Identifying your customers’ social media profiles, and map these to your customer records is a growing need going forward. In order to successfully be able to have a 360 degree view on your customers you must now know your customers various identities around the social web.
Why is this important?
You have upgraded your Customer Contact Center with a monitoring tool allowing you to monitor your brand, products and competition. But you constantly ask yourself who these people are, and without doing a manual search in your customer database you can’t tell 1) if they are customers 2) what type of customers. The data you get is great, but if you could connect it with your customer records, it would be so much more useful.
You may have identified 10 Twitter users that heavily influence your brand online. Would it not be useful to understand their buying behaviour, or if they are transacting customers at all? A low transacting customer but heavy positive online influencer may benefit from a little extra free perk on his next purchase. But this will be very tedious and time consuming to scale if you don’t automate the process of identifying your customers public social profiles.
Identify your customers public Social Media profiles
The first thing to tackle is to identify your customer public social media profiles. This can be a time daunting exercise if done manually, and a virtually impossible one if you’ve a larger amount of customers. The trick is do make the customer do this for you. But how?
You can for instance try to entice your customers with various kinds of rewards in exchange for their social media profile ID’s. This could be done in many ways, here are a few ideas:
- Free shipping on your next order when your profile information is completed with your Facebook ID
- Fill in your Twitter handle to enter the Mega Bonanza draw
- Your profile is only 80% complete, connect your account with your social profiles to benefit from VIP support
Enable your site with Social login
Social login allows your customers to register and login on your website using a choice of their social media profiles. Customers don’t need to create and remember another username and password in order to login. Instead they can log in with the same credentials they use for their favorite social network, bypassing long and tedious registration forms. You should also be able to cater for existing customer and allowing them to link up old account with their social media profiles.
Vendors to watch in this space:
- Janrain – Capture gives your site social login and stores social network profile data and friends lists
- Gigya – Social Login is similar to Janrain’s offering and let’s your customers link their existing account with their social media profiles
- Salesforce - Accounts and contacts pulls data from Jigsaw and Data.com, complete overview of your customers social media updates
Update: I made a video interview on this topic with some great minds from the iGaming industry at the ICE conf London: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGti7yMwTNU
