sensitively and aim to derive a picture on public opinion (Gupta 2013). Besides new insights into the market, Dell may also communicate own viewpoints, offer help, or discuss the reasons for certain opinions or statements directly with publishers of the respective postings. In addition, social media serve to spread “customer stories” easily by imparting authentic opinions about products, services, or the brand. – Community management (SP4.0). Dell supports and fosters communities to increase its reach into target audiences, to win external “supporters” and to develop its target groups. This refers to the marketing as well as to the service area alike. In the case of unjustified criticism, Dell employees notice it and post Dell’s position. In addition, external “supporters” often speak up and provide help without Dell being involved. Dell also promotes highly active users (e.g. “Dell community rockstar”, “Community advisory panel”) or forwards postings of external supporters via its own channels. In turn, these external supporters may

36

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

establish or increase their own reputation in the social web. Finally, Dell’s “Community advisory panel” provides feedback and promotes communication about the company. – Product and innovation management (SP4.0). Dell’s IdeaStorm platform allows external users to exchange ideas about Dell products and services, which may result in new market offerings (“New product creation”). As of 2018, more than 550 ideas were selected from a total of approx. 28,035 ideas submitted (as of 2/18). Thus, not only the knowledge generated from direct customer contacts, but also the combination of insights from the social web and the discussions on the IdeaStorm platform yield constant market feedback for product management (“feedback loop”).

2.2.4 Social CRM Infrastructure On the technological side, Dell has implemented the CRM system Salesforce and Radian6 (purchased by Salesforce in 2011) for the social media part. Besides Radian6, additional self-developed solutions are used. For example, the software “fusion” serves to connect social media and CRM in the field of services. The main features of Dell’s Social CRM infrastructure are: – The integration of several customer touch points (e.g. web, call center, mobile devices, social media, or web shop systems) and their links with the CRM systems. This ensures strong customer information and the recording of customer contacts together with a rich purchase history. – The analysis of social media with several systems. Radian6 includes the real-time analysis of UGC based on interlinked search terms and the evaluation of sentiments. It also helps to generate reports for campaign management and so-called management notes for decision makers within the company. – The interaction with the community in several languages (e.g. English, German, French, and Spanish). Radian6 takes incoming messages, supports the posting of answers (e.g. in the case of service requests) and archives the interaction histories. The latter are reconciled with the documentation in Fusion, which saves additional information, such as service ticket number, problem description, and given answers. Qualified Dell employees may also use their own tools for specific social media activities. The centralized “Social Media Listening Command Center” (see Fig. 2.12) pools analytical skills for the entire company and offers the following services: – GlobalWebIndex, which is a service from a market research company that generates data on customer groups based on their internet use via PC, mobile devices, tablets, consoles, or TV.

2.2 Dell

37

Fig. 2.12 Dell’s Social Media Listening Command Center (https://blog.dell.com/ en-us/dell-s-next-step-thesocial-media-listeningcommand-center)

– Strategic Oxygen (now Forrester Tech Marketing Navigator), which provides data on media, information channels or general media, which are considered relevant. – Sprinklr, which follows discussions on different social media platforms and provides interfaces to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, Foursquare, Wordpress, Tumblr, Weibo, QQ or RenRen. – Salesforce Chatter, which provides messenger functionalities integrated with the CRM system and allows employees to create profiles, join groups, share data or communicate worldwide. In 2013, Dell created the “Social Media Service Group” to make Dell’s social media experience available to other companies in the form of courses, advisory services, and “build outs” (dedicated instances of the Social Media Listening Center). These services aim to support companies in strengthening customer loyalty, in promoting products and brands, as well as in analyzing social media. They may be considered as an additional business model that has emerged from the expertise in Social CRM.

2.3

Spreadshirt

2.3.1 Company Spreadshirt is a leading EC company selling on-demand prints on clothes and accessories. Founded in 2002 in Leipzig (Germany), the company has grown to some 750 employees with a turnover of approx. €110 m (2018). Spreadshirt has printed in 2018 more than 5.5 m articles, which were delivered to 166 countries. Via the Spreadshirt platform, private persons, companies and organizations alike are able to create designs following their own ideas and to buy or sell these to third

38

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

parties on online shops, electronic marketplaces, or other channels. While the design process is external and partners are also deeply involved in the sales process, Spreadshirt is responsible for the production, the entire order process as well as for service enquiries related to the production (“co-creation”) . The first prototype of the platform went online in 2002, and six months afterwards the hundredth shop had opened. In 2016, the design portfolio comprised in 2018 about 10 m motifs, which were available in shops, at marketplaces, or within Spreadshirt’s T-Shirt Designer. From a CRM perspective, the business model relies on an active community that is closely linked to Spreadshirt’s marketing, sales, and service processes. The community is, in particular responsible for design, promotion or customer acquisition. Spreadshirt focuses on the platform, production, distribution, and invoicing. It provides the technological infrastructure, such as the tools to design—or more precisely to configure—products by either selecting pre-defined options and/or by adding individual elements (e.g. pictures) within a defined solution space (“mass customization”). It links this with the innovative potential of the community (“open innovation”). Spreadshirt groups the community members into end customers of the T-shirts (customers) and into designers, companies, or promoters (sellers), but often community members have both roles. For example, after some initial purchases, a customer may start to design his/her own T-shirts with the help of the T-Shirt Designer and put them into his/her own online shop or into the Spreadshirt marketplace, thus becoming a seller. In 2018, Spreadshirt reported to have about 100,000 active sellers.

2.3.2 Use of Social Media Spreadshirt supports a mix of social media platforms, which follows a layered “onion-like” system. While the inner layers (e.g. own blog, own forum) focus on brand management, community building, and marketing, the outer layers (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, forums, or external blogs) support market research, customer acquisition, and direct interaction. The aim is to redirect communication from the outer layer to the inner layer for increasing control of the channel and for obtaining deeper insights into the audience. Compared to a focus on spontaneous and direct communication on the outer layers, the inner layers aim on building relationships. Both layers are linked when original content is published in the inner layers (e.g. problems applicable to many customers, trends discussed in the forum) and is distributed via the outer layers or when new contacts from the outer layers are redirected to platforms on the inner layers, such as the partner forum. The layered system consists of the following platforms: – Owned social media (internal). Employees from services, product management, and social media consolidate knowledge from customer interactions and analyses (e.g. frequently expressed customer needs, results from social media analysis) on an internal platform.

2.3 Spreadshirt

39

More than 1,000 different topics are discussed in the forum

Highly active users have more than 3,000 contributions

Posts cover production-related questions, new features or offers

Fig. 2.13 Topics and discussions in the Spreadshirt forum

– Owned social media (external restricted and external open). Spreadshirt operates forums and blogs in different languages (e.g. English, German, and French). On the one hand, partners may discuss topics in the forum (see Fig. 2.13) and on the other, Spreadshirt participates in these discussions and creates new entries itself (e.g. new products, support issues, offerings). The blogs mainly serve to inform the community about marketing offers, current activities, or trends (see Fig. 2.14). These owned social media are connected with hosted external platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, or RSS feeds. – Hosted social media (external open). Spreadshirt is present in several popular platforms. On the one hand, the Twitter presence with about 18,100 followers (7/19) complements traditional external interaction channels, such as phone or email, with an easy-to-use channel for fast requests. Spreadshirt aims on short response times of less than half a day. Conversations that exceed two interactions are directed to owned social media or to email. On the other hand, the YouTube channel with about 5,128 subscribers (7/19) offers detailed information regarding the brand, its processes, resources for self-service (e.g. screencasts on how to operate the shop application, videos about the production or new products) as well as marketing material (e.g. TV advertisements). Presences on platforms, such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr, serve similar purposes. – Hosted social media (external restricted). Facebook with about 148,422 fans (7/19) supports relationships with the community via sharing news and/or promotional offers. It also represents an additional entry point to inner layer presences (e.g. shop, forum, and blog). Customers or partners may post their feedback, questions, and reviews on Spreadshirt’s Facebook timeline.

40

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Blog with relevant categories for customers and partners

Post about visualization features in the Spreadshop

Fig. 2.14 Example for a posting in the Spreadshirt blog

2.3.3 Social CRM Application Social CRM is an integral element of Spreadshirt’s co-creation business model. The company aims at an active and closely integrated community that supports all three CRM core processes. In marketing, this particularly refers to campaign management. Campaigns, such as the promotion of topics or motifs (SP1.0), are designed to support sales in the community and to strengthen designs originating from it. For example, sharing strongly discussed topics in newspapers within the partner community might spur partners to pick up these topics in new designs for increasing their sales. To evaluate the success of a campaign, Spreadshirt compares social media metrics (number of blog entries or Twitter postings) and the costs of a social media campaign with the actual sales of the (electronic) shops and marketplaces. Furthermore, Spreadshirt is able to track the spreading of postings and the number of persons who discuss a topic via the analysis of Mini URLs. This is valuable to assess the reach or “virality” of a certain posting (e.g. the times a posting has been shared and by whom) and to identity actors with strong activity and/or audience (“influencers”) (SP1.0 and SP4.0). An analysis of postings following specific keywords, such as “Spreadshirt”, provides further insights into current topics relevant to the company or the communities.

2.3 Spreadshirt

41

In sales, Spreadshirt strives to increase its reach into niche markets and to link as many as customer demands as possible with the offerings on the platform: – Target group-specific distribution channels (SP2.0). The global Spreadshirt web page as well as the respective country-specific pages point to the online shop where products are presented in a hierarchical tree structure or via a search function. Besides information on T-shirts and prices, there is also information on designs and, if available, a link to additional shops of the designer. Partners may link the Spreadshirt shop or the products on their own page. The flexible offering of products within its platform allows Spreadshirt to offer a broad product range to many niche markets. For this purpose, Spreadshirt provides its partners with shop configurations that are free of charge (see Fig. 2.15 left) and predefined interfaces (API) to the Spreadshirt platform. – Facebook shop (SP2.0). Next to their own web shop, Spreadshirt operates a shop app on Facebook that is based on the shop model kit and supports the selection and shopping cart functionality as well as the ordering process (see Fig. 2.15 right). Partners may embed this app into their Facebook pages, which makes the shop available to their followers. In the service domain, Spreadshirt aims at providing content proactively and answering enquiries rapidly: – Product and service management (SP3.1). Enquiries about the product range are answered via social media, email or chat. A ticket system supports the internal management and makes enquiries available for other departments, such as product management or community management. The system links insights from

A partner shop with the Spreadshirt platform in the background

Fig. 2.15 Example of a designer shop (left) and a shopping cart (right) in Spreadshirt’s Facebook shop

42

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Frequently asked questions and linked answers and explanations

Fig. 2.16 FAQ web page with information on payment methods

social media with internal knowledge, which is recorded during the compulsory tests for products. Service employees are able to forward information to other departments (e.g. to product development when suggestions for new product variants arise) and analyze customer enquiries regarding frequent questions. In case a general problem is detected, an explanation or a possible solution is identified and distributed on adequate channels. This may either be a new entry in the FAQ (see Fig. 2.16 left) or a video on YouTube. The community frequently uses these resources for answering customer enquiries independently. – Cooperative support (SP3.1). Many partners are highly active in the hosted forum and answer questions (e.g. post links to already existing solutions) to help other partners. Due to the active collaboration of its partners, Spreadshirt’s service team may focus on new or still unanswered enquiries. Regarding cross-functional processes, three application areas are observed at Spreadshirt: – Brand and reputation management (SP4.0 and SP3.0). Facebook is used for presenting the brand and increasing the awareness for content in blogs or forums that is present within the inner layer. In addition, many partners have their own social media presence linked with Spreadshirt. Potential customers and first-time buyers often get in touch with the brand on Facebook through recommendations of friends or through links on other social media platforms. The presence on Facebook provides information as well as the option to ask questions (and to receive answers) and Spreadshirt aims to slowly re-direct these users to their own

2.3 Spreadshirt

43

platforms. Hence, the monitoring of Facebook helps Spreadshirt to identify and track service problems, to draw conclusions about the effect of postings, and yields background information on the community’s structure. – Product and innovation management (SP4.0). Since social media provide insights from the market, social analytics is a valuable source for deciding on the range of products in the catalog. Spreadshirt regularly conducts surveys, analyzes the discussions on product-related topics and discusses new ideas with partners and customers to obtain feedback before the (re-)launch of products. In addition, user tests with customers and sellers take place periodically. – Community management (SP4.0). To foster an active and successful community, Spreadshirt aims at a proactive and transparent communication with partners. Among the examples are interviews with successful shop owners about their strategy (e.g. CuteMonsters on the use of social media) or videos on specific topics or background information about processes (e.g. the T-shirt printing process). In addition, some Spreadshirt employees in the social media marketing department support the community with blogs about relevant topics (e.g. fashion trends).

2.3.4 Social CRM Infrastructure Spreadshirt features a technological infrastructure that has grown alongside the shop solution. It is based on many applications that were developed or adapted in-house. This comprises the entire front-end for shops and the marketplace as well as the content management system (CMS) and customized open-source solutions (e.g. the Pentaho Suite for business intelligence analysis). The forum itself is supported by a modified WoltLab Burning Board system and the blog by the software Wordpress, which allows to manage several blogs via one solution. In the field of services, Xtramind and a wiki are used. The CRM system consists of a proprietary administrative interface and is complemented by the social media management and analytics tool CoTweet. For example, CoTweet saves the contact history for important social media, while the CRM systems hosts the customer profiles. In addition, task- or social media-specific systems, such as the analytics features of Facebook or Omniture/Adobe Analytics for website tracking, are used. Social media monitoring itself is based on keyword-based search requests. For example, Spreadshirt filters Twitter postings with the hashtag Spreadshirt (#spreadshirt) and answers these, if necessary. Monitoring of the blog, the forum, and of Facebook is done directly by the employees. Overall, the infrastructure allows for a simple monitoring and direct interaction in all CRM core processes. As it consists of several isolated solutions, there are limitations when it comes to process integration and automation. At the same time, closing the manual gaps would also require more financial investments in the technological Social CRM infrastructure.

44

2.4

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Deutsche Telekom

2.4.1 Company Deutsche Telekom AG (DT) is a worldwide leading telecommunications company and a subsidiary of Telekom AG, which serves private and business customers in Germany. The product portfolio comprises fixed-line and mobile telephony as well as internet and media services, such as DSL and IPTV. At the end of 2018, Telekom AG operated 27.9 m landlines, 20.2 m broadband connections, and served 178 m mobile telephony users (based on Deutsche Telekom 2019, p. 2). By now, DT has accumulated several years of experience in social media and has established a dedicated organizational unit called the “Social media service center”.

2.4.2 Use of Social Media DT applies social media in various areas. Within human resources, social media primarily serve recruitment purposes, while corporate communications and marketing aim to strengthen public relations, the brand image and the distribution of corporate or product-related information. DT is present on internal as well as on external platforms: – Owned social media (internal). DT operates a wiki, a blog platform, and a social network called “Telekom social network” based on Jive. In 2015, more than 100,000 users worldwide were registered with these internal social media. An open area exists for all employees as well as closed areas for individuals or project groups. – Owned social media (external restricted). DT hosts several platforms. For example, the “Telekom_hilft!” (“Telekom helps!” in English) community (1.22 m users in 7/19) represents a broad knowledge base with more than 3.1 m (as of 7/19) postings on various topics. A service forum targets technically interested customers, and the feedback community addresses regular customers and covers rather general questions. In the “Telekom-helps!” forum, customers may ask questions, discuss topics, or follow the service blog. DT also provides a dedicated area for business customers and a service blog serves more complex topics (e.g. setup of specific routers), which employees cannot easily answer on Twitter or Facebook themselves. Other DT blogs disseminate news about employees or career opportunities, which may subsequently be commented on by blog users. Finally, direct contact to DT employees is possible on several web pages via chat or video functions. – Hosted social media (external open). DT operates several channels on external social media platforms. With about 73,700 followers for the generic DT presence and about 62,200 for the “Telekom_hilft!” Twitter presence (7/19), Twitter is mainly used for marketing, service and human resources purposes. Telekom

2.4 Deutsche Telekom

45

Service channel for customer service issues Press releases and news related to investor relations

Channel with current job offerings

News from the DT foundation

News from DT innovation labs

Fig. 2.17 Overview on DT Twitter channels (Deutsche Telekom 2014)

editors share content on corporate communications, investor relations, or the Telekom Laboratories via this channel (see Fig. 2.17). On Google Places, DT publishes information on the location of Telekom shops (e.g. address, map, opening hours, see Fig. 2.18 left). In addition, DT aims to increase the reach and the visibility of content and messages concerning the brand on several YouTube channel. Among the examples are the channel “Telekom erleben” (“Experience Telekom” in English) with some 69,722 subscribers and almost 40 m views (7/19) that presents brand related information or “TelekomHilfeVideos” with 7,930 subscribers and 2,57 m views (7/19), which offers service related information and is linked to the support hotlines and forums. – Hosted social media (external restricted). At the beginning of 2019, DT had more than 98,873 fans on Facebook and different profiles for marketing, services, and human resources marketing (e.g. the profile “Telekom-helps!” with 114,153

46

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Fig. 2.18 Example of a Telekom shop on Google Places (left) and of “Borders were yesterday” as a topic of the campaign “Life’s for sharing” on Flickr (right)

fans for an interactive service or “Experience Telekom” with 399,136 fans). DT is also active on Flickr, for example with the groups “Life’s for sharing”, “The world’s longest love-letter”, “Passion for football” or “Borders were yesterday” where users interact with the brand by sharing images (see Fig. 2.18 right). Furthermore, DT shops are registered in location-based services, such as Foursquare, Google or Facebook places (see Fig. 2.18 left). Instagram, however, is currently only of little relevance for DT due to shortcomings in presenting a coherent corporate imagery.

