Many companies are now monitoring the internet for activities related to their products and services. Tools such as Google Alerts and Technorati are commonly used for this purpose. Pro-active companies typically reach out to customers by email and phone to deepen the customer relationship. An example of this occurred to me just last week. I posted this blog about my recent 're-adoption' of Mind Manager 7. Within hours (on a Sunday night) someone from Mind Manager's PR team dropped me a quick email and pointed me at some handy Mind Manager resources which might help me. The experience definitely gave me a direct connection with Mind Manager and certainly improved their chances of me converting from trial to purchase. This kind of proactive contact has happened to more than once (software companies, bars/restaurants, services companies etc etc). All have done a great deal of benefit to my opinion of these organizations through their timely and polite communications.
Typically these types of interactions are being initiated by 'web savvy' sales & marketing people within a company – but they don't have to. Using an app like Google Alerts you can funnel these activities into a CRM Queue. Simply set up a CRM Queue for a search keyword and associate an email address with it. Alternatively you could use our Workflow capabilties to route the alert to the appropriate person. Setting up the Google Alert is dead easy – just select your search phrase, choose the type (eg. Blogs, Comphrensive etc) and How Often. Always choose 'as-it-happens' as it will ensure a more timely response. Then have the alert sent to a mailbox which your CRM Email Router is monitoring. The rest is all 'regular CRM' at that point.
Here is an example of one these emails which has been routed to CRM 3.0:
Here is a sample workflow (not Workflow) which might happen.
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Phil posts about Fabrikam's new Moonshine Still on his blog. Phil loves his new still – but can't figure out how to measure the alcohol content.
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Google detects the post and matches it to a Google Alert set up by Fabrikam for the term: Fabrikam Moonshine
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Google sends an email to moonshinesupport@fabikam.com.
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The CRM email router picks up the email and creates an email activity in CRM.
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The email activity is routed into the Moonshine Support queue.
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A CRM workflow was fired on the creation of Activity and flags it's support level appropriately (based on it's origination from Google Alerts).
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A Support opens the email activity and clicks through to link to Phil's blog.
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The Support Rep locates Phil's contact information on his blog and sends me a quick email (based on a CRM template) with some links to Specific Gravity meters (for measuring alcohol content). Alternatively the Support Rep could have left a comment on the blog.
The cost to set up and execute this process is minimum. It involved zero coding and almost no retraining of the Support reps. The process is also extremely scalable. You could have many different queues for different search terms and/or different service levels for each term. You may also want to use workflow to fire up monitoring processes (eg. everytime an alert for customer complaints is triggered it could create Task activities for your Customer Complaints team etc etc).
It's unfortunate that Microsoft don't offer a competing service (if they do – I'm unaware of it). The good news is that Microsoft CRM 3.0 is an excellent app for consuming these types of alerts and our upcoming Titan release will even allow far more complex logic with it's improved Workflow features without writing code.
Before any asks: No I don't make moonshine, I don't even drink alcohol (for the next four months). Yes… Moonshine is illegal in the United States. It's inclusion here is one of parody – not of encouragement.
