Social CRM market will grow in 2012 – Measurable ROI & M&A surge since 2011

Most of the business organizations across the world have been able to some sort of social media presence as demanded by their customers and some of the businesses are trying to actively use social media in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Since the usage is at an early stage businesses are finding it difficult to tie with measurable business outcomes. Gartner analysts expect the worldwide market for social CRM software licenses and subscriptions to reach $2.1 billion in 2012, up from $850 million in 2011, and social CRM revenue will represent 10% of the overall CRM market. Social CRM grew 30% in 2011 in revenue terms and is 7% of total CRM spending globally as of 2011. Despite rapid rise in adoption of social applications by sales, marketing and customer service departments, Gartner believes that by this year end, only 50% of Fortune 1000 companies are expected to receive a worthwhile return on investment (ROI) from their social CRM initiatives. Another prediction by Gartner is that by this year end three-quarters of new social CRM initiatives that receive funding will have a business case incorporating measurable ROI. This highlights the fact that both vendors and customers are looking at ways to measure effectively the return of investment (ROI) that Social CRM efforts will generate. In fact the success of social CRM in next couple of years will depend on how well businesses and social CRM technology providers can tie Social CRM investment to clear and measurable business objectives rather than make social CRM projects just social objectives.

Social CRM is no longer a concern of marketing, but it penetrated into most of other marketing functions, sales, customer service and support and its importance is already evident in lead generation, cross-selling and up-selling capabilities, and other major successful sales & marketing functions. Social CRM applications help in capturing and sharing of data between users including the customers and other relevant stakeholders and involve them in developing and improving the products and services through their constant feedback. Social CRM applications can have both internal and external company users, communities both public & private and customers, marketing and service organizations use apps to create brand awareness, gather information, build trust, evaluate decisions, sell and aid post purchase activities. Social CRM adoption has been mostly among business-to-consumer (B2C) type organizations and business to business (B2B) companies are seeking to aggressively invest in social and by end of 2013, B2B organizations using social CRM applications will represent 25 % of all projects worldwide. Gartner expects business-to-business applications for sales use will have the fastest growth and will account for 30% of social CRM spending by 2015, up from 5% in 2011. According to a report from Gartner’s Ed Thompson titled “What’s “Hot” in CRM Application 2012,” Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery of CRM applications represented 34% of worldwide CRM application spending in 2011. More than 50% of all Sales Force Automation (SFA) spending is on the SaaS platform.

Early part of 2012 and the year 2011 saw a flurry of Mergers & Acquisitions in the Social CRM space with large CRM players like Oracle & SAP aggressively buying smaller players in this space. Oracle has continued its social media CRM spending spree with the acquisition of Collective Intellect whose cloud-based applications for social media monitoring would be combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform and earlier Oracle acquired Vitrue for $339 million, a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that enables marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Salesforce recently announced that it has won a bid to acquire BuddyMedia for $689 million and also recently added Radian6, while Adobe bought up Efficient Frontier last year to push its own social CRM offerings. These acquisitions highlight the need for companies and Social CRM technology vendors to dynamically engage the customers on the various social media fronts and the Social CRM technology must simplify and make the two way communication effective. There is pressure on social CRM technology vendors to differentiate their offerings from their competitors in terms of functions, analytics, ease of use and superior experience delivered through professional services and this need is driving the M&A deals in this segment. According to Gartner Research Director Adam Sarner, “Vendors that can assemble a full set of social CRM functions and make progress in two or more areas, such as marketing and customer service or sales and marketing, will be best-positioned for success.”

Despite all the positive forecasts for Social CRM there is another angle that is highlighted by Gartner, that 50% of Fortune 1000 organizations that are not determining, or even measuring, ROI, will face failed projects. Among the companies who will not see a worthwhile return, only 20% will even have the data to evaluate where their social strategy is falling short. These organizations will be unable to justify future funding according to Adam Sarner. Another critical factor is social CRM works only with user communities participating which they will do only if they perceive value from engagement and Social CRM applications therefore must be more customer-centric than traditional CRM applications and they should allow the customer to manage the relationship and organizations should allow this rather than they trying to manage the customer relationships. Another important fact that business organizations need to keep in mind is that media is constantly evolving and new uses are frequently being discovered, the organization Social CRM strategy should be refined on an ongoing basis. Nucleus has found that early adopters of social CRM have recognized clear benefits, such as increased visibility and productivity. The 11.8% productivity gain is high, and Nucleus expects adoption of social CRM, particularly by salespeople, to grow not just in real numbers, but also in frequency of activity as users become more aware of the technology’s capabilities and as vendors’ offerings mature. And Gartner believes Social CRM technology vendors have to show quantified business cases and, more importantly, deliver repeatable social CRM processes that are not yet broadly available.