2.4 Deutsche Telekom

47

2.4.3 Social CRM Application The various social media platforms used by DT support all core Social CRM processes. In marketing this applies to spreading information about DT and its brand across social media, to increase brand awareness and to conduct campaigns. For example, a larger marketing campaign (e.g. “Telekom, life’s for sharing”) may include a central campaign landing page, which links individual content on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In addition, photographers may exchange and discuss images concerning the topics on Flickr. Campaign management in social media is currently only partially supported by software and often supplements campaigns on other channels, such as TV or print. The structure and interests of followers are periodically analyzed with the BuzzRank tool. In sales, DT applies social media mainly for supporting their physical shops: – Sales support (SP2.0). While a direct selling of new contracts on Facebook or Twitter is difficult due the complexity of the underlying sales process, employees support the process by forwarding sales-related questions to the responsible organizational unit (e.g. a branch office) or by recommending products or services via social media. – Shop support (SP2.0). DT uses Facebook places and Foursquare to make (physical) Telekom shops public on the internet. On the one hand, customers may check into these shops via their mobiles or via PCs in the shop (see Fig. 2.19 right). On the other, the shops’ Facebook presence (facebook.com/telekomshop) includes links to current offers, products, and news, thus acting like an additional virtual shop window. – Offer management (SP2.0 and SP1.1). DT conducts sales campaigns on Facebook (“Facebook events”, “competitions”), for example, customers were able to obtain a used smartphone with a contract for €1 within the “iPhone refurbished” action (see Fig. 2.19 left). Furthermore, DT uses so-called “dark postings” (Facebook messages that are published, but do not appear on the timeline of the source) for offerings. This way, the sending Facebook page is not crowded with advertisements and users may still comment on it.

Special offer related with a new iPhone

Special offers of loca DT stores

Fig. 2.19 Offer for refurbished iPhones (left) and flagship store on Facebook places with campaigns (right)

48

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

In view of DT’s large customer base, DT is interested in efficient and high quality service processes, which allow to quickly detect problems and to react rapidly in order to avoid (negative) viral effects. At the same time, DT pursues a multi-channel approach that enables customers to choose their preferred channel, including social media. Social media are constantly monitored by the so-called A(lert) team and is based on a semantic vocabulary of approx. 5,000 lines in order to accurately identify DT-related topics. The team analyzes service-related phrases (e.g. “does not work”, “offline”) together with brand-related terms (e.g. “Telekom”, “dtag”) in more than 500,000 sources. Two main use cases are reported in the service area: – Product and service enquiries (SP3.1). If customers report questions or problems via social media, an employee reacts and aims to solve the problem directly. In case the issue cannot be solved, a service ticket may be created to forward the enquiry to the regular support team. In addition, “Telekom-helps!” provides a centralized and moderated platform where customers may search for solutions or post enquires that may be answered by the community (e.g. Fig. 2.20). Since the entire thread is public, the solution is also documented for other customers. As long as these service interactions are on social media platforms, they require no further private information (e.g. a phone number or an email address). If a problem is more complex, personal details are required and/or bilateral communication is required, the messaging function on Facebook may be used as well as email or video chats. DT also experiments with video chats, since face-to-face interactions promise benefits in creating trust and familiarity. – Proactive support (SP3.1). Contrary to passive dialogues where customers approach DT with their requests, active dialogues mean that DT employees investigate the social web to identify customer complaints and aim to solve these before they go viral. An example is the case of the group “TOD - Telekom Opfer Deutschland” (in English: “Telekom victims Germany” whereby “Tod” is the

Reply from Telekom about the conditions

Customer questions about the extension of his contract

Fig. 2.20 Customer interaction on Twitter at DT

2.4 Deutsche Telekom

49

German word for death). Employees also create postings or videos on frequent and urgent enquiries (“hot topics”) proactively to avoid viral effects and to generate positive feedback for DT services. For such ad hoc and timely issues, the distribution of videos via social media platforms has turned out to be particularly helpful. DT aims to create professional videos (e.g. in terms of illumination and content editing) within four hours to evoke more attention, to increase the reach within the affected customers and to positively influence the entire related communication. The production costs of these videos are considered rather small in view of the high number of potential service requests that otherwise would have to be dealt with individually. Finally, social media are reported to contribute to cross-functional processes at DT as follows: – Support of product development and introduction (SP4.0). DT conducts social media analyses related to products or specific topics (e.g. “hybrid routers”) to obtain sentiments from the market that promise to be helpful in the product development process. In the same vein, topics with a potential negative connotation are analyzed. Insights from this analysis are used as an early warning system or as a “seismograph” to anticipate critical issues and to prepare appropriate countermeasures. – Topic management (SP4.0). Topics that are communicated more frequently on DT’s own channels are triggers for more detailed analyses (e.g. sentiments or opinions), which are also included in reports for (top) management. For example, the analysis of critical discussions about the topic of motion-logic (i.e. the use of partial profile data for optimization) in local public transportation has prompted management to further investigate the topic before starting a potential service. – Community support (SP4.0). The community not only allows customers to directly interact with DT employees, but also enables customers to support each other via the commentary function. DT employees recognize and support active members of the community, which helps to create a loyal and proactive base of followers that might again support DT in critical communications. In addition, DT actively searches and answers questions on external (hosted) platforms. Important communities are linked directly to the “Telekom-helps!” team. For example, the consumer protection web page ReclaBox forwards respective complaints to DT.

2.4.4 Social CRM Infrastructure Employees in the “Social media service center” use a standard DT workplace, which comprises tools, such as email and office applications, but also social media-specific software. Among these tools are the business version of CoTweet, BIG for the administration of social media activities on Facebook and Twitter as

50

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

well as Omniture (part of Adobe Analytics) for website usage tracking and the visualization of online customer movements. In addition, DT’s social media agents use open-source tools, such as Google Alerts for monitoring keywords, LivePerson as chat software, and Buzzrank to follow social media campaigns and to analyze reach, keywords and sentiments. DT implemented the software Lithium for the “Telekom-helps!” community and Jive for the internal community. The digital presence of DT stores on Facebook or Foursquare is managed through the web interfaces of these social media platforms, meaning that customer data on these platforms remains with the respective providers. As of 2016, the social media tools are not linked with DT’s CRM systems, but the company recognizes a need to integrate both. In a first step, DT aims to provide “Telekom-helps!” employees with relevant customer information and to enable them in conducting entire dialogues within the social channel. For this purpose, social media agents may already access the back-end and front-end systems to manually enter service tickets or offer enquiries. Today, the social media-specific software features partial CRM functions. For example, employees use the BIG system for maintaining a history of service interactions.

2.5

Case Comparison

Following to the introductory chapter, which recognized social media as a technological potential for CRM, the four cases illustrated how four different companies used this technology in their customer-facing processes. The cases show that Social CRM is not a uniform concept, but rather broad in nature with many design options. In particular, the cases differ regarding the organization of social media activities, the support of core CRM processes as well as the use of social media platforms and tools (see Table 2.2). First, the introduction and operation of Social CRM requires organizational structures that define the responsibility for these activities within the entire organization. Although Dell and DT are considerably larger than Cyberport and Spreadshirt, all four companies concentrated their social media skills in dedicated organizational units and initiated qualification programs. Differences may be observed in the extent of these programs and in the degree of decentralization. While a centralized unit is considered important for coordinating and overseeing the introduction as well as the operation of all corporate social media activities, addressing a broad customer base via social media calls for decentralization. For example, Dell established a centralized coordination entity (the “Social listening command center”) and empowers as many employees in their organizational units as possible for social media. This not only enables them to represent the company in social media, but also safeguards timely reactions that are close to the

2.5 Case Comparison

51

Table 2.2 Evaluation of case studies Criteria Company Indicators – Year of foundation and headquarters – Employees (approx., fiscal year) – Turnover Social CRM organization

Cyberport

Dell

Spreadshirt

Deutsche Telekom

1998, Dresden, Germany 640 €673 m (2016)

1984, Round Rock, U.S. 157,000 €90.62 bn (2019)

2002, Leipzig, Germany 750 €110 m (2018)

1995, Bonn, Germany 215,675 €75.7 bn (2018)

Centralized social marketing department connected to specialized departments

Centralized department connected to a call center for social media

●/● ◑/●/●

●/● ◑/●/●

Forums, blogs, social networks

Forums, social networks, microblogs

◑

◑

◑

◑

◑

◑

●

●

●

●

◑

●

Centralized Centralized program social media for employee’s department qualification and connected to centralized specialized command centers departments Social media presences Owned/hosted ◑/● ●/● ●/●/● Internal/open/- ○/●/● restricted Emphasis Social Own platforms, networks, microblogs microblogs, blogs Supported core CRM sub-processes ● ◑ Campaign management (SP1.0) ◑ ● Lead management (SP1.1) ◑ ◑ Offer management (SP2.0) ◑ ● Feedback management (SP3.0) ◑ ● Service management (SP3.1) Complaint ◑ ● management (SP3.2)

(continued)

52

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

Table 2.2 (continued) Criteria

Cyberport

Dell

Cross-functional processes (SP4.0) – Brand ◑ ● management – Community ◑ ● management – Event/alert ◑ ● management ○ ● – Innovation management ○ ◑ – Market research – Product ◑ ● management ◑ – Support for ○ decisions Technological support Utilization of ● ◑ functionalities of social media platforms In-house ○ ● developed solutions ● Specialized ◑ software Radian6/Salesforce, Google (examples) Analytics, Google Alerts, groupware Social Bakers, Strategic Oxygen, Sprinklr

Integration between systems

Manually by Via system employees and functions and groupware in-house developed solutions

Spreadshirt

Deutsche Telekom

●

●

●

●

◑

●

●

◑

◑

◑

●

●

○

●

●

◑

●

○

◑ Pentaho Suite, Co-Tweet, Social Mention, Omniture, WoltLab, Wordpress, Xtramind Manually by employees and groupware

● Co-Tweet, BIG, Google Alerts, Jive, Buzzrank, LivePerson, Omniture, Lithium

Via system functions and manually by employees and groupware

Legend: strong ●, partial ◑, marginal ○ coverage of criteria

units that have customer contact. Likewise, Spreadshirt has created a small team and intends to gradually qualify many individuals in the organizations with the knowledge to create blog entries and to answer difficult enquiries.

2.5 Case Comparison

53

Regarding the support of CRM core processes, the case studies featured use cases in all CRM processes with an emphasis on the fields of marketing and services: – In marketing, the three dominant use cases are market research, campaign management and lead management. The possibility to directly contact customers enhances traditional market research with an additional means for analyzing individual needs and for recognizing trends and niche markets. Regarding the execution of campaigns, social media not only allow to directly address fans or followers, but also to continuously monitor campaign success (e.g. via the number of likes or shares). This way, companies may even react to unexpected developments during a campaign. Dell and DT demonstrate that marketing campaigns may also benefit from a combining social media with other channels (e.g. events, TV). To generate contacts in lead management, social media may stimulate and create buying intentions. These can be selective offers via Twitter or Facebook, as in the case of Dell and Cyberport, which draw the attention to offerings and encourage first purchases or redirect users from the social web to the EC shops. – In sales, the primary use case is the conversion of leads into orders. Social media allow to contact leads with targeted postings and to generate sales opportunities from enquiries or interactions. For example, Dell customers may post product-related questions via social media, which are then forwarded to employees in the sales department for further advice. In addition, campaigns, such as “Black Friday” at Cyberport or offerings from the Dell Outlet, may generate increased sales and/or attract new customers from niche markets. A second use case are sales apps as illustrated in the Spreadshirt case. Users may sell products via these apps in their own social media presences (e.g. on Facebook) and extent a company’s market reach. As in the marketing area, measuring the sales activities allows for an improved monitoring of the user actions in terms of “customer journeys” (e.g. offers via Twitter with link to the web shop or the redistribution to friends on Facebook), which helps to complete profile information. – In service, the use cases focus on directly answering enquiries (see Dell and DT), on proactively reaching out to customers with service issues (see DT) and on allowing users to answer requests themselves or among themselves. In addition, social media are helpful in recognizing and treating complaints. If users provide feedback via social media, businesses have the opportunity to handle them systematically in workflows (e.g. via service tickets). The cases emphasize that this contributes to avoid escalation and to positively influence the brand image. A third use case besides self-service and complaint management is feedback management: Social media encourage users to share their opinions about products, services, brands or companies either directly or indirectly with references (e.g. hashtags, links to profiles in channels of Cyberport), thus enabling companies to obtain detailed feedback. In addition, surveys or idea contests are used by Dell and Spreadshirt to tap the creativity potential in the social web. For

54

2 Social CRM: Four Case Studies

example, users may discuss product improvements in the community with the company or even contribute to the design of products. All cases also featured use cases in the domain of cross-functional processes. Similar to marketing and service, innovation management may obtain insights into market needs and product ratings. Product innovations may be realized directly with customers as mentioned in the feedback management use case. For example, DT and Spreadshirt apply social media analytics to deduce market trends or opinions. Another contribution may be observed for cross-functional processes, such as community management and brand management. If companies achieve to maintain an active community, a closer link to the company and the brand are more likely. This might lead users to be supportive and active, for example by sharing content (e.g. reviews, links). Finally, Spreadshirt and DT illustrate the possible applications to recognize incidents early. Regarding the social media platforms, all cases show a mix of platforms. This allows to address broader audiences, to leverage the specific functional orientation of the respective platforms and to maximize the ownership of data (see Sect. 4.4). The layered system approach as applied by Spreadshirt illustrates that not only the purpose of each platform should be formulated (e.g. hosted external open platforms serve to attract potential customers and owned platforms to establish closer customer relationships), but also the transitions between the presences (e.g. initial interaction on externally hosted open platforms and more in-depth questions involving sensitive customer information on owned platforms). On the technical side, open-source tools have proved to be popular and easy to use, but commercial software involving financial investments was found with growing breadth and maturity of social media use: While the two smaller-size companies primarily relied on open-source products and invested for specific functions only, the two larger case companies had professional tools in use that were complemented with open-source tools for specific purposes only. For example, Spreadshirt decided to purchase tools for analytics and management, but relied on open-source tools in other areas. Aside from the Dell case, most tools were only little integrated and additional tools were used for specific tasks or to represent social media activities in other systems even at Dell. Priority was rather on a semi-automated analysis of social media and an integration among the tools was regarded a future necessity. Overall, the cases Cyberport and Spreadshirt showed a first step of maturity in their Social CRM activities. DT and Dell, however, showed more differentiated organizational structures and the application of advanced analytical instruments. Dell qualifies as the most mature of all four cases due to an advanced integration of the technological infrastructure and the extensive organizational measures undertaken.

References

55

References Costello, K. (2019). Quarter of 2019: CPU supply constraints are strengthening top vendors’ positions. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190410005846/en/Gartner-WorldwidePC-Shipments-Declined-4.6-Percent. Retrieved July 15, 2019. Dell (2015). Global social media policy. http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/corpcomm/ social-media-policy. Retrieved November 11, 2015. Deutsche Telekom. (2014). Social Media Weltweit [Social media worldwide]. https://www. telekom.com/socialmedia. Retrieved December 14, 2014. Deutsche Telekom. (2019). Annual report 2018. http://bericht.telekom.com/geschaeftsbericht2018/serviceseiten/downloads/files/entire_dtag_gb18.pdf. Retrieved July 15, 2019. Gupta, M. (2013). Social net advocacy (SNA) demo tour. http://de.slideshare.net/dellsocialmedia/ social-net-advocacy-pulse-demo-tour. Retrieved August 8, 2015. Heiss, A. (2014). Dell social training & activation global lead. http://de.slideshare.net/ dellsocialmedia/unleashing-the-power-of-employee-advocates. Retrieved August 8, 2015. Mathisen, G. (2013). Social media governance, tools and employee certification. http://de. slideshare.net/dellsocialmedia/social-media-governance-tools-and-employeecertification16694385. Retrieved August 8, 2015. Mslgroup. (2012). Case study: How Dell sold 3,887 PCs on Renren. http://blog.mslgroup.com/ case-study-how-dell-sold-3887-pcs-on-renren/. Retrieved November 11, 2015. Sayers, A. (2011). BMW uses Dell streak and BMW mini to launch car sharing product. http://en. community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2011/03/31/bmwuses-dellstreak-and-bmw-mini-to-launch-car-sharing-product. Retrieved May 6, 2013. Sirur, D. (2012). Dell launches Pinterest page to share pinteresting content curated across time and the web. http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/direct2dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2012/ 07/19/dell-launches-pinterest-page-to-share-pinteresting-content-curatedacross-time-and-theweb.aspx. Retrieved December 18, 2012. Versteeg, S. (2013). How Dell became a social company. http://de.slideshare.net/projectmanagement_ bbp/nccc-presentatie-simone-versteeg. Retrieved August 8, 2015.

