So I was just listening to the panel discussion, which was very interesting. I will look at the, yeah, an earlier phase of the customer interaction. And I was asked for a giving a short presentation about social CRM. The question was how actually do you balance customer experience privacy and business requirements in social CRM. And today I want to share some of our,
We're having a slight technical hitch at the moment. So I'll just while we correct that, if I could just pause you for a second. Okay. We're back now. Yeah. So if we start from this top,
Okay.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. So today I will share some of the learnings from us to our research, to our consulting at the CRC about the challenges that we had in social customer relationship management and how is them. And if time allows, I have also three upcoming challenges from my perspective that will shape the development of CRM in the next years, but first to start. So what is the social CRM? I usually refer to this company from which maybe, you know, or not it's Spreadshirt spreadsheet is a yeah, a company that uses actually individual apparel. So they print shorts based on the customer demand. And the whole business model is very, very customer focused. It's an essential element because they collaborate with their potential customers with potential designers that create the Perl. And second, they address with their Perl niche markets, very with very individual products and they cannot produce these products by them themselves.
So they need this collaboration with partners or their future customers that need a very specific design. And what they also do is they outsource a lot of the business processes into their community. So actually they are mainly producing and advertising the company, but all the marketing, the designs are done by the community. So it's a very collaborative business model. And that means they have to use all possible means to interact with their communities on the channel where their community is active. They need to monitor the market, get insights on upcoming designs on upcoming trends. And they have to share that with their community. And at the end, they have to really collaborate and work together with their community. So we just heard, heard in the panel that customers become type of employee. It's what they already do. So their customers, or like the customers with a longer history, they are the partners of the company.
They are kind of employees. And as I said, the business model is yeah, very customer focused and social CR plays an important part. So social CRM helps them to become accessible, to enrich the internal knowledge with external data, with the voice of the customer. And also it helps them to create a service system that is very responsive and adaptive to changing customer demands and expectations. And for realizing social CRM, it's not just a combination of CRM and social CRM. It means really, yeah. Integrating on the strategy level, integrating on the process and the is level. And this integration usually created also a lot of challenge and situations from the perspective of privacy, because the customer has demands and the business as well for delivering the service. And I want to go with you through the three levels just briefly to highlight some of the challenges.
So first of all, the strategic level, the question is how actually can social abusers be incorporated into the CRM corporations? And there are four different areas. Social media can just be a contact point presence. That means as a company, you are not only providing own platforms, but you are active on the platforms where customer is active, or for example, where the partner is selling his products. Second, you can acquire information about the market, about the users through social CRM. You can analyze the platforms, the content, the user, the user interactions to learn for your business, and also to share that information, or even to enrich your product with data from outside of the company. And you can use it of course, in workflows as direction channel. And you can use it for collaborating with the Mar with the market, for example, for creating new designs, helping the designers to create designs that the company actually can print.
And yeah, the first challenge is actually that we are not talking directly to customers. You have contract with, it's more kind of partnerships that you have on social CRM means that external people are maybe supporting your course, maybe criticizing your course, but you do not have a contact with them. You need to, with them on eye level. And it means as a business, you in social CRM, you start to become open to external users. You also can or should be very transparent about your terms and conditions for the interaction. So you state what, why you need information, what is allowed in the channel, and you should be very transparent about the purpose and intention. That's what in social cm. The solution is when working with external partners. The second one is that you use social media based on the purpose. The problem is that very often when companies introduce social CRM, they start with analyzing the data.
They start with capturing data and they do not exactly know which processes will benefit from that. That's a huge challenge. So the solution for that is usually that you differentiate between public and restricted platforms and that you try to reach out on external platforms, but then try to bring in contacts from external platforms into internal platforms. So called onion ring PO, and last up not least you place, or you use platforms based on the insights and reach you can get. But as well as the control you have over the platform. So social cm, you try to actually build a customer journey and influence the customer journey that the customer is not too far outside of your, of your reach. And if you want to do more of them, very close to your business on own platforms where you can up the terms and conditions and not, not, not have to follow external conditions.
