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Defining Social CRM

June 14th, 2010 | Category: Social CRM
There are many different parts of social CRM, which is a collection of strategies to engage current and prospective customers. The first strategy is using product components.  The product components include customer community pieces, such as the website ‘Get Satisfaction’  which increases the flow of communication between companies and their customers.  The site gets feedback from customers to help companies find out what they want and need.
Another social CRM strategy is to analyze social graphs to acquire followers, who essentially become unpaid promoters of the product that the company is trying to sell.  If companies develop a good reputation, more people will buy their product.
Ideation is another strategy where companies ask customers to submit ideas or vote on how the company can improve or create new products.  This feature is helpful because the whole point of social CRM is to understand your customers.
Finding new social data sources are essential to social CRM.  Review and ratings sites, such as Yelp, can be another productive way to engage customers because it finds out what the customers like, want, and need.  Something to consider is that all reviewers may not have the same taste or opinions.  On the other hand, these sites allow companies to identify what types of people like their product.  Another term for this identity based targeting is demographics.  Social CRM moves beyond demographics because it is more strategic than basic identity targeting.
Social CRM is an extension of two markets, the enterprise collaboration and content market and the CRM market.  Successful social CRM products will fulfill the demands of both markets.
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Customer Data Used For Application Testing

December 17th, 2007 | Category: Customer Data

 An interesting study conducted by the Ponemon Institute has thrown up some interesting facts regarding the (mis)use of customer data. Sixty two percent of the companies that were questioned by Ponemon stated that they used real and sensitive customer data while testing and developing applications.

Given the fact that the data includes employee, vendor and customer records, and credit card and Social Security numbers, it is a little surprising that companies are loath to use duplicate data for testing purposes.

The report states that 52% of companies outsource application testing and 49% of those questioned revealed that they shared sensitive data with the outsiders working on the application testing. Disregard for data security comes across quite strongly in these situations where companies are lazy enough not to use dummy data. This easy access to data can tempt unauthorized people to abuse the data.
Shockingly, well it is shocking you know, 50% of the companies interviewed had no idea if their data had been compromised during the testing and a third were not sure if their data had been lost or stolen during the testing and development phase.

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