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

The idea of Social CRM is to achieve an improved support of marketing, sales and service processes by means of social media. As illustrated by the four case studies in the previous chapter, multiple use cases are possible and companies may embark on Social CRM with simple IT tools already. In a first step, many businesses often use the analytics and interaction functionalities from the individual social media platforms. However, these functionalities remain limited to the respective platform (e.g. Facebook offers evaluations only for Facebook presences) and frequently offer little scope for customization. Although businesses may obtain first insights and establish contact with social communities, relying on platform functionalities for Social CRM involves a considerable amount of manual work, which may be reduced by extracting data from social media platforms via API’s (see Sect. 1.2) and by importing this data via electronic interfaces into dedicated application systems. An application system (AS) or “tool” is software whose program logic serves a specific task and runs on a specific hardware. As shown in Table 3.1, there is not one single application system that covers Social CRM. Instead, several types of application systems may be relevant for Social CRM: – The first category originates from the already mature world of enterprise systems and comprises “Business Intelligence” and CRM systems, which often include a broad range of functionalities. CRM systems are of particular relevance for Social CRM since they contain information about customers (e.g. customer profiles, value, history on enquiries, purchases, campaigns, complaints) and provide functionalities for operational as well as analytical CRM processes. Frequently, they are linked to corporate back-end systems (e.g. enterprise resource planning, ERP) to synchronize master (e.g. articles, customers) and transaction data. – The second category is younger in nature and has emerged along with social media. Their functionality is often more focused, but has received many enhancements in recent years. Among the representatives are systems for managing presences on various social media platforms (“Social media management”) and the © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3_3

57

58

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Table 3.1 Application systems for Social CRM (following Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290) Type of Social CRM application system

Functional description

Examples of systems (for functional category see Fig. 1.6)

Business intelligence (BI)

Consolidating and visualizing of SAS (2), Microstrategy (2), operational data for decision-making. QlikView (2) Due to the focus on structured data, analyses of keywords or product mentions in postings, may be analyzed with BI tools Creation and administration of Community Lithium technologies (1;2;3;5), communities or forums, e.g. to plan management GetSatisfaction (1;3;5), Jive (1;3;4;5) and track activities on multiple social media platforms CRM system Support of core operative CRM Salesforce CRM (2;3;4;5), processes to obtain an overall view on Microsoft CRM (2;3;4;5) customer activities. Social media are considered as additional interaction channel that needs to be aligned with other channels Administration of profiles and Social media Falcon Social (1;2;3;5), CoTweet management distribution of content on multiple (2;3); Sprout Social (2;4;5), RD platforms (e.g. sharing of postings on Station (2;3;4;5) various platforms) Social media Evaluation of pre-defined public and Viralheat (2;3;5), Synthesio (2;3), monitoring restricted social content (UGC) by BIG (2,3,4,5) Overtone (2;5), topics, opinions/trends, sentiments or Sysomos (2;5), Gigya (2;3;5), user activity (e.g. opinion leader or Omniture/Adobe Analytics (2;3;5), “influencers”) Earshot (2;3;5) Social network Tracking of authors on several social KXEN (2), Bottlenose (2), Network media platforms to provide analysis insights (2) evaluations on relationships among authors, authors and topics as well as effect of single contents on discussions Social search Search of blogs via keywords or topics Social mention (2) and navigation through social web postings and identification of relevant content Caption refers to the Social CRM elements: 1 = social media; 2 = analytics; 3 = interaction; 4 = customer relationship management; 5 = management

administration of communities (“Community management”) as well as for analyzing and visualizing social media content (“Social media monitoring”, see Table 1.2). Widely used analytics are statistic evaluations, e.g. on the number of followers, likes, frequency of words, as well as semantic analyses, such as the interpretation of statements, opinions, sentiments (see Fig. 1.6). Further dedicated systems focus on the analysis of relationships in the social networks (“Social network analysis (SNA)”) and the search of social content (“Social search”).

3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems

3.1

59

Examples of Social CRM Application Systems

This chapter presents four application systems that emerged in recent years. They illustrate how tool providers combine functionalities related to the five elements of the Social CRM process architecture model (see Fig. 1.6) and may be considered as typical examples of architectures, scopes and functionalities of Social CRM application systems (see Table 1.5). Their evolution illustrates the development of the Social CRM tool market regarding the extension of the functional scope, the bundling of tools with service offerings as well as the merging of previously independent and specialized tools into single integrated suites. Viralheat/Cision provides an example of a tool with a strong focus on analytics and basic functions for management and integration. RD Station is an example for tools with focus on functions that stimulate sales-related interaction and the creation of customers for CRM. Falcon Social provides an example for tools with a strong focus on management and interaction from the perspective of communication flows. Finally, Microsoft CRM represents tools that emphasize the integration with CRM functionalities.

3.1.1 Viralheat/Cision Founded in 2009, Viralheat emerged as a cloud-based solution for social media management. As of 2015, Viralheat had more than 100,000 user accounts and offered predefined interfaces to a number of established tools. These comprised application systems for CRM (e.g. Salesforce, Marketo, SugarCRM), web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics, Omniture) as well as for customer support (e.g. Zendesk, Desk.com) and HR (e.g. Glassdoor). Viralheat allows the analysis of UGC from an own free accessible account, which authorizes the management of multiple social media presences, the interaction with users via different platforms and the establishment of workflows across these platforms (see Table 3.2). It builds upon an own database, which includes data that is collected from own and from public presences through APIs. The tool also includes social media monitoring functionalities with dedicated functionalities for semantic analyses. These are based on the Viralheat semantic analytic algorithm “Sentiment and Human Intent Technology”, which uses metadata, posting characteristics and other data to initially identify and categorize potential customers or influencers. In 2017, Viralheat was fully integrated into Cision to extend their capabilities in social media management and intelligence with publishing, engagement, monitoring and analytics functionalities. Cision provides an integrated platform for communication across online and print channels. The Cision Communications Cloud has four major modules: a database module for assessing relevant media and influencers, a distribution module for managing the distribution process, a monitoring module for analyzing conversations across channels and analytics for measuring the impact of postings.

60

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Table 3.2 Functionalities of Viralheat/Cision Social CRM element

Main functionalities

Social media

– Integration of popular social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Wordpress, Foursquare, Glassdoor, Yelp, as well as blogs, news, review web pages, forums and video platforms (via RSS) – Translation of postings (via Google Translator) and identification of more than 180 languages – Continuous listening and monitoring of stored search queries – Ad hoc real-time searches based on keywords – Data cleaning, enrichment and standardization for use in dashboards and workflows – Analysis of accounts and keywords via topic profiles – Sentiment analysis (e.g. positive statements) – Identification of interests (e.g. lead status) and influencers (e.g. reach) – Standardized reports and analyses of selected platforms – Generation of Excel and PDF reports – Archiving of postings – Publishing (scheduling and bulk publishing dependent on the time zone) – Direct responses in real-time (e.g. Twitter reply) – Supportive tools, such as link shorteners, smart streams, browser plug-ins and link previews – Support of teams and single workspaces – Depiction of workflow approvals – API for external services – Login via social channels (Facebook login) – Integration of additional systems, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Desk.com, SugarCRM, Omniture, Google analytics

Analytics 1. Monitoring and listening 2. Analysis, reporting and data storage

Interaction (publishing and engagement)

Management and integration functions (workflow/compliance)

CRM and back-end systems

Typical use cases of Viralheat/Cision are found in the field of marketing with the execution and monitoring of cross-platform social media campaigns and cross-platform reactions to external postings. The integration in Cision provides users with the opportunity to analyze and interact via online and print media in a single environment. It also yields access to a large database of relevant channels and influencers as well as access to networks and platforms for the distribution of content.

3.1.2 RD Station Founded in 2011, Resultados Digitais (RD) is an online marketing company from Florianópolis (Santa Catarina, Brazil). With 1,500 employees, the company serves 1500 partner agencies and over 12,000 clients from different areas such as EC,

3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems

61

education, research, real-estate industry, technology, and communication. The agency supports small and medium-sized companies, as well as major enterprises, in understanding and exploiting the benefits of online marketing. RD developed the cloud-based application system, called RD Station, which comprises a software solution for online marketing management with four major features: – Digital inbound marketing to support the generation and qualification of leads from different sources, – Administration of digital inbound marketing activities through landing pages, marketing automation, lead tracking, and lead scoring, – Support of content management with posting schedule strategies, scheduling of publications, previewing posts, or to create a presence on social networks, and – Integration with Google Search Engine Optimization to attract prospective customers to a website without spending money on advertisings. The feature also indicates the action a user may take to rank a page in top positions. The main use case for RD Station is in lead management and aims at motivating qualified leads towards a purchase decision. Another important use case is lead scoring, which adds a score stating the possibility for a lead to purchase a product or service. The calculation of the score combines different pieces of data, such as profile data and interests of the contact. RD Station generates a ranking of the most interesting leads for further processing and prioritization, thus increasing the efficiency of sales teams. In addition, it provides different APIs for the integration of external services. Most functionalities of RD Station focus on inbound marketing, which aims at attracting customers to products and services via content marketing, social media posting, SEO and others (see Table 3.3). RD Station supports user in overseeing discussions on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Different prepared templates serve to create a campaign with content and associated landing pages for different topics as well as channels to attract leads. Additionally, data like interest, age, gender, occupation is available for campaign and lead segmentation. This ensures that a lead only sees the information that is fitting to their individual needs and requests, as well as that each step and exchanged information is tracked. Additionally, RD Station automatically assigns lead levels based on a leads activities on the website or the social media platform. The scoring of a lead is based on the observed interest in products and services and increased by specific actions of the customer or by the marketing department. Based on the scoring the level is assigned and actions are performed that can also be automated. Once a lead reached the A-level (high purchasing chance), the lead will be transferred to the sales department. In addition, RD Station contains an integrated function for SEO on Google. Users receive insights about the performance of websites related to relevant keywords. For measuring the effectiveness of keywords, the function provides specific page reports. These reports identify irrelevant or less effective keywords to optimize the Google rank.

62

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Table 3.3 Functionalities of RD Station Social CRM element

Main functionalities

Social media

– Integration of different social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – SEO (e.g. Google rank, keyword index, keyword effectiveness) via an integrated function to get insights about the performance of a website – Measuring of source and traffic arising – Lead tracking captures the interactions of a lead with the company, landing page and email campaign – Lead scoring assigns a score to a lead according to his/her profile and his/her interaction with a page and content – Publishing and scheduling of social media postings and blog entries – Customized landing pages and lead generation to get a visitors’ contact by making marketing offers and content available – E-mail marketing campaigns with an editor, multiple templates and targeting possibilities – Report system for every inbound marketing activity to plan future campaigns and obtain better results (e.g. click rates and received emails) – Keyword performance reports and page reports – Connection to a separate existing CRM system – Integration with other systems via API (e.g. to CRM system) – Basic CRM functionalities for lead management (lead profile, lead score)

Analytics

Interaction

Management and integration functions

CRM and back-end systems

RD station is a marketing-oriented Social CRM tool. It enables companies to structure the creation and qualification of leads from the anonymous market (see Fig. 1.5) in Social CRM by closely linking these activities with sales and service processes as well as the available resources. Businesses may use the system for establishing a lead and sales qualification workflow for Social CRM.

3.1.3 Falcon Social Founded in 2010, Falcon IO offers Falcon Social, a cloud-based solution that offers functionalities for monitoring, publishing and evaluating UGC in larger teams. It comprises a database that contains more than 4.5 m datasets (e.g. postings, likes) from publicly accessible social media platforms. In early 2019, Cision acquired Falcon IO and has started to integrate the tool into their communication cloud solution. The core functionalities of Falcon Social comprise five modules (see Table 3.4): – Listen module: Since the large database of UGC not necessarily includes company- and/or brand-specific postings, the listen module allows creating interactive

3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems

63

Table 3.4 Functionalities of Falcon Social Social CRM element

Main functionalities

Social media

– Integration with popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and LinkedIn – Enrich information with additional information, such as on sentiments or influencers – Analysis of content via keywords and individual “listen projects”, i.e. a set (“bag”) of keywords – Functionalities for data mining – Publish (content editor, publishing calendar, approval process, content pool, URL shortener) – Engage (news feed, response templates, prioritized inbox, spam detection, bulk actions) – Build (templates for Facebook apps, customizing functions for apps/branding, embedding of media content, compatibility with mobile devices, monitoring of Facebook apps) – Pre-defined metrics to create reports (e.g. sentiment indicators, benchmarking, influencer score, analyses across several platforms) – Management functions to support community managers and social media teams (e.g. in workflows) in defining user roles, managing rights, releasing workflows, assigning tasks, and in tracking changes made by users – Falcon Social provides interfaces with existing application systems (e.g. Zendesk, Salesforce) and a API for accessing relevant information (e.g. user, organization, channels, teams, content, etc.) from other systems

Analytics

Interaction

Management and integration functions

CRM and back-end systems

lists for different marketing projects. For example, discussions about the brand or products may be monitored regarding possible customer enquiries or contact points for marketing. The results are presented in live-streams, which may be enhanced by sentiment indicators (see Sect. 3.2.2) and customized via configurable filters. – Publishing module: This module is designed to create and publish content on social media platforms. For example, the social media calendar (see Fig. 3.14) shows a summary of planned and past postings on various social media platforms. A content editor supports the shortening of URLs links (“URL shortener”) and stores postings for reuse (“content pool”). – Engage module: This function serves to track and manage conversations. The aim is to support community managers and social media teams to distribute and prioritize tasks. So-called engagement templates include data on how to proceed with customer contacts (i.e. leads, opportunities) and help to structure interactions as well as to automate workflows. – Measure module: Functionalities for comparing results against calculated benchmarks, the scoring of influencers, and the creation of reports support the

64

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

evaluation and monitoring of activities on social media platforms as well as analyses across platforms. – Build module: This module enables the creation of Facebook apps via a so-called Facebook app builder. Facebook applications may be configured in a “drag & drop” fashion for web and mobile devices. Typically, a social media coordinator configures the modules and the workflows for community managers, social media managers, or marketing managers. While these managers often use all functionalities, employees in sales, marketing, customer services, and HR require only a functional subset and mainly monitor content, identify new contacts or manage critical situations. Typical tasks of Falcon Social are to: – manage and to evaluate social media campaigns in social media marketing, – provide workflows and templates for automating answers to customer enquiries, and to – identify leads via keyword searches and to directly follow-up on them via predefined workflows. Falcon Social sees the future in integrated systems, which are intuitively to use (Garratt 2014). In contrast to traditional CRM providers (see examples in Table 3.1), Falcon Social has a strong basis in social media analytics functionalities as well as some basic CRM functions.

