Case Study: The Marriage of CRM and Social Data

Just married by Marcus Hansson via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Is it time for social media to tie the knot with your enterprise CRM? (Photo credit: Marcus Hansson, Creative Commons Attribution)

Putting social media data together with a company’s CRM systems is something talked about but seldom accomplished. A February 13 article by Maureen Morrison for AdAge Digital attests to the problem. Social Syntax recently piloted a short project that attempted to marry unstructured social media data with the company’s CRM systems. Here is a brief overview of the findings.

Problem: A loyalty services provider wished to investigate whether a customer’s loyalty program participants from their CRM data matched with their client’s significant Facebook page following. The opportunity was to discover whether social media fans of the page were in the program and if they were buying more or less product than the rest of the loyalty database.

Approach: The loyalty services company, with permission from their client, provided a significant sample of customer data from their CRM system, 12,000 POS records that included customer name, email address, city, state, and product purchase history. These names were to be compared with the thousands of fans who had friended the client company’s fan page. A software engineer from Redpoint Technologies (sister company to Social Syntax) built a Ruby query against the Facebook Graph API that collected the name, sex, and date of the person’s Wall posting on the fan page.

Challenges: Results were significantly hampered due to the lack of full access to the Facebook API. It is much more likely that with access to the unique Facebook page ID, a far larger sampling of individuals could have been compared. As it stood, the query used was still able to return the first name, last name, picture and all any other public information about the the user queried. Of the thousands of Facebook page fans, fewer than 500 were accessible because they had posted on the page.

An additional difficulty with Facebook or any social network is that users may be using an alias or nickname and may not correctly match data from any CRM unless that data is somehow solicited and self-disclosed by the consumer.

Results: Despite the very small sampling, a few matches resulted. Nine of the 500 users queried showed up in the CRM database from the loyalty program, indicating that these individuals who were engaging actively with the brand online via the Facebook page were indeed customers who participated also in the loyalty program. Verbatim quotes from these individuals who posted on Facebook can be said with confidence to be the authentic voice of the customer.

Study of the loyalty services data also showed that about half (6,000) of the POS loyalty program customers were aged 36 or older, whereas the Facebook demographic skewed far more strongly toward the 13-34 age groups, raising the question whether the loyalty program offers were more appealing to an older demographic and suggesting that further efforts might be made to engage the younger age demographic on Facebook with the loyalty program.

Implications: The integration of CRM data with unstructured social media interactions is fraught with uncertainties about data quality, but the effort is well worth the attempt. As a result of the pilot study, the loyalty services company was able to suggest to its client that they might better integrate marketing efforts with online campaigns in order to more fully engage with customers and prospective customers. Through social media, powerful “voice of the customer” data can emerge that may otherwise remain invisible to brands unless they go to the considerable expense of convening focus groups and surveys.

Is your company considering how to integrate social media data with your enterprise’s CRM? If you’re seeking guidance, contact us.