Jesus Hoyos - CRM in Latin America

My #SugarCon 2013 Presentation - SCRM and the global impact.

Global Considerations for sCRM Strategy from Jesus Hoyos

Repost - Welcome to CRM Idol Season 3 #crmidol #crm #scrm

This is a repost. Original post found here.

Welcome to CRM Idol Season 3

We've had quite a ride up to now. None of us ever realized that this competition would get this important to the CRM and social markets. In the 2 completed years, eight of the participants have been acquired, several others gone on to a great deal of success and many others far more visible than they had ever been before they began. Many have ongoing relationships to the CRM community that wouldn't have been possible without their participation.

This year we expect the largest group of applications in our history and we expect that we will see innovations that will delight and excite us and the market place at large. We expect some ups and downs as every year and in the end we expect that we'll see companies from the customer facing world emerge and flourish, which is the whole purpose of this contest.

So, if you're interested in participating, welcome! Just follow three simple instructions.

1. Make sure you thoroughly read the rules and the instructions for CRM Idol 2013 on this website. Make a point of it so you can be certain that you qualify and, if  you do, you are doing exactly as asked by the judges.
2. Request a registration form from us at request@crmidol.com
3. Fill it out and send it to submit@crmidol.com.  The faster  you do this the better since there are limited slots and ties go to the timely.

Also, spend a little time with Andrew Yates, CEO of Artesian Solutions and Brandon Evans, CEO of Crowdtap, both of last year's winners, and read their tips and hints on how to do well in CRM Idol 2013. There's some great advice there.

So, let's get this party started!! 

Welcome everyone, to another season of CRM Idol!!

The impact of social media in the call center #latam #scrm

Tim Wilson from Nearshore Americas interviews me about the impact of social media in call center and BPOs from Latin America. I had the opportunity to discuss my views around analytics, communities and managing process using different social crm technologies.

“The risk in Latin America is that many call centers promote ‘non-voice services’, but they don’t really know how to do social media,” says Jesus Hoyos, a principal with Solvis Consulting.

Hoyos says that companies can become victims of their own success. If businesses and their outsourcing partners do not have a technological model that can scale, then they can find themselves paying through the nose for what should be a social media bonanza that can deliver measurable ROI.

“If a call center wants to sell you seats, and they are charging you $20 an hour per rep to manage yoursocial media, then you could end up paying for more and more people,” says Hoyos. “That’s simply not scalable, which is why you need a technological solution. If you are a bank, for example, you can’t handle 30,000 or 50,000 conversations, with people suddenly jumping from social media and picking up a phone. This is why a workflow methodology is crucial to deflect traffic.”

Read the full interview here.

Top CRM Blogs 2012

CRMOutsiders announces the TOP CRM Blogs from 2012. Here is the list for 2011. I have the opportunity to in both years (Spanish blog). Make sure you follow this impresive list of CRM practicioners, analysts and influencers.

Customer Loyalty at SAPPHIRE Madrid 2012

During the Sapphire Madrid 2012 I had the opportunity to discuss the importance of customer analytics in creating customer loyalty programs. The interview starts at the 11:55 min.

 

Multi-Cultural Marketing: Ready to Reach 50 Million Latinos #sapradio

Listen to this radiocast with #SAPRadio about Multi-Cultural Marketing: Ready to Reach 50 Million Latinos? Hosted by Bonnie Graham from SAP Game-Changers.

I had the opportunity to chat with Mike Valdes-Fauli and Rae Leyshon the impact of the Hispanic market from the social CRM and CRM point of view.

Discussing how to Enchant Your Customers with Guy Kawasaki at #Sugarcon 2012

After Guy Kawasaki keynote at SugarCon 2012, I had the opportunity to discuss how to enchant your customers with Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Chief Strategist & Evangelist, Brent Leary, Owner, CRM Essentials, and Larry Augustin, CEO of SuagrCRM and Guy Kawasaki.

Here is the full video of the keynote and panel. The panel starts at the 00:55:16 minute. You can go directly to the start of the panel here.

 

The evolution of the social media command center in Latin America #scrm

From Community Managers to Community Management

In the recent few months I have seen a noteworthy progression of social media command centers in Latin America in industries like CPG, telecommunications and banks. The Latin American market is changing from having just a community manager to monitor Facebook to forming command centers with monitoring tools and community platforms. Some of these companies are early adopters eager to take the risk of failing and to quickly overcome any social media hurdles. 

Some are just using social media tools, others are incorporating forums and knowledge bases and others have a CRM system somehow integrated to the command center and social media channels. The good thing is that these companies are learning to listen and to validate social media metrics to then start a Social CRM strategy in phases. Based on what I have seen in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina, I have come up with 4 different levels to manage a social media command center.

1) Facilitate the Conversation. Using social media tools like Buzzient, Next Principles, CoTweet or Radian6, we can monitor and have an engagement where agents of the command center and/or the community managers are able to understand the conversations and be the advocates of the consumers. The problems are not solved but they facilitate the conversation to understand the problem.

2) Community Collaboration. Once they understand the problem, they seek ways to engage the community to solve the problem. With a knowledge management system and/or communities such as Open-source forums, blogs, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, Fuze Digital, Yahoo Answers and/or Lithium they can re-direct the consumer to the appropriate content to resolve the problem.