3.1.4 Microsoft CRM Microsoft CRM is a cloud-based CRM system with Social CRM functionalities that may be implemented as separate solution (“standalone”) as well as in connection with other tools in Microsoft Dynamics 365 portfolio. With its release in April 2015, it became possible to use either the Social Engagement portal or the integrated solution within the Microsoft Dynamics suite (Dynamics Marketing). The portal allows to observe current interactions on Facebook and Twitter channels and to directly communicate with social media users. In addition, multilingual analytical functionalities for analyzing structured and unstructured data in real-time are available, including data mining and advanced natural language processing functionalities. The solutions distinguish three core functionalities: social listening, social engagement, and Social CRM (see Table 3.5). Social listening allows to monitor social media platforms based on keywords definitions, while social analytics evaluates sentiments and the number of mentioned keywords to detect trends. The results may be filtered by region and a notification function generates alerts in case of unexpected sentiment developments or frequently mentioned keywords. Likewise, single news may be filtered out and opinion leaders (“influencers”) be identified. Social engagement enables users to conduct actions, such as to react on a

3.1 Examples of Social CRM Application Systems

65

Table 3.5 Functionalities of Microsoft CRM Social CRM element

Main functionalities

Social media

– Integration with popular social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, news portals, blogs and video portals – Definition of search topics and search terms with inclusions (e.g. different spelling of terms) and exclusions – Categorization of search topics – Sentiment analyses on the level of search terms, drilling-down to related postings (based on natural language processing and machine learning) – Analysis of categories, search terms, drilling-down to related postings (e.g. regarding number, trend, language, location, source, share of voice) – Definition of alert function (e.g. strong negative trend) – Portal to interact directly with social network users – Definition of filters for displaying relevant postings on the social engagement portal that need a response – Definition and sharing of posting streams for specific users and teams – Definition of rule-based responses (e.g. for certain users and groups) – Rights management – Workflow management – Alert function for different search topics – Conversion of social entries into leads, sales opportunities or service tickets – Integration into Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Tracking of social entries within Dynamics CRM – Display of relevant analytical results via widgets on dashboards and objects

Analytics 1. Social listening 2. Social analytics

Interaction (social engagement)

Management and integration functions

CRM and back-end systems

tweet or to directly retrieve the page of a blog. Activities identified in social engagement may be transferred to Dynamics CRM and converted into leads or service tickets. At the same time, a profile (“Social profile”) may be assigned to existing contacts in Dynamics CRM. Visualization takes place in the Dynamics Marketing environment via graphical elements (“widget”) in dashboards to track metrics on the brand image, reputation, and/or campaign success. In general, the potentials of Microsoft CRM for Social CRM are: – Analytics: The campaign dashboard helps to monitor social web activities. Users may oversee the success of campaigns and follow discussions on the brand, competitors or markets. For example, companies could identify if competitors are active within specific groups or whether product problems are affecting sentiments. Alert functions enable early reactions before opinion leaders or influencers pick up a problem and spread negative news.

66

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

– Interaction: This refers to the identification and interaction with opinion leaders. The monitoring and analysis of postings based on topics, reach and sentiment helps to discover influencers and to initiate future dialogs. For example, a first personal dialogue may take place as a reaction to a blog entry. Microsoft CRM is a standard CRM solution that has been enhanced with functionalities for Social CRM. This leads to a broad coverage of core CRM processes as well as of the CRM design areas operational, analytical, communicative and collaborative CRM. At the same time, it allows first “out of the box” integration of UGC with CRM functionalities, which may be expected to receive further enhancements in the future.

3.2

Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

While Sect. 3.1 featured four packaged systems, which evolved from different functional backgrounds, this chapter presents typical functionalities that may be used for Social CRM purposes along the five Social CRM elements (see Sect. 1.4) (see Fig. 3.1).

3.2.1 Social Media Social media platforms are the basis for corporate social media presences and Social CRM. Three fundamental functions may be listed here:

Fig. 3.1 Functionalities of Social CRM systems for the Social CRM elements

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

67

– Source selection and configuration. UGC is present on many social media platforms from which each has individual interfaces where data may automatically be extracted. In addition to APIs, crawlers, RSS as well as data aggregators or social data providers (e.g. Gnip) are often used to obtain social content. Since API definitions may change frequently, companies are faced with substantial maintenance efforts. Many systems for Social CRM therefore have preconfigured interfaces to popular platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), forums and blogs (see Fig. 3.2). Although users are often unable to change the initial selection of these platforms, they may, however, influence the selection of data and limit the results (e.g. only content from Twitter). Furthermore, it is also possible to add logins or specifications of sub-pages or access-restricted sources (e.g. company profiles in Facebook). – Query definition and content pre-filtering. After the selection of sources most tools enable to define the content that should be analyzed (e.g. via keywords as in Fig. 3.3). While simple tools rely on logic operators (“AND”, “OR”) to combine keywords and often restrict the amount of possible keywords, more comprehensive tools allow for the definition of sub-queries and stop words (e.g. to differentiate ambiguous product names) as well as the maintenance of ontologies (e.g. to assign different product names to a product group, see Sect. 4.3). The definition of queries follows a simple syntax (“keyword operator keyword”) and often uses text search engines, such as Solr. – Platform provision and operation. Aside from external social media platforms, companies often use owned presences since these provide more freedom in terms of design and control. Social CRM application systems support the hosting and provision of blogs, forums or review pages in connection with additional platform functionalities (e.g. moderation, badges, interaction management, search engine integration). These tools may be integrated with existing web pages and customized to the corporate design (see Fig. 3.4).

Fig. 3.2 Selection and configuration of specific sources (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2018)

68

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.3 Examples for query configuration (below, left) in Synthesio, content filtering (above, left) and source filtering (above, right) in Viralheat and content filtering in Earshot (below right) (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2018 and Viralheat Q4/2016, Earshot Q3/2017)

Fig. 3.4 Structure and customization of an owned community in Lithium (screenshots from www.lithium.com, www.bt.com, www.sephora.com)

3.2.2 Analytics and Monitoring The second Social CRM element focuses on extracting knowledge from UGC (see Table 1.2) and is a functionality present in many Social CRM application systems. Predefined metadata serve to identify names of authors or publishing dates and

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

69

relevant postings may be aggregated to threads or customer profiles. To meet the high variance in the choice of words, terminology, contexts and user habits, semantic technologies (see Sects. 1.5 and 4.3) contribute to automatically interpret unstructured data. The goal is to not only derive sentiments, but also the meaning of complex phrases. Meanwhile many tools evaluate captions or tags, images, video and audio data that have previously been handled as “black boxes”. Common functionalities for content analysis are: – Keyword analysis(tagging). In the simple case, keywords are pre-defined and the tools automatically annotates social media data. This automated indexing may, for example, identify certain brands (see the tags #supercar and #car in Fig. 3.5) and assign postings to certain subjects. Following specific keywords (e.g. repair, purchase) postings may be considered a sales lead or a service case. However, keyword tagging requires an exact match of the keywords and will often necessitate further manual investigation. – Opinion analysis (sentiment detection). A sentiment describes a positive, neutral or negative attitude of a posting that has been calculated on the basis of several indicators. The differentiation of positive, negative and neutral postings that is supported by many social media management and monitoring tools, yields a first orientation on how the community discusses a certain topic (see Figs. 3.6 and 3.7). A basic sentiment analysis is based on a taxonomy of keywords where each term is labelled as positive, neutral or negative. However, it remains difficult to identify more complex phrases, such as the use of irony, ambiguous opinions or contextualized statements. While this may be performed via manual evaluations or the adjustments, more complex techniques apply linguistic and semantic concepts (e.g. grammars, ontologies), thus allowing an improved automation that comes with higher efforts in defining the knowledge structures. – Relevance analysis (scoring of postings). Determining the relevance of postings is a challenging undertaking since it depends on what the user has in mind. Some systems allow for initial evaluations based on how the posting matches the terms used in the search queries (see Fig. 3.8). Other systems support the relevance rating with additional metrics (e.g. reputation of a profile) that are calculated from internal (i.e. intransparent) algorithms.

Fig. 3.5 Example of a tagged posting and a positive sentiment (screenshot from Viralheat Q4/2016)

70

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.6 Dashboard for the visualization of sentiments (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2016)

Fig. 3.7 Neutral marked posting in Synthesio (Q3/2017)

Additional analytical functionalities reveal insights into the interconnections and dependencies between postings and authors. These functionalities are also known as network analysis or “Social network analysis (SNA)” and are mainly used in market research and forecasting as well as in the planning and control of marketing activities. Two popular types of analyses are: – Link analysis. Especially more advanced analytical tools allow the evaluation of relationships between individuals and the assessment of their influence on the distribution of a posting in the social web (e.g. number of shares of a message to others through single persons) (see Fig. 3.9).

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

71

Fig. 3.8 Relevance score for postings and authors (screenshots from Synthesio Q3/2017)

Fig. 3.9 Relationship analysis between postings and authors in Bottlenose (left) and NetworkedInsights (right) (screenshots from www.bottlenose.com and www.networkedinsights.com Q2/2016)

– Context analysis. To describe authors and the sources of content more precisely, postings may be enriched with data from additional sources (e.g. social media statistics from Alexa WebMetrics, domain specific ontologies for products, people or locations) and metadata (see Fig. 3.10). Among the examples are the number of friends, activities, preferred posting topics of authors as well as the reach or influence of sources. This helps to prioritize incoming postings and to determine the best fitting social media platform for sharing content.

72

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.10 Information on reach and influence of a social media platform from Alexa WebMetrics in Synthesio (screenshots from Synthesio Q4/2016)

The analytical capabilities are complemented by functionalities for data visualization and navigation: – Dashboard visualization. To visualize their results, most tools comprise simple pre-defined and static dashboards (see Fig. 3.11). Sometimes more advanced functionalities to customize dashboards or to create individual dashboards based on templates and repositories with analytical modules. Typical modules are so-called “rivers”, which present a consolidated view on postings as bar charts, linear diagrams (e.g. number of postings from different sources, number of

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

73

Fig. 3.11 Template-based dashboard configuration in Synthesio (screenshots from Synthesio Q4/2016)

Fig. 3.12 Carlsberg marketing dashboard in Falcon Social (2015) (screenshot from www. falconsocial.com)

postings within a period of time) or tag and word clouds (e.g. collection of frequently mentioned keywords with varying font size). Configurable dashboards are helpful, when results are reported regularly to stakeholders within a company (e.g. for marketing, service). An example for a network dashboard is the marketing dashboard of the brewery Carlsberg in Fig. 3.12.

74

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.13 Data sharing function in Synthesio (screenshot from Synthesio Q2/2019)

– Insight sharing. An alternative to the visualization of insights in dashboards within a tool are the sharing of reports or relevant data in exchangeable and printable formats (e.g. PDF report, excel, shared widgets, interactive reports generated in BI tools) (see Fig. 3.13). Reports typically feature KPI’s (e.g. number of positive Mentions, number of follower interactions) and sample postings (e.g. most influential positive postings, postings from top followers), while data files contain a selection of postings for further use in other systems. Many tools offer the option to save selected results, such as postings, profiles or diagrams in separate files. They are used for communicating results of the Social CRM activities or when working with external departments that have no access to the respective systems.

3.2.3 Interaction The third element of Social CRM refers to the interaction with social web users and comprises three key functionalities: – Content scheduling. Since Social CRM strategies often use multiple social media platforms in parallel, it is not only important to extract data from various platforms, but also to efficiently distribute content across diverse platforms (e.g. long-term marketing planning, coordination of postings). For example, weekly postings may be planned and compiled along a previously defined publishing plan (see Fig. 3.13). Postings are then automatically shared on the respective platforms at the defined times. For example, an advert may be published on the company’s Facebook presence on the first day and a related story may be published the next day. Depending on the reaction of the community, an additional posting with a link on Twitter may be provided as a third step. This automation allows even small teams to conduct complex social marketing activities (see Fig. 3.14). – Activity tracking. To assess the effectiveness and reach of activities, tracking and monitoring functionalities depict the impact of postings measured in the number

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

75

Fig. 3.14 Scheduling of postings with marketing calendar in Falcon Social (screenshot from www.falconsocial.com)

Fig. 3.15 Impact analysis of postings in Synthesio (screenshot from Synthesio Q2/2019)

of reached persons for published postings or the number of mentions in other social media platforms (see Fig. 3.15). Data for these analyses are obtained via social media APIs as well as via additional analytical data from other platforms (e.g. to evaluate the reach) and the provider of the individual tools (e.g. number of links to an entry on other platforms in Viralheat/Cision). – Content enrichment and interaction services. Social web data may continuously enhance existing content on websites, such as FAQ pages. For example, recurring combinations of questions and answers are analyzed to create summarized answers, which may be published as FAQ entries. The tools not only allow to enrich existing data, but also to provide new content (e.g. Facebook apps, answer templates) based on preconfigured objects that are only customized prior to publication (see Fig. 3.16).

76

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.16 Configuration of a Facebook app via templates with Falcon Social (screenshots from www.falconsocial.com)

3.2.4 Customer Relationship Management The fourth Social CRM element links the analysis and interaction elements with the world of corporate CRM. This means that two sources of data need to be aligned, which strongly differ in quality (see Sect. 4.3). Among the examples are identities and the content itself. In many social media environments—especially externally hosted platforms—users are free to choose user names and pseudonyms without having to reveal their real names. Identities may equal real names, but may also be false or fictitious in nature. Unless a validation or additional indication on the name is available, this only allows the deduction of generalized insights (e.g. on trends and opinions in the market) and impedes social media data to be assigned directly to user profiles in corporate CRM systems. The differences in content are rooted in the users: while CRM users are professionals, social media users are primarily consumers. Despite these differences in data quality, some functionalities are helpful in considering social media in CRM workflows:

Fig. 3.17 Task assignment (above, left), communication template (above, right) and option to assign a posting with a sentiment (below) in Viralheat/Cision (screenshot from Viralheat Q4/2016)

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

77

– CRM object creation. Based on social web postings, entries in the CRM system may be created together with workflows specific tasks (e.g. sending marketing material or links pointing to an internal forum or an online shop) (see Fig. 3.17). The CRM system supports the creation of business objects, such as contacts, leads or service tickets out of web postings, makes these objects available across channels (e.g. initiating activities on other channels, such as the call center) and allows to track activities (e.g. a reminder after sending out material, a question whether a problem has been solved). – CRM object enrichment. Business objects that already exist in CRM systems may also be enriched with data from social media. For example, a Facebook identity may be added to a physical contact or missing contact information may be added from data available on social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn). If an object is connected with a social identity, it is again possible to track and trace the history of postings for this contact, its prior interactions on social media and also to assess whether the contact is influential opinion leader (influencer). – Social analytics in CRM dashboards. Data from social media analytics may enhance dashboards, which are available in many CRM systems. These dashboards provide a comprehensive and intuitive overview on CRM objects (e.g. a contact, service ticket) as well as on market data. For example, by using widget technology, Microsoft Dynamics CRM (see Sect. 3.1.4) allows evaluations from postings on selected social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, see Fig. 3.18) as well as social media postings that have been assigned to a specific CRM object.

Fig. 3.18 Dashboard with social media analytics in Microsoft CRM (screenshot from cloudblogs. micorsoft.com)

78

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

Fig. 3.19 Dashboard for reaction on a twitter posting in Earshot (screenshot from Earshot Q3/2017)

Fig. 3.20 Social campaign definition in Salesforce (screenshot from www.salesforce.com)

– Integrated interaction services. Postings on various platforms may be created directly from the CRM system using the social media platforms’ APIs. This allows a seamless integration of social media into marketing campaigns and efficient customer interaction, which, among others, is required when reacting to incidents (e.g. new posting, number of likes, or registration of a user). For example, Earshot allows the reaction on twitter posts and supports the user with information about the creators of postings, their previous postings and the like (Fig. 3.19). Another example is Salesforce that has predefined functionality and workflows to define social media campaigns (see Fig. 3.20) as well as to interact with customers across channels in the so-called customer interaction center.

3.2 Core Functionalities of Social CRM Systems

79

Fig. 3.21 Dashboard with ongoing interaction workflows across different channels in Microsoft CRM (screenshot from community.dynamics.com)

Fig. 3.22 Group configuration of three accounts in Viralheat (screenshot from Viralheat Q1/2016)

3.2.5 Management and Integration The fifth Social CRM element coordinates activities across multiple social media platforms as well as across analytical and integration tools. This ensures a comprehensive overview on all activities as well as consistent data and an overall administration of the platforms. Two main functionalities are: – Workflow management. The execution of Social CRM activities, often calls for the collaboration of different internal departments. For example, the creation and distribution of a posting about a new product requires product management to write a blog, public relations (PR) to check whether it meets the corporate communication guidelines, marketing to contribute images and social media representatives to finally release and publish the posting. To support the underlying workflow, the systems offer functionalities to switch between different

80

3

Social CRM: Tools and Functionalities

profiles on various platforms and to track postings and the status of workflows in teams (see Fig. 3.21). – Administration of identities. As Social CRM is not limited to one department, Social CRM systems enable the administration of access keys for various social media presences and users in the company (see Fig. 3.22). When it comes to publishing content, it is possible to choose whether a posting is published in the name of an individual user, a virtual user (e.g. a team) or on behalf of the entire company. Moreover, the tools store the interaction history so that employees may retrieve and resume previous interactions from colleagues.

References Alt, R., & Reinhold, O. (2012). Social customer relationship management (Social CRM)— Application and technology. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 4(5), 287–291. Falcon Social. (2015). Building a social media dashboard with Carlsberg. https://www.falcon.io. Retrieved October 1, 2015. Garratt, D. (2014). Let’s cut a slice of the CRM pie! https://www.falcon.io. Retrieved May 26, 2014.

