Jesus Hoyos - CRM in Latin America

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.

Managing International CRM Projects

This is the presentation about managing international CRM projects from the lecture I gave at the CRM Evolution Conference. One of the key points I presented was the ability to have address and name formats within your CRM software. What this means? Then when you select the country for the contact, your CRM software will allow you to have the specific name, telephone and address attributes for the contact, prospect and account/company. This will allow you to improve your de-dup logic and have better data for customer segmentation.

Agile and Scrum could be an option to quickly implement you CRM software in different regions but you need to have a master plan, you need a strategy. And look at your best practices and compare them with the local requirements - US-centric best practices in processes and functionality do not translate into best practices in some regions.

Managing International CRM Projects

View more presentations from Jesus Hoyos.

CRM best practices are not always best practices for Latin American companies

I heard this many times from many CRM vendors (I am very sure you have heard it too) - we have the best practices to make your business a success. And this one - let your company adopt our out-of-the-box functionality and processes, and we can implement the solution within weeks. All of these could be true based on the type of company or industry... and if possible you should keep your CRM implementations simple and less complex; and, implement in phases using proof-of-concepts and pilots.

But in Latin America, I still believe CRM vendors are not doing a good job selling CRM from a Latin America perspective. Why? many best practices of the CRM packages are based on practices from United States or Europe. These practices are not always best practices for Latin American companies.

Let me give you some examples:

Managing contacts and account: This is a typical functionality of all CRM packages. In the region all relationships are based on two types of customers - Personal Moral (the legal company that will buy from you, the company that will get the invoice) and Persona Fisica (the legal consumer that will buy from you and will get the invoice). And, yes, you have decision makers, influencers, sponsors, etc, but each country has different rules, laws and procedures to manage these relationships. 

Address Formats: Many CRM packages do not have address validation rules to manage local addresses. Most of the time you need to buy additional software to manage Latin American addresses. The same happens with Spanish names - First and Last Names -vs- First, Middle, Last and Maiden Names.

Billing and Collections: I have written about this before. Many CRM vendors do not have this as part of the CRM. It is part of the ERP functionality. In Latin America you start collecting funds as soon as you produce the invoice. Collections is a front-office function.

Companies need to understand that best practices become best practices once you measure them with metrics (read my Spanish post about this). Some best practices are standard practices but that does not make it a best practice. It is a proven best practice until it has been tested and measured. CRM vendors need to understand this as well, specially for the Latin American region.

Now, the reason, I still believe that the major CRM vendors are not doing a better job selling to the Latin American market is because there are many local CRM vendors (here and here) from Colombia, Brazil, Spain, Peru, Mexico and Argentina, that have adopted their solutions to each local and regional market. I have seen many of these tools in action and in demos. These solutions are good (some are excellent), with local support, and with processes and functionality unique to the region. And their pricing adapts to the market.

I strongly recommend that for 2010, CRM vendors need to take a good look in how they sell best practices and need to provide real functionality that is required by the region.