For example, like Facebook. And the third challenge is actually how your employees are using social media. Social usually means you have to give your employees some freedom. You have to empower them and you give them the opportunity to speak in the name of the company on different social media. How did companies solve the problem that they are not actually directly controlling? What the employee does. They give them trainings about how to use the platform, what is allowed and what is not allowed. And they give them guidelines. And if there's any, any open questions to give them guidance and together, we can learn from social CR that it's very important, not only to think from the business side, but also from the customer side and to check the customer expectations. Because if you use social media and one of the, for areas, usually you can do very many things.
And many of them are also allowed if you have the content, but I want to point out that it's also important to check what the customer actually expect and what he accepts, because some of the things you could do legally are also not accepted by the customers. And that's what we saw in some of the social cm cases that many people or sorry, many managers are thinking about all the problems with the GTR. They may come along, but they do not start one step earlier. What actually does the customer expect? And what is the basis for this partnership, for this relationship that they are building and on the second level, then you could you come through the implementation here, you have yeah. Different tasks to do. You have to build up presences and you have to be active on external social media presences. You can analyze the data, you can interact to the platforms and you can integrate data, knowledge, or interactions into your internal database, internal processes.
Also here we have many challenges. The first one is, do you have a content? If a customer is complaining on an external platform about your product and looking for help to interact with him to solve the problem, but how do you design this indirection? You can reach out and then maybe you bring him in to your own platforms, to the platforms you control, and you can set up the terms and conditions. So the solution is if you companies should look very early for the consent for personalized directions. So as soon as there is a contact, you should reach out to the customer show 'em that you want to give them an answer and you should get the for that. Then you need, of course, to track the consent. We just occurred in the previous presentation about that, that it's very important to track really the content.
And the problem here is that, yeah, you have maybe content from a virtual identity, not a real person. And this brings us to the last challenge and solution that you should try to identify really the customers of your business, and then link identities with the profile. If you have the consent front, because then you can track and provide an individual service. The second one here is the analyzes. Actually you can do very, yeah, many things with social media analyzes tools. If you see very often is that different departments use different tools, stays being useful. However, many of the tools sometimes have functionalities that are totally in line with the GTB. And they're provided from outside. For example, of the European union, you need to sensibilize employees to really check the tools and get approval of the tools. So you should restrict tool like us. And the second one is each time a tool is used or analyze it is performed.
There should be an easy GDPR conformity check integrated. That's something. We, we see users of social CRM are aware of that, but yeah, the regulations are not always implemented. That's my business important to check. And the last, not the last one, the next one is about data enrichment. When analyzes results are integrated with CRM, very often existing data gets and which gets extended. And what is, it's important to really monitor the data processing and social CRM and manage actually this data preserving and to train your staff what is allowed and what is not allowed because technology very often provides opportunities that are not GDPR formed. And the last one data use, of course, when you use the data that you acquired, maybe on which data, then it's a, you need to make sure that you also use the data, the sense it was given by the customer.
And this is also a challenge because of this separated task of analyzing direction. Sometimes businesses lose track of what's actually the customer wanted from them, why he gave the data. And I think this is also something which we should be aware that the customer should be informed, not only about how we will use his data directions, but what will be done with his data during the analyzes. And then when he gets results, why he gets the results based on which data and the alternative is, which is also very often applied, that data is of course deleted or anonymized aggregated into larger parts of data, where you just focus on the insides and not the data itself from individual customers or visitors of your web or social media persons. And that is my second point. Very often, social CR we saw that GTR is like the first decision that that is GDPR is in focus of the first decision that is made.
