"What is Social CRM?" is a question I'll be answering often in the future as Cubic Compass moves beyond our customer portal roots to embrace a new paradigm in customer service and support.

Let me first state that there is no single agreed upon definition of "Social CRM", and you'll never be asked this question in a quiz, so there's no right or wrong answer.

The "CRM" aspect of Social CRM denotes the embracing of existing CRM systems as a basis for enabling and managing online relationships. This is where we part ways with many of our Social CRM counterparts who tend to see social business software as a replacement for CRM. For midmarket and larger companies, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a single version of the truth, which is why the customer record in an existing CRM system should be preserved, embraced, and extended with Social Web 2.0 features.

Long-term, it is our vision that companies will look to fulfill basic online Social CRM requirements first when selecting a CRM solution.

80% of information stored in CRM systems today is manually entered by internal Sales and Support staff. In Social CRM, only 20% of the information is internally entered. The remaining 80% of data is provided by the customers themselves, enabling a unique and new opportunity for Customer Intelligence.

Social CRM encourages online collaboration, community, and discovery... not processes. But Social CRM metrics can be used to trigger internal CRM processes, such as reviewing negatively rated Solution articles and chat sessions or following up to forum comments.

A productive discussion about Social CRM must first start by categorizing organizations as B2C or B2B. It makes perfect sense in a B2C relationship for customers to vent their frustrations with Jet Blue or Comcast through Twitter or Facebook. A B2C organization would be remiss not to utilize these tools. Most "Social CRM" solutions today take this B2C "outer locus of control" approach to monitor, integratewith, and manage broader social networks.

Many large consumer organizations have dedicated Community Managers that monitor these social networks. We expect Twitter and Facebook to gradually offer Professional versions of their service to help organizations manage these B2C Social CRM interactions.

Social CRM for B2B companies requires a much different approach, and this is our area of focus. As an example, if an Engineer at Boeing needs help with a jet engine component made by GE, he/she will *not* simply go to Twitter and attempt to describe the problem in 140 characters hoping that someone from GE will see the Tweet and respond. Instead, most customers will go to a suppliers website/customer portal to resolve their issue.

Historically, customer portals only provided some basic solution search and case management functionality. The social aspect of Social CRM now enables customer portals to be rich with the following features:

• Search results with community driven relevance
• Customer Roles
  
• Comments
• Discussions
• Voting
• Tagging
• Rating
• Bookmarking
  

These features result in a richer self-service solution that enables customers to network with others and find answers to their problems 24x7.

Social CRM provides quantifiable results:

• Increased case deflection
• Decreased call center calls
  

And qualitative improvements:

• Greater customer satisfaction
• Access to community of experts
• Acknowledgement of issues
  

Cubic Compass Social CRM recognizes that customers can be described in far richer terms than "Lead" or "Contact" and provides support for role-based experiences, such as "Engineer", "Primary Contact", "Donor", "Volunteer", or "Gold Partner".

I'll look forward to demonstrating these features in a series of webinars over the next few months to help you experience how to get more from CRM with a Social CRM solution from Cubic Compass. We'll also be applying our Social CRM solution to a new channel management solution in late 2009, so keep an eye out for more announcements.