Just 35% of all Enterprises Use Social CRM for Customer Correspondence

Customer management systems are limping along, trying to meet the needs of enterprises. The latest surveys found that integrating social media information into CRM applications is steadily gaining importance.

Under contract to Sage Software, the market research firm RAAD surveyed 350 sales, marketing, and IT managers in big and small firms on the benefits and integration of social CRM. It found that 64% of them don’t use social CRM, not even for sales and marketing purposes. One-quarter of the respondents, however, use social networks for acquisitions and service. Such usage will clearly rise, since more than 10% of those surveyed identified a clear need in these areas.

Emphasis on sales and service

Enterprises that actively use social media tend to focus mainly on winning new customers. According to RAAD, 39% of the surveyed firms use new channels on the social Web, with the effort being led by their sales & marketing departments. Service is the next most important department for deploying social media, with a third of the active enterprises already offering such services. Down the road, almost an identical share of sales and service departments, i.e. 20%, are planning to hop on board.

Social media still a separate communications process

Integrating social media into CRM appears to have a difficult birth. The RAAD survey found that only 14% of the respondents link social media with CRM. This finding was confirmed in a survey done by the ERP vendor Qurius, which found that CRM is mostly set up separately and not integrated into the communications process within social media. Therefore, just under half the enterprises using social media channels for communications are able to do so from within their CRM system. A mere 16% of them have integrated processes. However, RAAD found that 20% of the companies recognized the need for greater integration of social media into CRM. Qurius determined that almost 60% of the firms would like to see better integration of both departments.