Saturday, May 09, 2009

Getting Social Media Into CRM

Social CRM
There are very few initiatives so far to integrate social media data into CRM (customer relationship management) database. In fact, it is very difficult to incorporate it on a technical point of view. In terms of customer relationship management strategy, it is crucial to integrate a community management approach, and consider social media as a new medium of interraction with customers.

How to integrate social media into CRM
The data contained into social media is complex. We probably need a semantic approach to get data used for CRM purpose. Moreover, social media contains lots of data in natural language, we need Natural Language Processing to help us extract meaningful data from them. One aspect that's gaining prominence is Sentiment Analysis that detects the sentiment of the person towards a product/service and thus can provide the info to the CRM system.

I've found this very interesting article. It explains that an ideal system would contain a blend of all three systems :
  • Semantic
  • Sentiment analysis & other NLP techniques
  • Direct data mapping
I believe this article shows well the issues CRM software will have to face to incorporate the social media data, and the keys for such an enterprise.