More Social Media in CRM: SAP CRM 7.0 Gets Twitter
Perhaps SAP is so tired of hearing criticism for their ERP product that they’ve decided to beef up their CRM platform for a while. That’s right, this week SAP announced that SAP CRM 7.0 would live in the future, and features a Twitter integration.
Twitter is where many enterprise software companies have begun their foray into social network integrations—despite producing lots of noise, it is a very simple way to gain insight into customers’ conversations and tastes. And SAP is being smart about the integration—the Business Objects Text Analyzer will provide sentiment analysis of user’s Twitter streams. The goal, as usual, is to create targeted connections with customers using social media.
But as there were difficulties before, some obstacle still remain, and not just for SAP, but for any company trying to effectively leverage social tools typically used for leisure. And SAP CRM VP of Marketing, Vinay Iyer, expressed security concerns to SearchCRM’s Barney Beal (though what those specific apprehensions are were not detailed in Beal’s article), as agreed that easily drawing significant data from Twitter will take some time.
Iyer did make an interesting note, however: he said he’s observed many customers that are simply happy to looking at aggregated data, find relevant tweets, do sentiment analysis, and create a response based on that. This is a good thing, because we might be waiting a while before CRM platforms can analyze and respond to individual tweets, which would be ideal for an all-encompassing “social CRM” platform, which is doutbless what many vendors have been working toward since the explosion of social networking.
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I’m not sold on this idea that social media should be integrated into CRM. The problem with CRM systems is that they try to do everything, and as a result seemed to have lost focus. These are no longer tools that help you develop and maintain client relationships.
I got together with a group of rainmakers and did a series of posts about rethinking the perfect CRM. You can check it out at http://www.helpeverybodyeveryday.com/marketing-101/134-the-perfect-crm-for-aec-firms
I’d love to hear your comments!
I think that SAP’s move into CRM is a smart move. CRM is making a shift towards more social and inevitably Social CRM is going to become one of the core pieces of CRM software. Social tools have proven to be one of the premier methods to foster and maintain customer relationships and are here to stay
Yet smart enough to improve the interface. For example in the system TeamWox (http://www.teamwox.com/en/) was one of the main tasks.
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