Socially Enabled CRM has already entered corporate offices, businesses in a big way. Organizations have realized that the Social Media which has the real people in form of customers is all about customer engagement and reach out facility and is also helping in building Online Reputation Management.

Social Media channels are not only front-end of CRM system but in todays Digital days (read Socially enabled people), customers are empowered like never before as they can share their experiences, opinions, their demands, needs and choices about brands/ products on hugely popular Social Media channels.

Marketers ofcourse have no control over what customers are saying about their brands/products and at this stage lets not argue on what Vodafone did by sending a Legal notice to a person for ranting out on Social Media Channel.

The Social Display of angst or love is fully visible to all including other customers, potential customers and competitors and of course to the concerned brands. So left with no choice but rather Listen, Learn and adopt or make strategies based on the data (content) from what customers are saying and try to Engage them in meaningful conversations.

(p.s.: if you are looking for how to build an online community, please read this article; “Eleven Community Management Tips for Nonprofits” By Erica Grigg, Chief Marketing Officer, Carbon Outreach; Click Here)

Now coming back to our topic. The big question is can all this data which is live, real time and most of the time non-predictive can be turned into Analytics? See isn’t Business Intelligence is supposed to provide a real time support with the data.

If taken into account, Socially Enabled CRM too are not able to conver this “Dark data” as much of the data now flows without human intervention or awareness.

The best part is Social Media space is changing and evolving rapidly and Media or Dotcoms companies or any CRM vendor is incorporating all new channels and feeds “locally” or at their own end for every installation of CRM system.

With this real time data the problem is that Predictive analytics could also be not applied. The only possibilty is to analyze past customer behavior and predict future behavior too based on statistical models.

So my guess would be to

have some algorithm in near future for this Predictive analytics logic/modules which can be “embedded” in Social CRM work-flows to help analyse, predict customer behavior from “real-time” social network data feed and than take corrective action by triggering appropriate work-flows based on some pre-defined business rules

.

For example, if a customer (or a group of customers) tweet about their dissatisfaction with a product or service, predictive analytics can help in identifying is it a real customer or not and is his first time or is he a regular whistle blower. Also if there are some good number of customers sepking on social media than who among them are most likely to defect so that company can take corrective action before it is too late.

Technology in near future esp., Natural Language Processing has to play a big role with stochastic, probabilistic and statistical methods.

Lets see and watch.