The 24th Social Crm Use Case Loyalty

As a follow up to our webinar The Enterprise Social Customer featuring author Adam Metz (see replay and slides), we are publishing a series of posts to dive deeper on certain key topics. First up: Loyalty + Social CRM.

Metz mentioned in our webinar the work he did with Altimeter Group around “The 23 Use Cases of Social CRM”. One use case we thought was missing from this rather extensive list was Loyalty Programs. We see more and more customers asking about loyalty program integration and have identified three really interesting ways in which social CRM intersects with loyalty efforts:

1. Member Engagement and Customer Support

Loyalty programs are just about everywhere. (I have 5 customer loyalty cards on my keychain alone.) Aside from the obvious benefits of usage data that these programs present, they can really create a community for your best customers.

Your loyal customers are the ones you want talking up your brand online. It stands to reason that a social media monitoring system should be “member-aware.” Knowing when a high-revenue customer posts a positive or negative comment is critical.

While many social media efforts focus on getting the most-connected people talking about you, we argue that the ones that should have the most “clout” – with a “c”, not a “k” – within your organization are those that have the greatest impact your bottom line. Tools and processes that make it easy to keep tabs on your high value (read: recurring revenue) customers on social networking sites are paramount.

Having social media posts and interactions sit alongside all the other interaction data (purchase history, online activity, phone support calls, etc.) in the customer record in your CRM system is also critical. This is exactly why we integrated Buzzient Social Media Monitoring and Engagement platform with CRM systems like Siebel

2. Spreading the Word: Getting New Members

Loyalty programs are always looking to bring additional target customers into the fold. If you’re lucky, these customers always sign up for your loyalty program and you get 100% uptake.

If this is you, congrats, you can skip to the next section.

Otherwise, social media offers an excellent chance to capture new loyalty leads and convert them to members. Consider setting up alerts to find prime suspects and invite them through social channels to join your loyalty program. Look for certain keywords or phrases, or hand-pick users who have posted positive comments.

3. Sentiment Comparison

Loyalty programs can add a new dimension to sentiment analysis (which should be part of any social media strategy) by comparing member sentiment to the community at large. How does your brand affect the sentiment of the loyalty program members, and how big is the ripple effect on the general population over time?

When you have a link between your loyalty program and social media you can really see how much your program creates a halo effect for your brand on social channels.

And there are plenty of additional ways to use social media in loyalty programs. The most common request we hear is around awarding points or credit for social media interactions.

We see a strong emerging trend in social media leveraged for loyalty programs. To serve up a strong solution, we partnered with Oracle’s Siebel Loyalty team to produce an integrated system. For a detailed walk-through, check out Closed Loop Siebel CRM and Social Media. (The Buzzient part is toward the end, at about the 3 minute mark. The narrator doesn’t mention us by name, but trust us we’re in there!)

Buzzient is the only social media system integrated into CRM and Loyalty systems to enable these and other use case scenarios. For more use cases and to learn how Buzzient Enterprise can bring social into your CRM workflow, check out the Using Social section of our website.