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Both previous chapters showed that social media have a variety of use cases in CRM and that Social CRM solutions may vary considerably in scope and complexity. In the following, four critical aspects are discussed that have emerged from the case studies. First, businesses need to define their strategy towards Social CRM, which in a second step may also indicate a suitable level of integration for Social CRM. Growing levels of integration are inherently linked to the third challenge, which refers to the quality of automatically extracted data. Finally, each measure in Social CRM needs to consider critical questions regarding data privacy.

4.1

Strategies for Social CRM

It is a well-known observation from the literature in CRM (e.g. Rigby et al. 2002; Alt and Puschmann 2004), that CRM projects should not be technology-driven, i.e. start by selecting and implementing a technological solution. Prior to these technological decisions, businesses need a clear understanding on the goals they wish to achieve with these systems. For Social CRM this means that organizations should first establish an understanding in which core CRM processes—marketing, sales and/or service (see Fig. 1.5)—they desire to interact with social media users. From a more generalized perspective, a key strategic decision in Social CRM refers to the purpose of using social media. While establishing a simple corporate presence on social media platforms may be sufficient for some businesses, unlocking more benefits from Social CRM requires more sophisticated solutions for obtaining knowledge or for enabling workflows and collaborations. Thus, the use of social media may follow four different strategic intentions (see Fig. 4.1): – Presence. A presence in the social web opens an additional interaction channel with specific characteristics (see Sect. 1.2) for reaching (existing or additional) target groups. With limited investments, this strategy may already yield © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3_4

81

82

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Companies and service providers

Platform provider

Users

Social CRM Social web users

CRM core operations

Strategic level

Strategy Marketing Sales

Presence Knowledge

Public community

Potential buyers Followers Customers

Workflow Services

Personal community

Cooperation

Experts Competitors Staff

Fig. 4.1 Social CRM strategies (based on Reinhold and Alt 2012, p. 156)

additional data and enhance interaction options that complement traditional CRM instruments (e.g. newsletters, call-center). A social media presence not only allows a company to describe itself and its products in a personal and authentic manner, but may also create an interested community related to the company, the brand, or the product. Hence, social web presences are initial contact points for individuals interested in a company via which they may connect and interact with the company (e.g. via the linking to a fan page, use of a hashtag). In addition, a social web presence facilitates the connection between the offline and the online world by means of incentives (e.g. collecting points for a team in a social community, exchanging content or participating in challenges) and additional information on products, the company or the market. They may be posted by the company itself or by other social web users (i.e. the community). – Knowledge. A second strategic intention recognizes the presence in the social web as valuable source of authentic and unadulterated data. It follows the intention of analytical CRM (see Sect. 1.4) to derive information from data and contributes to the corporate knowledge on customers and markets. For example, businesses may record current or frequently discussed topics on their presences or on other publicly accessible social media platforms and process these and/or react to them. This allows to measure the success of a campaign already when it is running, to analyze a target group more precisely and to identify needs or to detect critical developments at an early stage. Insights from the social web may also be linked to internal data, when products used by “friends” are included in postings, when customer profiles are enriched with interests observed in a community or when offerings are filtered based on the experiences with a group of “friends”. Obtaining insights from social media is a broad field, which may start with using analytical functionalities that are offered by each social media platform. Due to the manual effort required in processing the results, dedicated analytical tools are available for a more efficient and more comprehensive analysis of UGC. The advances in automation also lead to questions in data acquisition, which are discussed in Sect. 4.3. However, these tools also tend to increase the necessary investments for Social CRM.

4.1 Strategies for Social CRM

83

– Workflow. A third strategic option is to link social media with workflows and transactions. Traditionally, these are the domain of operational CRM (see Sect. 1.4). Although interactions on social media platforms are already possible with simple presences, the strategic intention “workflow” connects social content with the operational CRM processes as well as with other customer interaction channels. For example, this allows to automatically create leads, offerings or service cases and to process them in the related departments. Compared to the prior strategies, the bi-directional exchange of data allows for highly automated processes. For example, technicians could be contacted directly via social media instead of having to contact a social media manager first who then forwards the enquiry to an adequate contact partner. Another advantage is that users may choose and change the communication channel on their own without the communication history being lost for the company. – Collaboration. A fourth strategy conceives social media as a collaboration channel. Again, data exchange is bi-directional, but less structured than in the “workflow” strategy. “Collaboration” interactions to achieve a common goal. These could be the simple exchanges of ideas for new products, shared executions of tasks or more comprehensive developments of new products (or parts thereof). This intention not only aims at gaining additional resources in problem solving (e.g. in customer service or within advisory services), it also strives to develop insights and expertise (e.g. to identify potential improvements), to attract multipliers (e.g. brand ambassadors), and to acquire creative input from the market (e.g. ideas for marketing and design). “Collaboration” requires that social media users are admitted to engage in corporate processes. This is possible by establishing owned social media platforms that are accessible for external users, by embedding social media functions (e.g. sharing, commenting) into the corporate web page or web shops, or by making use of feedback mechanisms (e.g. gamification elements, community or peer group meetings). Nevertheless, it is necessary to plan this strategy deliberately and to monitor it continuously to avoid negative effects that could occur, e.g. if ideas from the community were not acknowledged.

4.2

Organizational and Technological Integration

Similar to the implementation of a CRM system, which often starts from operational CRM towards analytical CRM and finally communicative as well as collaborative CRM, a Social CRM will often evolve over time. Based on the case studies and on literature (cf. Faase et al. 2011; Marx 2011; Malthouse et al. 2013; Forrester 2017) three development stages or maturity levels may be distinguished for Social CRM from the organizational side. They feature a growing degree of integration within the respective organization. Integration in this context refers to aligning multiple design elements of Social CRM, such as strategic intentions, responsibilities in the company, interactions involved in workflows and transactions

84

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

as well as the alignment of functionalities and data structures in the corresponding Social CRM application systems. Three steps shall be distinguished: – Separate presences. Many organizations start their Social CRM activities in small test projects that are initiated by individual departments, such as marketing, services, PR or HR. A first step is to identify the platforms where relevant discussions take place and/or where target groups are organized. Even without an individual presence (own presence), companies may analyze if and when social web users talk about the company and their products as well as how the community responds to postings. The next step is to establish a personal social media presence with (manually) moderated groups and news feeds. Again, passive activities, such as observing and analyzing data, are possible as well as more dynamic activities, such as interacting and engaging via own postings. By definition, an overall administration and responsibility across these separated presences is lacking at this maturity level and only a small number of people are involved in the company’s Social CRM activities. – Coordinated presences. Businesses at the second maturity level operate several internal and external presences, which are overseen by a centralized organizational unit. This is where corporate Social CRM projects are initiated and where social media specialists, such as social media managers or chief listening officers are located. Typically, these representatives are involved in strategic projects, such as the assessment of opportunities and risks of Social CRM, the development of a Social CRM strategy as well as the design and implementation of operational Social CRM measures. The responsibilities of these organizational units are to foster a cross-functional management of competences, data, and infrastructures (see Table 4.1). The maturity level “coordinated presences” also comprises the use of analytical and interactive elements in one or more CRM core processes as well as the use of dedicated Social CRM systems. Table 4.1 Tasks of Social CRM organizational units Responsibilities

Examples

Process management

– Development of target group-specific Social CRM activities and link to CRM processes – Identification of social media platforms and content relevant for the company – Coordination between social media and CRM activities – Measurement of the value creation of Social CRM activities – Collection and analysis of structured and unstructured data – Integration of external data into existing data structures – Measurement of social web activities – Rule-based creation of business objects (e.g. lead, opportunity, service case) – Creation and operation of individual social media platforms – Definition of information and integration needs – Support of profiles on external platforms – Link of social media and internal application systems (e.g. BI, EC, CMS, CRM)

Data management

Infrastructure management

4.2 Organizational and Technological Integration

85

– Company-wide approach. A first aspect of this advanced maturity level is the coordination of Social CRM. One part of organizing Social CRM are centralized organization units that pool and establish knowledge regarding the company’s existing and future Social CRM activities. They provide methodological advice as well as guidelines that are necessary for aligning multiple presences. Another part are the multiple organizational units within the company that have customer contact and that need to be involved in Social CRM. They may use social media as interaction channel and data source, but also need to align their activities and strategies with the Social CRM strategy. Consequently, Social CRM needs to be rooted in the entire organization. This refers to the different business units (marketing, sales, service), which are usually present in different market organizations. The alignment of social media presences in several languages and with market-specifics (e.g. products, preferences) content represents a particular challenge here. A second facet of the “company-wide approach” is a comprehensive support of the customer life cycle (see Fig. 1.5), which means that activities in the CRM core processes are coordinated. Again, this involves an overall coordination of the affected departments, which aims at empowering a large number of employees to provide content and become active users. An example is the Danish brewery Carlsberg (see Sect. 3.1.3), which created cross-border Facebook presences. The platform covers a total of 190 social channels of the Carlsberg group and was rolled-out in 49 countries with more than 500 users. The company has developed a standard management process, which defines access rights, content pools and defined workflows. A social media dashboard provides a holistic perspective based on three metrics: The “community” in terms of fans and followers across all platforms, the “engagement” with data on the reach and quality of postings as well as “mentions” with data on who talks about the brand. Obviously, each maturity level comes with growing requirements regarding the alignment of responsibilities, process designs and system architecture. At the first stage, general knowledge about the target audience (e.g. customers, fans) and the topics (e.g. products, interests) are required to set-up Social CRM activities. From a technological perspective, many cloud solutions facilitate the access to analytical, interaction and administrative functionalities. Often these are platform-specific and data remains in the databases of the social media platform (see Fig. 4.2 right) or in databases of Social CRM applications, such as Synthesio, Bottlenose or analytical services (see Fig. 4.2 middle). Integration becomes more demanding at the second level, which often involves the extraction of social media data via electronic interfaces (API). Safeguarding a correct mapping between data from the social media platforms and the internal systems is key here. This is particularly important when activities should take place across several social media presences (e.g. monitoring of KPIs for a campaign, aggregation of brand sentiments from different platforms). For the first two maturity levels, employees only require limited in-depth IT knowledge and may thus easily start first Social CRM activities on a number of social media platforms.

86

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Companies and service providers

Platform provider

Users

Social CRM CRM systems

CRM data

Databases with structured customer and process data

Community management

Basic metadata analysis Semantic text analysis

Basic text analysis Data mining

Interfaces

Interaction

Social media management

Social media platforms

e.g. posts, profiles, links

Social network analysis

Analysis

Social search

Extraction

OLTP

Interfaces

Data mining Data analysis

e.g. master and potential data, incidents

Systems Processing

Backend

Social media monitoring

Multimedia sharing

Blog/micro -blog

Social networking

Social tagging

Syndication

Wiki

Webfrontend

Crawler RSS API

Third party aggregator

Access

IS level

Data Warehouse

Business intelligence

Features

CRM system

Social CRM tools

UGC Databases for structured and unstructured data

Databases of social media platforms with raw data

Fig. 4.2 Technological elements of Social CRM (based on Alt and Reinhold 2012, p. 290)

Further interfaces between Social CRM tools and corporate CRM systems (see Fig. 4.2 left) allow corporate data to be managed (see Sect. 3.2) and are the basis for a company-wide integrated Social CRM approach at the third level. Due to the large number of available Social CRM tools and the lack of an overall integrated Social CRM system, many businesses pursue a best-of-breed approach and combine several specialized systems. An architecture that places the tools in a comprehensive context deems critical for systematically increasing the maturity of a Social CRM implementation (see Fig. 4.2).

4.3

Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality

The automatic acquisition of data from social media platforms is inherent in the more advanced Social CRM strategies (e.g. knowledge, collaboration, workflow). In view of the big data-like data volume (see Sect. 1.2), capturing relevant UGC, deriving insights and linking it to CRM processes quickly surpasses the possibilities of manual activities. However, the current social media management and monitoring tools involve various challenges to data quality and automation. An important goal is to combine high levels of data quality with high levels of automation. The necessary requirement for automation is the extraction of content via electronic interfacces. Different options are available for this endeavor (see Fig. 4.3). A simple option is to access analytic services via web front-ends that are offered by the individual platforms. More efficient are electronic interfaces. Many social media platforms provide programming interfaces (API) that allow importing social media data without manual intervention in separated, more specialized tools. The technology behind APIs is called representational state transfer (REST).

4.3 Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality Social CRM tools

CRM data Databases with structured customer and process data

Social media platforms

Interfaces

Interfaces

IS level

CRM systems

87

UGC Social CRM databases for structured and unstructured data

Databases of social media platforms with raw data

Integration options between tools and systems

Integration options between platforms and tools

1.

1.

2. 3.

Manual access and integration of data between Social CRM tools and CRM systems API call (Rest) for automatic and bidirectional integration File based import and export of data between Social CRM tools and CRM systems (e.g. CSV, JSON)

2. 3. 4.

Manual access and integration of data between social media platforms and tools Configuration of crawlers for automatic UGC retrieval from social media platforms API call (Rest) for automatic and bidirectional UGC retrieval and distribution RSS subscription or feed for automatic UGC retrieval and provision

Fig. 4.3 Option for data integration in Social CRM

A limited set of commands (function calls, such as get, post, put, delete) allows the automatic extraction of data in a (previously) defined format from web pages or social media platforms. This data may be imported in dedicated analytical tools, which were described in Sect. 3. Additional options for automatically extracting content are RSS feeds (see Table 1.2) or the use of so-called crawlers. The latter searches public content and is available as a stand-alone tool or as an integrated in standard social media monitoring tool (see Sect. 3.2.1). If a company uses one or more Social CRM tools they may either manually integrate the results and UGC with other systems (e.g. CRM, other Social CRM tools), export them from one system in common file formats (e.g. Comma-separated values (CSV), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)) and import the data in another system or they can integrate the tools and systems via API’s if these are provided. The handling of large data volumes of UGC requires an automation of data analysis. Four options are available for the automated analysis of UGC (see Fig. 4.4): – Basic metadata analysis. Simple quantitative analyses provide hints on the impact of content (e.g. how often was a posting shared or liked?) and the actors (e.g. who is connected to whom? Who is active?). The analysis is a pure counting and calculation task of available metadata. However, for social media or CRM managers the aggregation of basic information in a dashboard or a KPI delivers a quick overview at almost no configuration costs. Existing tools that apply these techniques mainly differentiate in the number and presentation of KPI instead of the quality of information. – Basic text analysis. While statistical approaches originate from the field of business intelligence, a more advanced option takes the textual parts of UGC into account and applyies basic approaches from the field of text mining

88

4

Only metadata (e.g. likes, shares, date) is taken into account Enables dashboards with KPI No or very low configuration necessary

Basic text analysis

. . . .

Metadata and the textual content is taken into account Requires NLP without extensive domain knowledge Enables filtering by phrases and provides basic insights such as the sentiment or classification of postings Limited up-front effort for configuration

Extraction

Basic metadata analysis Semantic text analysis

Data mining

Metadata and the textual content is taken into account Requires NLP with extensive domain knowledge Enables enrichment of data for improved filtering and accurate insights High up-front effort for configuration

Social CRM tools

Interfaces

IS level

CRM systems

Semantic text analysis

. . . .

. . . .

Metadata and textual content is taken into account Requires NLP with extensive domain knowledge Allows enrichment of data for improved filtering and accurate insights Very high effort for configuration and setup

Social media platforms

Basic text analysis Data mining

Interfaces

Basic metadata analysis

. ..

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

CRM data Databases with structured customer and process data

UGC Social CRM databases for structured and unstructured data

Insights

.. .. ..

Categories (e.g. type, issue, status) Meaning (e.g. news, opinions, problems) Business objects (e.g. brands, products, actors) Opinions (e.g. likes, shares, emotions) Relationships (e.g. topic clusters, networks) ...

Databases of social media platforms with raw data

UGC

.. ..

Postings (e.g. text likes, videos) Profiles (e.g. name, status, birthday) Links (e.g. hashtags, hyperlinks) ...

Fig. 4.4 Analytical options in Social CRM

(Feldman and Sanger 2006).1 Text mining recognizes the unstructured nature of this data and makes it accessible by processing the data (Natural Language Processing, NLP) and navigation through this data. In its simplest form, key words (e.g. names of customers, products, or companies) and/or simple phrases (e.g. “product not working”) are used to “select” relevant UGC from a larger set of accessible UGC. In a more advanced option, the text is pre-processed. The “bag of words” approach represents a common approach for reducing the complexity of texts. It compares and evaluates documents by words, but disregards grammar and word order. For example, “I bought a nice shampoo from Nivea” is transformed into “I”; “bought”; “a”; “nice”; “shampoo”; “from”; “Nivea”. Another approach links keywords or phrases to positive, neutral or negative meaning (e.g. “nice” means positive). This allows the association of so-called sentiments to UGC based on the occurrence of words. However, as these approaches reduce text to parts of its content (syntax), the results often lack accuracy and require additional manual interpretation. Tools appling these techniques typically present UGC with additional data, such as keywords visible 1

Text mining combines “techniques from data mining, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), and knowledge management. Text mining involves the pre-processing of document collections (text categorization, information extraction, term extraction), the storage of the intermediate representations, the techniques to analyze these intermediate representations (such as distribution analysis, clustering, trend analysis, and association rules), and visualization of results.” (Feldman and Sanger 2006, p. x). Many of the statistical techniques, the intermediate representation as well as the visualization of results are known from the field of data mining, which focuses on the analysis of structured data.