But before that customer experience should come, so why do you need data? Why do you need to monitor? And what is the benefit for the customer? Because with this information, it's much easier to inform the customer well and to get his content and approval for what you plan to do. And if he doesn't give it, it's hard to give it. Then usually it can also use such techniques like data analyzation or clustering to get the insights you need for your business, but at the same time, protect the privacy. And on the last level of social CRM, we have, yeah, the integration of social media platforms and CRM systems on the data level, there are yeah, many different services Ray level that you can apply. Also, there are many systems that help on this task when you use the systems. However, there are some challenges. The first one is how it is the data data extractor some years ago, extraction covered API, web Porwal.
And so on the point is when crawling is applied, the it's much more difficult to respect the terms and conditions of the platform. So standard usually is to use the API, but this is not always possible. So it's important to check always terms and conditions also changes in this terms, conditions and social CR for the platforms. And that can be huge task. If there are more than 50 or 100 platforms in your monitoring and focus on privacy, preserving extraction methods. So maybe not co the full content, but just co metadata or even analyzes results without the, the full content that is available. Maybe on the platform. The second data processing, I already said, the selection of the GTR platform tool is important and should be always checked. Also, if this is really done by the departments that each tool they use was checked, and that there are limits for data processing, that there are clear definitions of what is allowed and what is not allowed in the country.
And the last point I would like to point out is this creation of shadow databases on social CR that's a problem which currently is not really solved. So in many cases we use a tool, usually also have access to historical data. And this historical data is to result from really, yeah, the extraction of the original data into the second database that can be later, we used for different analyzers with other purposes and so on. So you should be aware that if you use such tools, that can be shadow databases and yeah. How you want to handle that. And an alternative to this shadow databases is that only metadata is storage stored in the tools, but that means you cannot look in the past. So if you would like to know, how did my product develop regarding customer sentiment? Sometimes when you have such a sort database, you can look five years in the past, how was it actually for that product?
If you just look for the media data, you have to be run and can usually only check from the time where you start, you analyze this. So this, what I would like to take from, from this presentation, that data processing should not be transparent only to your customer. This is very important and it's not so easy to achieve, but at the same time, I see very often that it also should be very transparent to your business. So that also your department, your privacy protection officer, your employees know what is done, how the tools work, and if they are within the limits of the TTR or not, the starting form for my presentation was business requirements, customer events. We saw that business actually needs for social CRM. A lot of data can make a lot of use of different platforms. And so on at the same time, the customer actually wants a satisfying service experience and also a high level of anonymity and engine of negative data, which just is somehow opposing.
The problem is many customers are not aware of the extent of data processing, social CRM, that calls for businesses to really be transparent and to demonstrate also ethical behavior, because the tools very often, lot more than what is in the sense of the customer to look at customer experience. In my opinion, from the start, maybe customer experience is connected to three. Interesting. The first one is of course, the quality of the service that it's satisfying for the customer. This is a good first starting point for evaluating activity. The second one, however, is privacy protection. How well do you demonstrate that you are aware of privacy risk and how do you address them? And an interesting study from thinking worry, which is showed that besides these two elements, the third one trust has a very high influenza on customer satisfaction. So by demonstrating privacy, where or privacy protecting behavior, you build up trust.
And at the same time, this trust helps you to balance customer mind and business requirements. And it also has a huge impact on the customer experience. And yeah, with that, I want to close my presentation. So what, what are the learnings about building the customer privacy experience, check customer privacy, demand and preferences as part of building the customer-centric put building trust as a top priority, manage a customer journey also from this trust and privacy perspective and not only the affection perspective and seek for earlier customer content and double check activities, content seems to, to be difficult to obtain because then usually there are better ways to acquire the data without actually needing this content by using minimization, by using maybe synthetic data and last one, applied privacy, preserving functionalities, and also stimulate your customer to behave in the privacy protective way, keyword, privacy matching, which I think is also very important, which helped in social CRM to actually change or influence the behavior of social media users on different social media platforms, that they are not giving away all the data of stimulating the check, what they give away, how they behave and what is the consequence of sharing information.
Thank you for your.
