Social CRM & Mobile Care

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are a powerful tool in general, especially when it comes to keeping a business operating. Allowing companies to better manage its contacts with customers is never an unwelcome development, but NextPrinciples announced just a few days ago it has something impressive to show in terms of CRM: Insight-to-Action.

Insight-to-Action is part of a larger group commonly referred to as "social listening solutions", a platform that allows companies to keep better track of what's being said in social channels--both the very latest and those that are more of an emerging variety--which in turn allows companies to build better relationships with both current customers and prospective customers.

It's primarily geared toward the medium-sized to large businesses, and will help users focus on a variety of different points that make up the larger "customer experience". It will allow users to manage and execute new campaigns, gather leads, keep track of their social presence, even provide some customer care functions to keep customers happy after the sale.

But perhaps the biggest benefit with Insight-to-Action comes in the form of integration with various CRM systems. It integrates with most of the major names, like Microsoft (News - Alert) Dynamics, Salesforce.com, and SugarCRM, making it an extremely potent tool. The integration, coupled with the organization of Insight-to-Action--it's sorted into four modules: Campaigns and Events, Contact Management, Social Performance and Community Engagement--allows businesses to go more in-depth with their overall social profile and produce results and analyses that go beyond hits, likes and followers and get into the real meat of what all those various people and organizations are saying.

How well does it work? NextPrinciples' CEO and founder, Satya Krishnaswamy, made it very clear by providing examples, including one company that averted a $15 million revenue loss by staying on top of a crisis. Another company saw annual returns go up five-fold by using Insight-to-Action to keep track of customer relationships.

Those examples paint a pretty clear overall picture; managing social media, and managing customer relationships, is the key to success on several fronts. When things go wrong, customer relationship management is there to minimize the impact, show that a company is doing all it can in the face of otherwise major problems--everyone makes mistakes, but being ready to fix those mistakes is the hallmark of true professionalism--and prove that they deserve a customer's business because they're there in the good times and the bad alike. By like token, even when things aren't so dire, proper relationship management can point out new product offerings that would be well-received, as well as new pricing structures to set up, new warranty programs to offer, and of course, where products could stand some improvement.

While NextPrinciples' Insight-to-Action may not work for everyone, the sheer value of such a service is hard to pass up. Whatever software is used, though, the key point is to keep the relationship between company and customer as trouble-free as possible.