4.3 Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality

89

in a posting, a general sentiment, tags, and KPIs about the author (e.g. influence, activity level). In addition, the application of text mining allows summarizing or categorizing large set of UGC by key words or data properties (e.g. counting of all postings with specific keywords or sentiment). – Semantic text analysis. More sophistication is possible when semantic relationships are taken into account. For example, a search for the term “Nivea” in Twitter not only leads to the popular brand name but also to users who have “Nivea” in their real and/or user name. The postings of these users would influence the results, since an automatic distinction between the brand name and a user name is difficult. Another example is the recognition of products or brands in UGC where the users use different terms than companies (e.g. magenta company instead of DT) or only mention a product or service (e.g. 16 Mbit contract). Techniques from knowledge engineering and/or artificial intelligence serve to analyze not only the parts of the content, but also their meaning (semantics). A widespread approach represents the application of specific domain knowledge (e.g. banking, healthcare, IT) in so-called ontologies.2 These ontologies may be conceived as differentiated data models, which link the various aspects within a field of knowledge (or domain). A common approach is the association of words to a defined classes (e.g. “shampoo” = product) as well as the estimation of missing information (e.g. if “Nivea”, “bought” and “shampoo” are mentioned, the posting is about the personal hygiene product and not about a person called “Nivea”). This approach yields the highest quality of results, but requires substantial preparatory work for establishing and fine-tuning the data model. Tools that apply these techniques are valuable since they provide additional insights that cannot be extracted directly from UGC. – Data Mining. Building on the previous techniques with additional techniques from the field of data science is the analytic option data mining. It aims at generating new insights instead of providing access to or simply enriching UGC. It reveals, for example, frequently occurring patterns and uses analytic methods (e.g. regression, classification) to interpret this data. Obviously, these analyses require a large set of basic data and are limited by the available models or skills of the data analyst. Tools that provide these techniques are typically designed for users with high skills in data mining. In addition, pre-configured analyses are possible, where users may influence only few variables. The results of social media analytics are called first-party data if they were derived from the company’s own social media presence. This data may be enhanced by “second” and “third” party data. Second-party data is first-party data from another actor. For example, social media platform providers sell aggregated content. Third-party data are provided by so-called data aggregators (e.g. BlueKai from

2

Ontologies are part of the semantic web investigation and may be characterized as “[…] a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” (Studer et al. 1998, p. 184). They create a common sense for a specific field of application.

90

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Oracle or eXelate from Nielsen), which sell demographic data or detailed profile data (Lubowicka 2018). While advanced automated analytical techniques, such as text or semantic analyses, are more demanding to implement and configure, they also provide more differentiated results (see Sect. 3.2.2). However, basic and semantic text analyses require the structuring of knowledge to make texts amenable to automatic knowledge extraction. Two main approaches may be observed in this respect: – Definition of a vocabulary. The results of a social media analysis (e.g. social media monitoring, social search) depend strongly on the choice of pre-defined keywords and search terms. These terms should cover the relevant domain (e.g. consumer electronics at Cyberport or apparel at Spreadshirt) and include mandatory (term that should be mentioned in a posting) and/or exclude terms (e.g. terms that indicate data in a posting is not relevant) for narrowing the results. The usual assumption is that the more overlap a posting has with the defined vocabulary and the more mandatory terms it includes, the more relevant it will be. Since the results are typically more precise with a differentiated vocabulary, it is time-consuming to formulate the vocabulary. In addition, this task requires extensive knowledge about the respective domains. For instance, DTAG uses several thousand terms to identify postings with reference to the company (Backhaus and Nissen 2014) (see example in Fig. 4.5 left). In addition, companies should take into account differences between the language of the company and in the local market(s). – Definition of semantics. Although searches and analyses based on detailed vocabularies, often yield valuable insights, semantic errors still occur. A potential solution represent semantic technologies (see above) that assign the individual keywords to pre-definied entities. For example, if the term “Nivea” is mentioned in a posting that includes other keywords assigned to the entity “cosmetics” or “products” the systems could suggest that the posting refers to the brand and further product-specific analyses become possible. Important techniques for the definition of semantics are taxonomies and ontologies, which model the semantical relationships between such entities in a structured, logical, and machine-readable form (see example in Fig. 4.5 right). Companies may create individual ontologies or integrate existing ontologies with relevance to CRM, such as GoodRelations or Productontology.org.3 Again, differentiated vocabularies and semantic relations increase the precision of an automatic analysis, but come along with growing investments in definition and maintenance. One possibility to reduce the efforts for creating such definitions is to build on data from existing databases (e.g. CMS, CRM, ERP, Wikis, Forums, Blogs), a procedure referred to as “domain shaping” and ontology engineering. Analytical applications may use these databases and the contained knowledge as additional input for social media analyses, as they comprise already relevant terms and their 3

See http://wiki.goodrelations-vocabulary.org/Cookbook/Schema.org and http://www.product ontology.org/.

4.3 Automatic Data Acquisition and Data Quality

91 Product class Product subclass

Service Context "wie wird" or "wieso geht" or "wieso kann" or "wieso soll" or "wieso sollte" or "wir können schon"~3 or "womit kann" or ("kann man" AND "kann man anlegen"~5)

Brand Context telekom or "netz der zukun " or @deutsche_telekom or @dtag or @deutschetelekom or @telekom or @telekom_hil or telekomanschluss

´Mis-Namings ´ drosselkom or "magenta t" or "mu magenta" or "t-offline" or #drosselcom or #rosariese or @telekom_hilflos or telekommer

Brand Brand Product class Product Term Company Audience

Telekom Telekom Zuhause Telekom Zuhause S Basic 16 MBit Tarif German Telekom Consumer online

Product

Term

Company

Audience

Fig. 4.5 Examples of vocabulary lists (left, following Backhaus and Nissen 2014, p. 16) and ontologies (right)

relationships within a domain. The ambitious goal is to reduce the time needed for configuring social media analysis from currently several months to some minutes or even seconds while retaining a similar accuracy as a human user would have. To measure the level of data quality, existing approaches known from the ERP context provide a starting point (Otto et al. 2011). In addition to general requirements, such as consistency, actuality and completeness, the characteristics of UGC (combination of structured, semi-structured and unstructured content) call for additional criteria that need to be taken in account. Obviously, the source and identity of UGC affect its usefulness for CRM purposes: – Unknown sources. UGC on social media platforms often originates from users who are unknown to a company. This is due to using acronyms or fictitious user names instead of real names or due to users that have not been in contact with the company. As merging data from unknown sources with high-quality data in CRM systems needs to be avoided, separate identities should be created instead (see Sect. 3.4.2) and only linked after further verification. – Known sources. Even in the case that users adopted their real names for their social identities, their validity is not necessarily guaranteed. Here, companies should aim at motivating customers to communicate their social identity before or to reveal it within an authentication process (e.g. social login). Likewise, similarity checks or the evaluation of the linguistic style may help to predict a user’s identity with a certain probability. In addition to the identity, the volume of UGC also requires to distinguish relevant from irrelevant content. Relevance can only be determined if a purpose (e.g. product feedback analysis, service quality assessment, lead identification) for the data analysis is predefined and the domain of the data origin is known. The resulting data should be regarded in the combination with other related postings (thread) and the relationship between writer and reader (Agichtein et al. 2008). Different criteria are available to assess the quality of social data (see Table 4.2). While the publishing date yields immediate insight on how up-to-date a posting is, further evaluations of comments and the text of the posting may deliver insights on timeliness of the topic. The analysis of unstructured data requires in a first step the text to be decomposed via content analysis techniques and to convert these

92

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Table 4.2 Criteria to evaluate data quality in Social CRM Criteria

Examples

Credibility

– Evaluation of profiles, e.g. on the basis of rankings, evaluations of other users, frequency of linking – Evaluation of postings, e.g. on the basis of evaluations and comments of other users – Comparison with data from other sources based on semantics or syntax – Determining the up-to-date nature of postings on the basis of the publishing date, the last editing or the up-to-date nature of linked postings – Determining the up-to-date nature of profiles on the basis of the creation date, the reaction of the net structure (e.g. up-to-date nature of comments, likes), number of hits – Evaluation of the completeness of the scheme on the basis of linked attributes and relations – Evaluation of topical proximity on the basis of keywords and the comparison with other postings – Check whether sufficient profile information (e.g. hobbies) to answer an enquiry is available – Evaluation of postings on behalf of other users in the same or in different networks and evaluation of the number of mentions – Determining the number of followers and of importing and exporting links – Analysis of content regarding topical proximity – Analysis and evaluation of content based on references (e.g. sources, quotations, paragraphs, references)

Correctness Immediacy

Completeness Adequacy

Reputation

Value-added Objectivity

fragments into a structured data format. In a second step, metrics for measuring may be applied. For example, to measure “adequacy” the words in a posting may be compared to a predefined vocabulary. The more the metrics overlap with predefined metrics for a certain purpose, the stronger a posting’s relevance may be. Even simple text mining techniques allow social media analysts to reduce noise and to focus on promising postings. This not only applies to the analysis of texts but also to network analysis methods designed to check the validity of a user profile. Ultimately, the analysis of social media data based on quality metrics may result in an increased speed (due to a now reduced amount of data) and efficiency (due to a focus on relevant content) of tasks associated with social analytics.

4.4

Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

The protection of a user’s privacy (privacy protection) and personal data about them (data protection) represents a highly sensitive topic and is often regarded as an inhibitor for Social CRM. It is an area where not only businesses design the use of data, but also an area that is subject to legal regulation. However, a common global legislation on privacy and data protection is missing.

4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

93

On an international level, the protection of privacy has been dealt with by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1980. The council published several recommendations concerning guidelines governing the protection of privacy and trans-border flows of personal data.4 In 1990, the United Nations (UN) enacted the directive on the processing of personal data in automated files of the UN General Assembly. Despite these common general international guidelines, the legislation for privacy and data protection varies considerably among countries. For example, building upon the principles published by the OECD and the UN, article 8 of the European Union (EU) Charter of Fundamental Rights (fundamental right to data), the directives 2002/58/EC (Telecommunications/Internet services) and 2006/24/EG (Telecommunications data retention) as well as the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC were formulated. Individual countries, such as Germany, applied this regulation in national laws, such as the Federal Data Protection Act (“Bundesdatenschutzgesetz”, BDSG) or the Telemedia Act (“Telemediengesetz”, TMG). In addition, further laws are relevant in a specific country (for example in Germany the Social Law and Penal Code). German legislation recognizes Social CRM as an activity that relies on data collection, processing and storage and imposes latent risks for the customer’s personal rights. While Germany is regarded as rather restrictive in terms of using UGC and personal data, the US are regarded as liberal, which leads to a different legislation. The key differences emerge from the fact that European legislation aims to protect personal data, while US legislation primarily protects privacy. In the first case, privacy is a fundamental human right that is implemented in State legislation and control may not be given away. In the second case, privacy is a personal property that may be given away or sold and is subject to self-regulation of the market. Consequently, the European legislation is proactive, while in the US it is reactive (crisis management) and represented by the ethical standards of the market (Nijhawan 2003). However, some rules regulate the use of data for specific sectors as well as for the government (e.g. the privacy act limits the option for the government to reveal certain data about individuals (Fromholz 2000; Grogan and McDonald 2016)) and with other countries (e.g. Privacy Shield between US and EU (Weiss and Archick 2016)). The EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC has been revised recently and was replaced by the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 25, 2018 and subsequently implemented into the individual laws of the EU member states (e.g. in Germany the BDSG). The GDPR is now compulsory for all organizations with headquarters or branches in the EU. This comprises services or products offered to persons within the EU and the monitoring of the behavior of persons within the EU. This is regardless of whether the processing of this data occurs in the EU or not. In general, GDPR demands transparency regarding the processing of data, the 4

Among the examples are the OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, the Transborder Data Flow Contracts in the Wider Framework of Mechanisms for Privacy Protection on Global Networks, or the Policy Guidance for Digital Content.

94

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

reduction of data processing to necessary steps (Privacy by Design, Privacy by Default), the implementation of technical and organizational security measures, the disclosure of data on request of all “data subjects”5 and the guarantee of the rights of data subjects. Infringements may be fined up to €20 m, or up to 4% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is higher. GDPR leads to a tighter compliance regarding the processing of personal data and requires companies to inform data subjects about the data processing and to safeguard their rights. Businesses need to appoint a data protection officer (DPO), who has to monitor and manage the processing of personal data. In Germany, the constitutional rights are known as the right to free development of personality and are part of constitutional law [“Grundgesetz”, article 2 (1)]. Similar to the right on informational self-determination, these rules have the status of constitutional rights following the consensus ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1983. However, these date back before the advent of the internet and the widespread use of digital media in the third internet stage (see Sect. 1.1) often creating problems in maintaining these rights. In particular, public profiles on open social media platforms facilitate data collection for third parties (e.g. Table 1.4). If companies use this data or data from third-party social media presences, this may or may not be in the customer’s interest. German law already prohibited the processing of personal data unless the person explicitly allows this (Section 4 Federal Data Protection Act). This so-called “opt-in” may be considered a best practice in data protection and should also be considered by businesses outside German legislation. In contrast, legislation in the US follows the “opt-out” model, which allows companies to collect data and process them as long as users are not explicitly objecting to this. Personal data are defined in the GDPR. Article 4 § 1 conceives personal data ‘as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person’.6 In practice, these include all data which are or may be assigned to a person (e.g. phone and credit card number, account data, customer number and address). Since the definition explicitly specifies “any information” a broad interpretation of the term “personal data” may be assumed.7 For collecting, processing, using and transferring personal data, firms need to safeguard the: – explicit consent (“opt-in”) or a legal permission for a Social CRM activity, – notification of users regarding the purpose, type and scope of the data processing, – waiving of a later use of data for other purposes, e.g. marketing campaigns (other purpose) after purchasing a product (primary purpose), – adherence to the principles of necessity, data reduction, and data economy, 5

In general, this includes any natural person identified or identifiable by data (see Art. 4 GDPR). In the domain of Social CRM, this typically applies to all (potential) customers as well as users of social media platforms. 6 An identifiable natural person is a data subject, who may be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person. 7 See https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/.

