Anwar Shaikh
Who knew, what began as a medium to connect and stay in touch with folks would evolve beyond our imaginations. Yes, it is the ‘social media’ platform, which has become one of the most integral aspects of our lives. Today, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to come across a wide number of businesses leveraging social media platforms to reach their audiences and stay in touch with their customers. As a matter of fact, a recent research states that there will be more than 3 billion active social media users around the world by the year 2020. Now this is something a business cannot afford to miss. Yes, social media has become a hotbed for businesses to talk about their products or services and assist their customers on the go whilst drive revenue and profits.
The inflating social media bubble!
With every five out of ten individuals active on some or the other social media platforms across the globe, businesses clearly have a vantage point when it comes to getting close and understanding their customers in a never before manner. This is the reason we are witnessing a steep spike in the number of businesses joining the social media bandwagon.
ERP & social selling
Now as the digital transformation has transformed the way we do business these days, enterprise management systems too have evolved over the years to keep up with the digitization and changing market dynamics. This is why enterprise resource planning or ERP software solutions have gained a decent traction in the recent past. Yes, today a business has access to a diverse range of ERP systems including cloud based (SaaS), modular, mobile, etc. Taking it ahead, you have ERP solutions that support seamless integration with social media channels, which opened new doors to the world of what we refer to it as ‘social selling’ today.
ERP systems are proving quite beneficial in helping businesses drive brand identity and brand recall while streamlining internal communications and interacting with customers, vendors and partners.
How ERP is transforming the art of social selling?
ERP solutions by allowing seamless integration with leading social media platforms into critical business processes allow a business to keep a track of social media history, profiles, online behaviors and much more. Now this data is like a treasure chest for marketers and sales professionals when it comes to providing the best customer experience to their customers across all the key touch points.
In addition, such an integration enables a business to leverage the prowess of Web 2.0 tools and techniques along with instant messaging platforms to help customers, employees, partners and stakeholders work in coordination. This further helps in creating interactive discussions, threads and channels to help everyone stay on the same page.
Social selling and personalized customer experience
As we know that personalization is the key to offering topnotch customer experience especially in today’s era wherein we are dealing with the most intelligent, connected and smart breed of customers. In fact, it is a fantastic means to earn the trust of your customers and improve customer loyalty. A good ERP software would help you track customer engagement, drives business processes, tracks projects and conversations, etc., all from a centralized hub.
Most importantly, ERP systems facilitate free flow of customer data across the supply chain along with providing real-time access to the required customer data, all in real time. Long story short, ERP solutions would make the customer data accessible, shareable and available 24 x 7, all from a unified dashboard with just a few clicks.
The best part about integrating an ERP software with social media is that it helps to automate as well as optimize the critical process of managing negative customer feedbacks. ERP system can collect and send this data to customer support/service department at the speed of light. While the support department would use social media channels to get in touch with the customers over their concerns/queries/complaints, your ERP software on the other hand would make sure that the customer support people get access to all the required data pertaining to a customer including his/her queries to help offer prompt resolutions.
Takeaway
ERP for social media not only opens the doors for a productive and dynamic workplace, but it also improves customer engagement levels thus, contributing to the bottom line i.e. sales and revenue. ERP software makes available messages, social profiles, etc. on a single platform. So getting your hands on specific customer data or messages, which was a tedious task a few years back is now just a few clicks away in your ERP software.
Simply put, for a business to be successful and customer-friendly in today’s era, it is advisable to make its presence felt and be where its customers are i.e. social media and ERP sits at the heart when it comes to getting the most out of social media for any business.
