Social CRM: market research

Customer relationship management, or CRM for short, is one of the more tangible results of drinking from the firehose of customer data. In return for capturing customer data at the point of sales or service, you can now tell how often people purchase something, whether they buy more frequently on special days, and how often they call for service. It has revolutionized the strategic use of customer data.

After integrating social media into the customer care process, it seems only a small step to integrate this social media data into a CRM tool and use it to conduct market research and customer analytics. We will look now at the data. Besides directly answering a customer question, is there anything else that can be done with this data? The answer is yes. In the future we will be able to combine several data sources from customer service data over product discussion to product usage data. That kind of customer-centric data base has the potential to be leveraged for market research purposes.

One key advantage of this type of integration is that the issue of whether we are listening to the right people is no longer a factor, since you have all those social media comments enriched with your CRM data of your paying customers.¹ Another advantage is that the data is accessible in one way: this is a kind of master data management (MDM) system, only with one important differentiation. The social CRM system of the future will contain all different types of data: structured, ...