4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

95

– collection of data as closely to the user as possible (i.e. no purchased data from social data providers with unclear origins or unclear data quality), and the – provision of a cancellation policy or an option to cancel and the guarantee of user rights, such as the right of erasure and notification. While personal data are owned by the data subjects, the question is who owns all other types of social content. From a legal perspective, the ownership of UGC is not clearly defined. Although UGC means that postings and likes are created by users of a social media platform (Step 1 in Fig. 4.6), data is stored and shared on a platform that is typically not owned by the users. UGC therefore represents a value or a way of creating value for the owner of a social media platform (sometimes the term “digital asset” is used in this context). The question is whether owners of social media platforms can invoke a legal position, which gives them a right for exploitation or value creation from this data. Since national regulations are essential for answering these questions, Table 4.3 summarizes relevant laws from four countries. The regulations in Germany illustrate that at least three legal regulations are relevant when assessing the ownership of UGC. The fact that postings and “likes” are intangible assets, classical ownership or property rights are not applicable. In addition, users may revoke a “like” or delete a posting at any point. Consequently, a secure legal position of the social media platform provider regarding the ownership does not exist. However, a legal position from copyright in the form of a derived right may be relevant for the creator or author of UGC if a posting represents a “work” in the sense of a copyright. The copyright depicts “work” as a protected good according to § 2 of the Act on Copyright and Related Rights (Urheberrechtsgesetz, UrhG) in the form of a personal intellectual creation. Media, such as photos, videos, music and text, may be considered as such “works”. They need to feature a certain amount of creativity and individuality that makes this content

Fig. 4.6 Regulations affecting the ownership and the use of UGC

– Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte (UrhG) – Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG) – Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)

Privacy

Copyright

Competition

Germany

– Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG) updated following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 – Telemediengesetz (TMG) – Telekommunikationsgesetz (TKG)

Topic

– Competition Law including Competition Act 1998 – Enterprise Act 2002 – Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) – UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotions and Direct Marketing (CAP Code) – UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP-Code)

– Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

– Data Protection Act (DPA) updated following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679

United Kingdom

Table 4.3 Relevant legal regulations in the field of Social CRM in four countries United States

– U.S. Antitrust Law (Sherman Act 1890, Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), Clayton Act (1914)

– The privacy laws of the U.S. follow a sectoral approach in which laws are developed and enforced for a specific industry sector and protect only certain types of information. Some guidelines regarding data privacy provides the Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) – U.S. Copyright Law Title 17

– LEI 9610 from February 1998 “Direito Autoral” – LEI 12.529 from November 2011 “Sistema Brasileiro de Defesa da Concorrência”

– LEI 12.965 from April 2014 “Marco Civil da Internet”, a dedicated law for privacy is in preparation

Brazil

96 4 Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

97

outstanding. In the widest sense, it needs to be designed for communication and requires a certain level of design or creation (as opposed to a routine activity). In this case, the author would have copyright and exploitation rights according to §§ 15 ff UrhG for the specific expression (semantics) but not the data itself (syntax). A posting via Twitter, a blog, as well as an image on Instagram or a comment on a picture may represent such “works”. On the other hand, a simple “Like” or “Tag” does not constitute a “work” under copyright law. The person who gives a “Like” is typically not entitled to any copyright or exploitation rights. If UGC is a work under copyright law, the author has the rights of use and exploitation. The rights of use may also be granted to others, such as social media platform providers. However, an implicit transfer of these rights by creating UGC on a social media platform should not be assumed (Step 2 in Fig. 4.5). The transfer of rights, or the transfer of a simple right of use (in contrast to the exclusive right of use) is possible and common practice through General Standard Terms and conditions (GTC) (e.g. of a platform or forum owner). By accepting these GTC, the authors yield specific rights (e.g. for analysis of data, tracking of user behavior, exploitation of data for marketing purposes, removal in case of violation platform rules) to the social media platform provider. Additional rights that grant the platform provider rights on the use of this data are legally not clearly defined. To a certain level, the owner of a social media platform may assert a defense claim based on an infringement of competition law under the Act against unfair competition (Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb, UWG) if the UGC is transferred from “their” platform to another or if someone else claims this UGC. Such a defense claim would not be based on a legal position regarding the UGC, but rather on the legal position of the platform. In case UGC is in conflict with other laws, such as penal law, the platform providers may also have specific own rights (e.g. the right to remove forbidden content). For the use and exploitation of the UGC, data protection aspects are relevant as well. In this case, the focus is on the use of personal data and not the ownership itself. Social media platforms process personal data on a regular basis and the owner of this data can deny his consent. Therefore, the processing of personal data must be transparent to him. The data subject (e.g. user of a social media platform that provides personal data) needs to be informed about which personal data is processed when by whom and for what purpose according to Art. 14 GDPR. The same applies if personal data is retrieved via API’s or by a crawler from the platform or from a public source. It may be assumed that with the creation of UGC a contract between the owner of the social media account and the content provider is created. The same applies for the disclosure of data together with the social media account. From the perspective of data protection, the use and exploitation of personal data is limited to the stated purpose in this contract. Any use or exploitation for further purposes requires at least an advance information of the data subject in accordance with Art. 14 § 4 GDPR. The data subject is then free to assert rights of restriction of processing, deletion of data and the like (Art. 15 GDPR).

98

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Even in countries with stricter ruling, such as Germany, it has collecting public data, i.e. data which is visible for all users without restrictions, is possible. For instance, this applies to most profiles on open social media platforms as well as to product reviews in web shops. The GDPR has tightened this situation, since businesses need to be transparent which personal data they process and how this is done. In general, it is forbidden to analyze non-public (access-restricted) platforms, to observe employees in their private environment, and to link data from social media with corporate customer profiles or CRM data without prior consent of the affected users. This also involves referencing a person in the processed data that may arise in social media profiles via the name in the free text, via directions, phone or customer numbers, IP address, data about a person’s location or via real names. While the ownership of UGC is not clearly defined, the use and distribution of UGC without personal data is often only limited by the GTC of a specific platform. In addition, users may restrict access to their UGC by using privacy settings on these platforms but only within the defined limits of the platform provider (e.g. limit the access or distribution of their postings). Consequently, companies that are using data from social media platforms should aim for an access via API or RSS feeds which are designed by the platform owner and should follow the GTC, as well as respect the privacy settings of the users that created the UGC. If a third-party aggregator is involved, then the company needs to ensure that the third party the applicable laws. However, as UGC is data, the effective control of the data creator is limited after data is being transferred to a third party as recent examples illustrate (e.g. Greenwald 2013; Gibney 2018; Zuckerberg 2019). Platform providers such as Facebook recognize these problems and announced new privacy protecting features in 2019, such as the integration of user-to-user communication features that can be more easily protected (e.g. end-to-end encryption as in WhatsApp) (Zuckerberg 2019). For a data protection check of Social CRM measures, the purpose of data collection is key. Other aspects, such as the type of collected data, the extent of acquired data, or the form of storage in a Social CRM system are relevant as well. Table 4.4 shows some criteria that guide in assessing data protection for planned Social CRM activities. The complexity of regulations and different design options of a Social CRM activity usually requires the involvement of the legal department and data protection officer or its external counterpart (e.g. contracted lawyer, external data protection officer). If companies aim to pursue Social CRM activities that comply with data protection, they should either exclude personal data or check the following privacy measures: – Aliasing of data, which refers to changing or erasing personal characteristics, so the data can no longer be assigned to a person. This especially applies when a large amount of data involving personal data is aggregated. – Pseudonymization of data, which means substituting the name or other identification characteristics. Although this makes the identification of the individual “behind” the personal data more difficult, it remains possible to restore the

4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

99

Table 4.4 Criteria of an initial data protection check for Social CRM Criteria Purpose

Aspects of data protection

– Companies should inform concerned parties regarding the collection and use of data in a transparent way. In case this is not possible, data protection rules might be violated. The stated purpose should not be unspecific or changed afterwards. Companies should consider that a clear consent of a customer provides a solid basis for many Social CRM activities, even though it might be challenging to obtain it in the first place – Key aspects: obligation to inform, consent, voluntary nature, hidden advertisements, appropriating of content Application of – When applying social media application systems, the purpose dominates tools the capacity of the tool. However, many Social CRM systems fall short on deactivating functionalities (e.g. scoring) or offer only little information on the algorithms used for data collection and processing. In addition, employee privacy needs to be taken into account (e.g. protection of login data) – Key aspects: Processing in accordance with Art 6 GDPR, Profilinga in accordance with Art 22 GDPR, employee privacy, processing of transaction data Data utilization – Utilizing data for CRM purposes needs to consider under which intention users agreed to these activities, that the utilization is within the stated purpose and that specific data such as about health, religion, ethnicity and others is additionally protected by law. Although the intention of users is not a formal requirement, an unexpected use of the data might be detrimental to customer relations. Special attention requires the privacy preserving/protecting storage of data as well as the mandatory erasing or anonymization of data after fulfilling of the stated purpose – Key aspects: obligation to erase data, protection of data disclosure to third parties, need for separation, aliasing, anonymization, protection of personal data Data access – Accessing data is technically simple due to APIs, (social) search engines or web crawlers. If data aggregation providers (see Sect. 3.2.1) collect and process this data, it is necessary to check the results in terms of data protection. An important aspect is the openness of the presence, which is restricted as soon as accessing data requires registration. In addition, the GTC of the platform provider is relevant, which often limit a commercial use – Key aspects: public sources, guaranteed access with a pseudonym (no mandatory real-name by the GTC) Organization – Besides legal conditions, the internal organization needs to consider data protection. In particular, applying social media guidelines has become common, which establish an internal framework for Social CRM and convey externally the compliance with data protection – Key aspects: communication guideline, possibility of enquiries, legal disclosure a Article 4 GDPR defines ‘profiling’ as any form of automated processing of personal data consisting of the use of personal data to evaluate certain personal aspects relating to a natural person. This applies in particular to analyzing or predicting concerning a natural person’s performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behaviour, location or movements

100

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

reference between data and a person. Thus, pseudonyms help to protect the identity from third parties but not from the responsible organization. – The use of personal data requires a check regarding the user’s consent/opt-in. Depending on the basic evaluation of data protection (see Table 4.4), Social CRM activities involving personal information need to include the request for an opt-in. If this is the case, clauses hidden in confusing GTC of businesses are not legally valid. – The use of personal data should be linked to a specific purpose, e.g. an order or a service enquiry. However, not each purpose allows the acquisition and storage of personal data (see Table 4.4). Two examples for such a purpose-based data protection check are described in Table 4.5. Table 4.5 Examples for a data protection check in Social CRM Social CRM activity

Steps within data protection check

Reactive service involving a reconciliation with CRM data

– A customer complains via his/her Twitter account that a delivery has not reached him/her yet. This posting also reveals his/her name – Is the company allowed to use the data to check the order status in its CRM system and answer the customer? – The data protection check first assesses, whether the answer is necessary to process the order (activity), if the used data is generally accessible (application of tools) and if the consent for replying via the respective channel exists (purpose) – While the purpose may justify the reconciliation with CRM data, a reply via the public channel Twitter may raise legal concerns. The recommendation is to only post a general reply on Twitter and to send the detailed answer via e-mail – An author (user A) regularly posts negative comments on the products or services of a company via his/her private Facebook and the followers (users N) share this content publicly – Is the company entitled to collect the postings of users N to create a profile of user A to position itself against these postings? – The data protection check first assesses, whether it is guaranteed that it is always the opinion of user A which is to be found (tool), which purpose the collection has (purpose), whether the data originates from public sources (application of tools) and which intention the author may have (data use) – While the later intention could justify the collection of data, the fact that user A chose to publish via a restricted presence (his/her personal Facebook profile) clearly reflects no intention in publicly sharing this data. The recommendation is to refrain from collecting and profiling since it would rather be considered illegal

Profiling of influencers or opinion leaders

4.4 Privacy Protection, Personal Data and Data Ownership

101

In summary, data protection represents a challenge for Social CRM activities. Especially, the GDPR requires personal data to be avoided, which often conflicts with their CRM goals. Therefore, organizations should designate one or more responsible person(s) for evaluating the compliance of their social media activities with data protection laws. They may come up with recommendations for the design of an activity based on the relevant legislation and could, for example, suggest that organizational statutes formulate stricter data protection than required to attain customer confidence. Data protection management systems, which indicate risks in terms of data protection and recommendations for devising social media campaigns, could support involved departments with dedicated data protection workflows when planning CRM activities.

References Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A., & Mishne, G. (2008). Finding high-quality content in social media. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, ACM. Alt, R., & Puschmann, T. (2004). Successful practices in customer relationship management. In 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). https://doi.org/10.1109/ HICSS.2004.1265415. Alt, R., & Reinhold, O. (2012). Social customer relationship management (Social CRM)— Application and technology. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 4(5), 287–291. Backhaus, D., & Nissen, O. (2014). Telekom hilft, Das A(lert)-Team—Beschwerdestimulation via digitalem Outbound [Telekom helps—The A(lert)-Team—Complain stimulation via digital outbound]. https://de.slideshare.net/fbmarket/telekom-hilft-das-alertteam-beschwerdestimul ation-via-digitalem-outbound. Retrieved August 31, 2015. Faase, R., Helms, R., & Spruit, M. (2011). Web 2.0 in the CRM domain: Defining Social CRM. International Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 5(1), 1–22. Feldman, R., & Sanger, J. (2006). The text mining handbook: Advanced approaches in analysing unstructured data. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Forrester. (2017). The social marketing playbook for 2017. https://www.forrester.com/playbook/ The+Social+Marketing+Playbook+For+2016/-/E-PLA124. Retrieved April 14, 2017. Fromholz, J. M. (2000). The European Union data privacy directive. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 15, 461–488. Gibney, E. (2018). The scant science behind Cambridge Analytica’s controversial marketing techniques. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03880-4. Retrieved April 20, 2018. Greenwald, G. (2013). XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User does on the Internet’. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data. Retrieved April 20, 2018. Grogan, S., & McDonald, A. M. (2016). Access denied! Contrasting data access in the United States and Ireland. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 3, 191–211. Lubowicka, K. (2018). First-party data marketing: 3 powerful use cases. https://piwik.pro/blog/ first-party-data-3-powerful-use-cases/. Retrieved April 17, 2018. Malthouse, E. C., Haenlein, M., Skiera, B., Wege, E., & Zhang, M. (2013). Managing customer relationships in the social media era: Introducing the Social CRM house. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27(4), 270–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intmar.2013.09.008. Marx, S. (2011). Social media listening and engagement journey. https://blogs.cisco.com/ socialmedia/social-media-listening-and-engagement-journey. Retrieved October 11, 2014. Nijhawan, D. R. (2003). The emperor has no clothes: A critique of applying the European Union approach to privacy regulation in the Unites States. Vanderbilt Law Review, 56, 939–975.

102

4

Social CRM: Challenges and Perspectives

Otto, B., Lee, Y. W., & Caballero, I. (2011). Information and data quality in networked business. Electronic Markets, 21(2), 79–81. Reinhold, O., & Alt, R. (2012). Social customer relationship management: State of the art and learnings from current projects. In Proceedings of the 25th Bled eConference eDependability: Reliable and Trustworthy eStructures, eProcesses, eOperations and eServices for the Future, Bled. Rigby, D. K., Reichheld, F. F., & Schefter, P. (2002). Avoiding the four perils of CRM. Harvard Business Review on Customer Relationship Management, 80(2), 101–109. Studer, R., Benjamins, R., & Fensel, D. (1998). Knowledge engineering: Principles and methods. Data Knowledge Engineering, 25(1–2), 161–198. Weiss, M. A., & Archick, K. (2016). U.S.-EU data privacy: From safe harbor to privacy shield. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service. Zuckerberg, M. (2019). A privacy-focused vision for social networking. https://www.facebook. com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096 634/. Retrieved June 3, 2019.

5

Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

Social CRM exploits the potentials of the social web for CRM. It leverages the power of social media in establishing direct relationships with consumers, including potential and existing customers. This may not only occur when they are actively sharing content or initiating activities on social media, but also passively by listening and learning. Social CRM should not be conceived as a technological undertaking or as a simple presence on social media platforms. It means that similar to the CRM concept, Social CRM has implications on a company’s strategy, organization and systems: – From a strategic point of view, Social CRM enhances existing CRM concepts towards more interactivity and brings businesses closer to their customers. – From an organizational point of view, Social CRM requires new competencies and tasks that are necessary to embed social media into more real-time and networked CRM processes. – From a technological point of view, Social CRM application systems automate many tasks, such as monitoring, interaction and management. They allow to extract large data volumes, to conduct analyses that shape decision-making as well as to align multiple presences. Ultimately, Social CRM has the potential to positively affect the customer experience and key business metrics (e.g. CLV, efficiency of CRM processes). This includes stronger emotional and more interactive relationships with “fans” or “followers” due to focused and timely recommendations, sales possibilities and service processes. In consequence, the thinking of traditional “inside-out” CRM concepts needs to shift towards an “inside-out” perspective (see Fig. 1.5). Instead of aiming at increasing customer retention, the customer perspective emphasizes understanding the customers’ problem(s) and her/his view from outside on the providers of products and/or services. As shown in Fig. 5.1, social media are centered on customers and via presences in multiple social media platforms businesses could stay in contact © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3_5

103

104

5 Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

with them along various “touch points” along the cycle. A Social CRM strategy may not only associate different goals with these social media platforms, but also design trajectories between the platforms that lead to a layered, onion-like model. A customer-oriented life cycle is more dynamic since social media unlock more touch points with customers that are also interactive in nature. Among the key potentials of this customer-orientation are (see Alt 2016): – Critical events happen outside the company. In the digital economy, critical developments and events are increasingly discussed on platforms where customers interact among each other and with businesses. Tracking these channels is a prerequisite to identify and to react on developments in the market. – Real-time interaction with customers generates value. The multiple touch points for interaction along the customer life cycle are opportunities to create customer value. Among the examples are individualized offers based on aggregated knowledge (“collective intelligence”, “recommendation engines”), enhanced sales experience (“group shopping”, “social shopping”), new types of customer service (“self-service”, service dialogue via chats), or innovation management (“co-creation”, “open innovation”). On many major social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram) previous interactions of companies with users also influence the firm’s visibility on these platforms. For example, Facebook increased the priority of content from individuals compared to companies, so that even the reach of paid content will be limited unless prior relationships (e.g. regular likes, the user is follower) to users already exist (Facebook 2018). – Customer value needs to be balanced with data protection. While analytic methods offer numerous possibilities, their application is not necessarily in the user’s interest. Businesses should always be conscious of this, keeping data protection issues transparent and having self-determined users in mind. This includes foreseeing and offering “opt-in” options wherever possible as well as disclosing collected personal data to the respective user. – Social content should match the social media platform. Multiple social media presences should be assessed in view of the control of content and contact channels. External platforms secure a high reach of the Social CRM approach, especially where there is a risk of losing control. This might be the case when the GTC or algorithms of the platform are changed. For example, modifications in the newsfeed algorithm of Facebook (e.g. Facebook 2018) directly impact the reach and marketing costs of businesses that target their market via Facebook. Owned platforms promise independence, superior analytic possibilities and a more individual treatment of contacts. The challenge here is to transfer contacts from external platforms to internal platforms. In addition, the case studies emphasize various issues that call for a coordinated approach: – Cross-functional coordination. While a company’s social media activities are often initiated from a company’s PR department, achieving higher levels of

