Managing Social Profiles in Your CRM (Part 1)

Part 1: Finding Social Profiles

Social CRM is all the rage these days. Every month dozens of articles try to convince us that connecting our CRM systems to social networks will give us great opportunities for sales, marketing and support. But one important message seems to be overlooked among all these great stories: How do I connect my CRM to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?

The current generation of Social CRM implementations is facing a few problems when it comes to connecting CRM systems to social networks. First of all, the most innovative solutions on the market are all stand-alone products. But many organizations are not willing to install yet another tool as a separate island, and filling it with customer data. What they need is a social dimension in the tools that they already use, and a master data management (MDM) solution across multiple tools, so that the social data can be shared. But in order to connect social network profiles to contact data in our regular CRM systems we have to overcome a couple of challenges. This is the first of three articles describing these challenges.

The first challenge is that our systems are already full of customer data. And to connect that data to social network profiles we have to manually find customers on-line and manually enter their user names and profiles into our systems. Why? For thousands of customers that is a lot of data entry! There should be a way to automate all that, don't you think? On the other hand, no automated system will ever be able to match the Steven Smith in my database with the 27,000 Steven Smiths on Facebook. But I know what our Steven Smith looks like, because he was at our service desk yesterday. So if I could just see some pictures…

Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable traditional CRM systems to find people on social networks. But different APIs use different methods, and each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

Find People by Email Address

A search on a person's email address results in high quality hits, because most email addresses uniquely identify individual people. However, in many databases personal email addresses are not (or sparsely) available. Furthermore, some people use different addresses on different social networks, and most social networks do not permit searches using email addresses. Therefore, this search method has only few hits. But when there's a hit it is probably a good one.

Find People by User Name

A search on a person's user name may result in more hits because user names are public where email addresses are not. And the quality of these hits is just as high. Some businesses have customer-facing services with user names available, and we can assume that many consumers prefer to use the same user name on different systems. Unfortunately, in many cases the preferred user name of a person will be unknown. This renders this method even less useful, unless it is used as an additional step after finding a user name with one of the other two methods.

Find People by Full Name

A search on a person's full name results in many more hits than either of the previous two methods. However, you not only get the person you're looking for, but also everyone else with a similar name. Depending on the uniqueness of the name this might or might not be a problem. By checking or filtering on additional data, like country, city, and bio, one is often able to find the right person in a relatively short time. A user's on-line profile pictures are particularly useful with this method. No system in the world can rival with our own experience at facial recognition.

The conclusion, with the current state of technologies, is that providers of CRM systems and other contact management applications might need a combination of all three methods to match social network profiles with existing customer data. A simple automated sweep of email addresses can work well to find a portion of your contacts on social networks. But it may leave the majority of your contacts in the dark. The second approach is then to find the remaining people by name, location, and picture. As this is a slower process it should perhaps only be performed for 10 or 20 percent of your most valuable customers. But, given the 80-20 rule, these contacts are probably responsible for 80 percent of your business.

Plenty of APIs, and various aggregated search engines, are already available. The only thing left for you to do is to convince someone that your CRM needs an upgrade…

(go to part 2: Hiding Network Issues, part 3: Forming Unique Identities)

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