Pst- is your CRM listening to your eCommerce customers?
(Or is it hard of hearing?)

You know how important social is to the typical eCommerce store. But do you really know how important it is? Your customers are talking, sharing, liking and tweeting. Are you listening? Or is your CRM hard of hearing?

“Over 25 billion social interactions take place on Twitter each day”

“Online stores that have a social presence have 32% more sales on average than stores that don’t”

“74 percent of consumers use social networks for help making buying decisions”.

Social listening – What is it, anyway?

Social data has been scraped, grasped and grabbed en masse – leading to vast swathes of data that doesn’t compute – and that little can be done with (at least anything meaningful). Social listening is the intelligent method of harnessing social data. It tracks conversations around topics, keywords, phrases, brands, products or industries – helping brands discover opportunities, make marketing decisions, stock choices and changes to processes – all of which are in the wider social world far (far) beyond your social pages.

Put simply, for the eCommerce business owner with a CRM, profiles that are enhanced with social listening provide the full picture.

eCommerce CRM – The current state of play

“Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest”.

Wise words, from Dan Neely, when describing the difference between simply capturing social profiles in your CRM, and a CRM that socially listens.

Your eCommerce site has analytics, whether Google Analytics or something slicker – complete with heat maps, click tracking and more. But here’s the thing – no matter how many bells and whistles your analytics software has, it is only monitoring your website, while social listening let’s you into analysis and reflection.

With a CRM that socially listens, the eCommerce owner can…

• Understand overall brand health
• Create content their audience craves
• Generate ideas for marketing campaigns
• Improve customer experience
• Drive strategic product decisions

Website analytics monitors. Your CRM captures.

Social listening dives deeper – analysing, reaching out and reflecting.

For the eCommerce store that fully embraces (and integrates) social listening, the full picture that they see (over and above their competitors) can lead to leaps and bounds being made in everything from marketing campaigns to customer experience.

Time for a brand health check – 3 stats 1 case study

Social media is now the number 1 route for customer care…

“36% will shame you publicly, 1 in 3 will switch to a competitor”.

“93% of shoppers’ buying decisions are influenced by social media- because 90% trust peer recommendations. But only 14% trust advertisements”.

“25% of millennials expect to get a response within 10 minutes”

“25% of millennials expect to get a response within 10 minutes”

And, when a CRM connects deeply with the wider social world, transformational changes can take effect for brands. Case and point made with Nestle, which now not only responds to 95% of customers via social within an hour, but also connects with their consumers on a personal level.

“Marketing Cloud enables Sciuto’s teams to reach consumers on a personal level by building consumer journeys that adapt to how individuals engage with content. Journey Builder and Predictive Intelligence enable personalized experiences to scale up to the millions of consumers Nestlé Waters serves. The goal is to build relationships with our consumers to improve their lives driving healthy hydration. “This is not about marketing and sales. It’s about holistically managing the relationship with our consumer across brands and functions,” Sciuto said”.

“The capabilities that are being enabled by Salesforce are truly transformational.”

– TIM BROWN, PRESIDENT AND CEO

Going beyond monitoring (way beyond)

A CRM that hears your customers across all social channels serves up deeper, more meaningful insights and understanding. And CRM’s are rapidly advancing the comprehensiveness of their social add-ons. Such as Salesforce, with Social studio;

vTiger – with their Social Module; Zoho – with Zoho Social and Microsoft Dynamics CRM – with Social Engagement.

Social listening isn’t just a nice to have for your CRM – but an out and out essential. It can shine a light on shopper sentiment (what they think and feel and what they experience when in contact with your brand), increase customer retention, flag up problems and guide the way with the next marketing campaign.