5

Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

105

Fig. 5.1 Customer-focused customer life cycle

customer interaction and value requires the participation of departments that represent the core CRM processes (e.g. sales, service). In particular, cross-functional coordination is required in workflows among various organizational units. – Cross-platform coordination. Following a layered approach, businesses are typically present on different social media platforms. These may be owned or hosted presences as well as open or restricted platforms. It is necessary to coordinate multilingual presences and platforms together with other customer interaction channels in the respective countries, in particular, if businesses operate internationally. – Cross-life cycle coordination. The dynamic customer life cycle calls for coordination of CRM activities along the life cycle (“customer journeys”) as well as for combining analytical and interactive tasks in accordance with data protection. The complexity of corporate CRM processes is also increased due to the connections with other channels (so-called “omni-channel management”). – Cross-system coordination. A comprehensive support of Social CRM activities requires the coordination of as many Social CRM elements as possible. An aligned architecture will reduce integration complexity and leverage more Social CRM potentials. Since current Social CRM application systems will consolidate in the future, these will sustain the move towards more integrated Social CRM solutions as described below. Although the long-term effects of Social CRM are not fully known, the case studies suggest potentials for all CRM core processes (see Table 5.1). As mentioned, these effects do not arise automatically from simply establishing a social media presence. In this book, they are seen as the result of a comprehensive Social CRM perspective that includes the alignment of strategy, organization and systems. Key aspects are the coordination across departments, platforms,

106

5 Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

the customer life cycle coverage and the use of multiple application systems. Ultimately, each Social CRM approach needs to match the image of a company. For example, businesses with emotionally strong products may use social media for cooperative marketing activities. Yet, other companies with rather anonymous products may fail using the same approach. While social media show many potentials for CRM processes along the customer life cycle (Stelzner 2019), many Social CRM use cases focused on the fields of marketing and service. However, new features and alliances such as the cooperation between Instagram and Amazon (Nassauer 2019) or Chatbots with AI (Colon 2018) provide new means for directly supporting the sales process. Building on the idea of shops on Facebook (see the Spreadshirt case), users will be able to jump into a purchase process from any social media based touchpoint in their customer journey, which further enhances the link between marketing, sales and service. For example, social media users may order products while they are reading UGC or while they are in activities within their community. This way firms can

Table 5.1 Effects of Social CRM CRM core processes

Effects

Marketing

− − − − −

Sales

− − − −

Service

− −

Cross-functional processes

− − − − − − −

Responding within short times when users first contact the company Conducting campaigns in social media Identifying contacts (“leads”) from discussions Tracking of campaign success in real-time Using UGC, such as experiences and suggestions, in marketing activities Offering advisory services and social media shops as distribution channels Converting social media leads into customers via links to shopping systems Following recommendations from social media users in online shops (“social shopping”) Supporting other distribution channels (web shop, branch office, sales employees) Activating social web users as “service employees” to detect/avoid errors Handling of service enquiries in real-time and link to service management Identifying problems in forums and publishing solutions Notifying the community about current problems or topics Identifying and targeting opinion leaders (“influencers”) Developing communities that are affine to the company, brand, product or topic Enhancing the quality of customer data and data on customer journeys via social logins Improving brand and reputation management via the tracking of positive/negative postings Detecting trends and contributing to new products/innovations

5

Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

107

Fig. 5.2 Integrated Social CRM architecture

more easily address potential buyers through community-specific social media platforms, such as fashion affine users of Instagram, tech affine users in forums or travel affine users on blogs. However, the basis for realizing such scenarios is an existing integration of social media with CRM-related processes and systems. An important precondition for Social CRM is the maturity of the organizational and technical infrastructure: If companies only analyze their presences with the functionalities of a social media platform, it is possible to obtain standardized results (e.g. number of postings, likes). More advanced solutions including automated text analysis, however, may yield much richer insights into background information and may allow to use data for further purposes. For instance, automated searches for problems and solutions discussed on social platforms offer the possibility to identify recurring service-related questions. Companies, such as Cyberport, may elaborate

108

5 Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

possible solutions rapidly and publish them in a central platform (e.g. their FAQs). Another example is an airline passenger who has left a valuable object on the plane and contacts the airline via a social media service. Via a real-time analytics system, the airline could then identify the problem and notify the operating division or operating service provider at the respective airport. They would be able to locate the object and to inform the passenger directly via social media. Obviously, such integrated scenarios require a high degree of alignment of organizational and technological issues. This leads to the framework of integrated Social CRM, which includes design elements on three conceptual levels (see Fig. 5.2): – Strategy level. Depending on a company’s Social CRM goals, the four strategies (see Sect. 4.1) differ for each CRM process and lead to various combinations. Mature Social CRM solutions illustrate that Social CRM may contribute to enhance customer satisfaction and lifetime value in every stage of the life cycle. Besides the cases described in this book, the German Fidor bank (www.fidor.de) shall be mentioned, which conceives itself as “bank without advisors” and has established an owned social media community, where “banking among friends” occurs. Members may discuss and even define new financial products. Besides cross-functional processes, such as product and innovation management, the social media bank also conducts campaign, lead, offer and services management via social media. – Process level. An integrated scenario includes a coordinated presence on multiple social media platforms, the coordination of customer touch points in social media as well as the use of analytical and interaction functions that are linked via management functions with the core CRM processes. They form the basis for seamless customer interactions (e.g. offers on different channels) along the entire customer life cycle. – Systems level. Finally, the system level comprises the applications and functionalities that support an integrated Social CRM. It includes the functionalities of the individual social media platforms, the various application systems (see Table 3.1), and the interfaces among these components. Specialized Social CRM tools are either isolated solutions or are linked with CRM systems via interfaces. The latter support the classical CRM processes and provide adapters to corporate back-end systems (e.g. for master data, availabilities or inventories from ERP systems, orders in EC solutions). In view of the differences in data types and data quality, the data view recognizes that there is a need to distinguish various databases. These include raw data from social media platforms, intermediary databases used as a “playground” for Social CRM tools (e.g. for sentiment and text analysis) and the CRM databases. For the future, two main perspectives may be expected for integrated Social CRM infrastructures. On the one hand, providers of Social CRM systems may consolidate their Social CRM functionalities (e.g. text mining) in their tools. This mainly applies to providers of CRM system (e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft CRM) as well as to providers of Social CRM tools (e.g. Falcon Social, Viralheat/Cision,

5

Learnings for an Integrated Social CRM

109

Facebook app kits). On the other hand, more specialized systems may evolve with defined interfaces. While providers of CRM systems have the advantage of direct access to relevant customer and market data and the ability to integrate with both back-end and front-end systems, specialized Social CRM tools may develop and implement new functions rapidly without taking comprehensive workflows into account. Overall, integrated infrastructures are only about to evolve due to the lack of integrated Social CRM software packages, but also due to concerns regarding the business benefits and the necessary financial investments. In summary, this book aimed to provide orientation in the emerging field of Social CRM and to raise awareness of the potentials of social media in customer-facing processes. Based on the existing experiences, it may be expected that social media will emerge as an important communication and interaction channel, which complements other channels. This development is still growing in maturity and businesses need to determine the added value of Social CRM for themselves and their customers. As formulated in the preface, a positive and constructive use of Social CRM offers valuable advantages in achieving more customer-orientation. In analogy to online banking, convincing incentives are necessary to persuade users to share at least some of their personal data. However, businesses have to ensure that this data is handled trustfully and in accordance with data protection laws. Companies need to be aware of the legal conditions regarding the collection, processing and storage of UGC. It may be expected that increased legal certainty together with the growing performance and integration skills of existing and new Social CRM systems, will allow businesses to implement more mature Social CRM solutions with less financial investment in the future.

References Alt, R. (2016). Electronic markets on customer-orientation. Electronic Markets, 26(3), 195–198. Colon, T. (2018). Eight tips for boosting sales in your digital sales transformation. https://www. forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/07/13/eight-tips-for-boosting-sales-in-your-digitalsalestransformation/#73b1e7dc52a0. Retrieved July 12, 2019. Facebook. (2018). Facebook recently announced a major update to news feed; Here’s what’s changing. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/04/inside-feed-meaningful-interactions/. Retrieved April 26, 2018. Nassauer, S. (2019). Instagram encroaches on Amazon with new shopping feature. https://www. wsj.com/articles/instagram-encroaches-on-amazon-with-new-shopping-feature-11552996800. Retrieved July 12, 2019. Stelzner, M. A. (2019). Social media marketing industry report: How marketers are using social media to grow their businesses. https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2019/05/IndustryReport2019.pdf. Retrieved July 12, 2019.

Appendix

Law

Link for more information

Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (BDSG) updated following the GDPR

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bdsg_1990/

Competition Law including Competition Act 1998 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/41/ contents Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/ contents

Data Protection Act (DPA) updated following the http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/ GDPR contents Enterprise Act 2002

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/40/ contents

Federal Trade Commission’s Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs)

https://www.ftc.gov/sites/de-fault/files/ documents/reports/privacy-online-reportcongress/priv-23a.pdf

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679

https://www.eugdpr.org/

Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb (UWG) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/ index.html Gesetz über Urheberrecht und verwandte Schutzrechte (UrhG)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/ BJNR012730965.html

LEI 12.529 from November 2011 “Sistema Brasileiro de Defesa da Concorrência”

http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato20112014/2011/Lei/L12529.htm

LEI 12.965 from April 2014 “Marco Civil da Internet”, a dedicated law for privacy is in preparation

http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato20112014/2014/lei/l12965.htm

LEI 9610 from February 1998 “Direito Autoral”

http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/l9610. htm

Telekommunikationsgesetz (TKG)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tkg_2004/

Telemediengesetz (TMG)

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/

Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con-tent/EN/ (TFEU) TXT/?uri=celex:12012E/TXT U.S. Antitrust Law (Sherman Act 1890, Federal https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competitionTrade Commission Act (1914), Clayton Act 1914) guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws

(continued) © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3

111

112

Appendix

(continued) Law

Link for more information

U.S. Copyright Law Title 17

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/

UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (BCAP-Code) https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/ advertising-codes/broadcast-code.html UK Code of Non-Broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotions and Direct Marketing (CAP Code)

https://www.asa.org.uk/codes-and-rulings/ advertising-codes/non-broadcast-code.html

Index

A Activity tracking, 72 Aliasing, 96 Analytics, 15 Application Programming Interface (API), 15, 39, 55, 65, 76, 83, 84 Application system, 55 B Bag of words (Bow), 61, 86 Best-of-breed approach, 84 BIG, 47 Blog, 5 Bottlenose, 69 Brand management, 12, 24, 33, 40, 52 Buzzrank, 47 C Campaign management, 12, 22, 30, 38, 45, 51 Chatbot, 3, 6, 16 Chief listening officer, 82 Co-creation, 36 Collaboration, 81 Collective intelligence, 102 Community, 33, 47 Community management, 34, 41, 52 Complaint management, 12, 51 Content analysis, 89 Content management system, 41 Content scheduling, 72 Cooperation platform, 27 CoTweet, 42, 47 Crawler, 85, 97 Cross-functional processes, 12, 24, 33, 40, 47, 52 Crowding out, 3 Customer, 12 feedback, 23 insight, 15

journey, 51, 103 service, 33 Customer life cycle, 12, 13, 103 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), 11 Customer Relationship Management (CRM), 11, 16 analytical, 13 business object, 75 collaborative, 13 communicative, 13 core processes, 12, 50 design areas, 12 operational, 13, 81 system, 74 Cyberport, 19 D Dark posting, 45 Dashboard, 70, 76 Data, 4 access, 97 dimensions, 7 drilling, 33 management, 82 mining, 61, 86 privacy, 90 protection, 90, 102 quality, 89 utilization, 97 volume, 7 Data aggregation provider, 65, 97 Data protection management system, 99 Data Protection Officer (DPO), 92 Dell, 25 Demand forecasting, 33 Domain shaping, 88 E Earshot, 66, 76

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. Alt and O. Reinhold, Social Customer Relationship Management, Management for Professionals, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23343-3

113

114 Emotions, 6 Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), 55 Extramind, 41 F Facebook, 11, 20, 29, 31, 38, 40, 44 Facebook app, 62 Facebook shop, 39 Falcon Social, 60, 71 Feed, 5 Feedback management, 12, 23, 32, 51 Flickr, 29, 31, 44 Followers, 11 Foursquare, 44 G General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 91 GlobalWebIndex, 35 Google Alerts, 47 Google+, 22 I Influencer, 39, 62, 75, 98 Infrastructure management, 82 Innovation management, 12, 34, 52 Instagram, 44 Integration, 81 Interaction, 16 Internationalization, 83 J Jive, 48 K Knowledge, 80 L Landing page, 23, 31, 45 Layered system, 36, 52, 102 Lead, 12 Lead management, 12, 31, 51 Link analysis, 68 LinkedIn, 29, 31 Links, 6 Lithium, 48, 66 LivePerson, 47 M Management functionality, 16 Marketing, 12, 51 Marketplace, 39 Market research, 51 Mass customization, 36

Index Mention, 73 Messenger, 5 Metadata, 6 Metrics, 90 Microblog, 5 Microsoft CRM, 62, 75 N Natural Language Processing (NLP), 63 NetworkedInsights, 69 O Offer, 12 Offer management, 12, 32, 45 Omniture, 47 Online shop, 23, 31, 39 Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), 6 Ontology, 65, 67, 87, 88 Ontology engineering, 88 Open innovation, 36 Opinion analysis, 67 Opinion leader (influencer), 75 Opportunity, 12 Opt-in, 92 Organization structure, 50 P Partner shop, 39 Pinned posting, 22 Pinterest, 20, 28 Podcast, 5 Presence, 14, 79 Processing, 97 Process level, 106 Process management, 82 Product and service enquiries, 23 Product and service management, 39 Product development, 47 Product management, 24, 40 Profiling, 97, 98 Pseudonymization, 96 Purpose, 96 R Radian6, 34 Reach, 73 Real name, 75, 96 Relevance, 89 Relevance analysis, 67 RenRen, 29 Reports, 72 Representational State Transfer (REST), 84 Retweet, 20 River, 70

Index S Sales, 12, 51 Salesforce, 34, 76 Salesforce Chatter, 27, 35 Sales support, 45 Seeding, 26 Self-service, 51 Semantics, 87, 88 Sentiment, 47, 67, 86 Sentiment detection, 67 Service, 12, 51 Service management, 12, 23, 32, 46 Share, 31 Share of voice, 29 Sharing platforms, 5 SlideShare, 27 Social big data, 7 Social CRM development stages, 81 effects, 104 elements, 14 integrated, 105 integration, 81 maturity, 52, 81, 83 organizational unit, 82 strategy, 79 term, 14 Social data provider, 65, 93 Social login, 89 Social media, 4 characteristics, 10 content, 5 data items, 5 hosted external open, 14, 20, 27, 37, 43 hosted external restricted, 14, 20, 29, 38, 44 hosted internal, 14 management, 57 manager, 62, 82 monitoring, 42 operation model, 14 owned external open, 20, 27, 37 owned external restricted, 37, 42 owned internal, 14, 27, 37, 42 owned internal restricted, 14 principles, 4 Social Mention, 42 Social Network Analysis (SNA), 68 Social networks, 5 Social software, 3

115 Social web, term, 2 Solr, 65 Soundcloud, 20 Spreadshirt, 36 Sprinklr, 35 Stop word, 65 Strategic level, 105 Support of channel partners, 31 Synthesio, 66 Systems level, 106 T Tag cloud, 71 Tagging, 67 Text mining, 65, 85, 89 Third party aggregator, 9 Ticket, 13 Topic management, 47 Twitter, 6, 27, 32, 37 U UGC ownership, 93 URL shortener, 61 User-Generated Content (UGC), 3 User profile, 6 V Viralheat, 66, 77 Viralheat/Cision, 57, 73 Virality, 39, 46 Vocabulary, 88 W Web 2.0, 2 Web forums, 5 Weblog, 5 Weibo, 29 Wiki, 41 Workflow, 81 Workflow management, 78 World Wide Web (WWW), 2 X Xing, 29 Y YouTube, 20, 28, 31, 37, 39, 44