3) Solve the Problem. But if the community cannot solve the problem, or your company has no content in the knowledge base, they can then manage the problem in the CRM system with interfaces and processes that create contacts and cases from the social media-monitoring tool and/or from the community platform. This implies that not all conversations on Facebook or Twitter should reach the CRM system. The command center should have business rules and workflows that will filter these conversations to the appropriate areas in your organization and/or community platform. Some tools used are ZenDesk, Desk.com and CRM software integrated to social media channels.

4) Learn from Metrics. But the most important thing is the power in real time to analyze the conversations in the different social media channels and communities to learn from trends and metrics. The command center metrics should also be part of your customer analytics and BI strategy.

As you can see this involves a "community management" approach and it is more than just having ONE community manager. The command center must have Social Media Director, supervisors or community managers, agents, analysts, a knowledge management administrator, and a community platform administrator, among other roles (internal or external) such as the members of your communities

These 4 levels of community engagement have different management flavors: a) marketing departments, b) customer service, c) call center outsourcer, d) marketing agency, and, c) a combination of the agency with the marketing department. It is still an evolving process and these companies are still learning as the move from one phase of the implementation to another.  The interesting fact is that they now understand that it takes a community to manage a command center.

Note: Many of these companies are still under a stealth mode with their Social CRM strategies, some are just doing customer service, others are gathering ideas and feedback and others are just building communities outside Facebook and Twitter. They are still learning and are not yet using their social media success or failures for any public relation goals.

Collaboration Tools and the Impact on Project Management

Collaboration Tools and the Impact on Project Management

View more presentations from Jesus Hoyos

10 Steps to integrate CRM and Social Media (#SocialCRM, #scrm)

10 steps to integrate CRM and Social Media? We know that we need more than 10 steps. How many? Many more! It all depends on the level of maturity your organization has within your own CRM ecosystem and most importantly in the way you manage customers today. If you are still thinking products and branding, you still have a long way to go to integrate CRM and Social Media. Why? Integrating CRM and Social Media needs to be about converting conversations into transactions. It is about going beyond the Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers and Video views. We can talk about transparency, openness, collaboration, engagement and so on, but at the end of the day it is about improving sales and reducing cost in the new business model where we, the people (customers, influencers, advocates, etc.), are in control of the conversation.

Many of my customers and prospects in Latin America have been asking me how to connect these conversations with CRM. Some of these companies are at different levels in understanding what Social CRM is all about. Some of them just have a Facebook page, some have private or public communities, others are just listening, and some have Twitter integrated somehow into their CRM. I have seen agencies doing all of the social media work, or just part of it, and many companies have a need to integrate social media monitoring with the call center.

Who are these companies in Latin America? Mostly B2C companies such a CPG, TV/Entertainment, Call Centers outsourcers, universities, hotels, telecommunications and banks. Some of these companies are small business in Latin America, local and national companies, others are multinational corporations and big brands. But all of them are looking to engage the customer with Social CRM.

The need to implement Social CRM is definitely there. By looking at my customers needs, learning from my recent engagements, by watching the market and conversing with fellow analysts and consultants, I came up these 10 steps to start implementing Social CRM.

1) Understand your Conversation Map. Listen and understand the social media conversations from advocates to influencers and from detractors to consumers.

2) Understand the Social Graph of your customers. This is very important - it refers to your current customer in your CRM system, marketing database or customer datamart. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, external communities, etc., etc?

3) Have a Social Graph of your Best Customers. Are your best customers using social media?  Can you start engaging them for your own pilots? Can you engage them? What other types of customers can you engage? Again, these are known customers in your CRM system or Loyalty Program.

4) Establish processes & requirements to meet your goals and objectives based on current needs and the analysis from the above 3 steps.

5) Get ready to put together a social media plan based on the requirements and processes. Do you need to be on Facebook? Do you need call center integration? Do you need to integrate social media marketing with your marketing automation? Do you need a community to provide ideas and collaboration for customer support? Do you have a Social Media Manager ad policies in place?

6) Create specific use cases for your integration points to capture data. This is not just about technology but also about customer experience, culture and processes.

7) Have your traditional CRM ready for social media. Do you have the workflow, processes, rules, data structure, training, call center, people, etc., ready to manage communities and social media channels?

8) If your customer or influencers are already collaborating using social media, is your enterprise ready to collaborate internally? i.e. Social Business, E 2.0.

9) Like in CRM... Do you have the culture, people and change management attitude to really change?

10) Improve your CRM ecosystem - this should be step 1. Fix what is not working today!

What do you think? Would you add more steps, combine some of them? Start with a strategy right away? I would love to read your comments!

At the end, I think you definitely need steps 1 through 7. Start with pilots and small phases. Measure, learn and retry. Validate your success metrics, show ROI (short and long term ROI)... but start somewhere.

What to know more about these 10 steps? I have the Spanish presentation that I gave at the SAP Forum Mexcio about a month ago. Here is the English presentation I gave a few weeks ago at the Online Marketing Connect event (this was a webinar series with other speakers, you can listen to the webinar by registering here, go to Events, Focus Weeks, Social Media).