Social CRM in Malaysia | Make the most out of social media

Customers are the core of every business. No company will be able to move forward smoothly without having customers as success relies on the numbers contributed by these consumers. 

By making a great impression, these happy customers will then share their experiences and indirectly become resellers of your products and services. So, the question is, how can businesses amaze and impress their target audience?

What is social CRM? 

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Social CRM, which stands for Social Customer Relationship Management, has been a long-standing, reliable tool used to engage and interact with both existing and prospective customers. No matter if it’s on the phone, SMS, emails, or what’s most relevant today, social media messaging apps, social CRMs offer effective solutions and strategies for sales, marketing, and customer support.

According to Statista, Malaysia has the 2nd most active social network penetration in the world with 30.25 million social media users as of January 2022, reaching 91.7% of the local population. This just shows how important it is for businesses to leverage various social media platforms to connect with this large pool of online audiences.

How can Malaysian businesses use social CRM

Considering the fact that most businesses in Malaysia have created at least one social media account for their brands, many should have a rough idea of the valuable purpose of social CRM. However, for those who are new to social CRM, it can be difficult to see how social CRM can actually help your business. So, what are some useful tasks that social CRMs can accomplish?

Providing effective business marketing solutions 

Social CRM is an innovative, contemporary solution with increased reliability, authenticity, immediacy, and accountability as compared to traditional marketing research such as letters or in-person interviews. It is all about getting the important numbers from customers and using them based on the metrics obtained on the platform. By observing the customer behaviour through their purchases, tracking the website and page visitor activities, and engaging them through real-time conversations, reviews, and comments, businesses can devise an effective strategy with comprehensive and versatile marketing solutions. The actionable insights will surely be able to help businesses reach out to target audiences more accurately to generate the best possible campaign results. 

Further reading: Effective strategies of omnichannel marketing in Malaysia

Offering stronger customer support

To stand out from others and become the flamingo of the crowd, businesses need to meet customer expectations to achieve the highest level of satisfaction. Especially for retail O2O and e-commerce businesses, a lot of effort and attention is required to keep up with the decreasing buyers’ patience as more than half of the consumers will stop doing business with certain brands after just one poor service experience, according to Hubspot. This is when social CRMs come into play, enabling businesses to attend to customers with faster and more complete resolutions based on a holistic view of existing customer data and previous records of activities and interactions.

For planning powerful inbound sales strategies

The first step to mastering inbound sales is by defining the buyers’ journey. The insights generated from social CRMs allow businesses to craft personalised frameworks and develop the most persuasive method of selling. It is a great opportunity to improve ROI as targeting pain points and hitting closest to the bull’s eye become easier. These systematic strategies make selling on social media at scale a convenient and time-saving process.

Learn more about the trends of social selling in Malaysia here.

The benefits of social CRM for Malaysian businesses

Although it may take some time and effort to manage a few social media accounts, we now know a social CRM will be the most helpful for optimising work efficiency. 

Still doubtful? Let’s take a look at a few benefits of using social CRM.

Boost sales and conversions

Upon analysing the customers’ purchase behaviours using the detailed data acquired from analyses on social CRMs, businesses can carry out accurate refined targeting campaigns. As a result, customers and prospects can be engaged better, not to mention that they can communicate with your brand on whatever channel they prefer. 

Furthermore, by prioritising and ranking Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (MQLs & SQLs) based on various needs and conditions, the sales team can build the momentum to steadily convert interactions to sales for huge conversion rates. 

Gain more insights based on analytics

No more switching between tabs and windows. With a social CRM platform, team members in the customer support team, sales, and marketing can all see the analytical data clearly at a glance. Bounce rate, reply rate, and the amount of time your brand’s audience spends on each of your website pages are all critical contributors to developing and improving marketing strategies. These insights offer precision and do not only assist with better customer segmentation but also support sophisticated research and development for future improvements.

Retain long-lasting customers and cultivate customer loyalty

While WhatsApp has 2.44 billion unique active users worldwide as of April 2022, it is indeed the most popular messaging app in Malaysia, making WhatsApp for customer service more common these days. However, the large volume of messages can take up a lot of manpower and decrease efficiency, delaying the response time and making the customers upset. The same problem can also appear on other social media channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram chat, live chat on the website, Telegram, and so on. 

Social CRM then becomes a simple solution to this kind of problem. Other than contact labelling, automated messaging can be fully utilized to set triggers and smart routing rules, so that the customers or leads are engaged properly at just the right time. With the finest brand impression and the best customer experience, businesses will then be able to retain long-lasting customers and sustain their loyalty over time. 

Seamless workflow for smooth internal communication

Social CRMs undoubtedly provide a medium for centralised efforts. Besides having organised storage for customer data, it is an advanced tool that offers transparency for all team members. It allows for employees from distinctive departments across the globe to collaborate seamlessly while delivering the information and services requested from customers efficiently. They can refer to specific customer profiles and notes on previous interactions, and even establish consistency in voice. As businesses scale with a growing customer base, the performance of team members can also be assessed by tracking each of their successes in sales and communications.

Creating success with social CRM in Malaysia

Kiehl’s Malaysia earns 8x return on ad spend using Facebook

Photo from Midvalley

During the celebrative month of Ramadhan, Kiehl’s Malaysia managed to promote its special range of skincare products using the idea of togetherness. Dynamic ads, live streams, and various campaigns on Facebook were incorporated to encourage users to initiate conversations and make purchases.

From there, their ad spend generated an 8x return and 59% of the online sales during their campaign period were achieved from this effort. In other words, more than half of their online sales during that time were brought in because of the campaign. Other satisfying results from their social CRM strategy also include a 34% conversion rate from conversational commerce via Facebook Messenger.

Tesco Malaysia thrives with Messenger-powered digital assistant

Now rebranded as Lotus's, Tesco Malaysia obtained promising results when they introduced a brand new digital experience for their customers. Their online catalogue, when advertised through Facebook Messenger, yielded 4x more views as opposed to traditional email marketing. 

Moreover, 85% of their enquiries were answered using the Messenger-powered digital assistant. Not only that a large amount of time and effort is saved up for their customer support team, but more customers are also encouraged to interact with the brand as messaging is the preferred contact method over phone calls and emails.

Pizza Hut Malaysia utilizes WhatsApp for a frictionless brand experience

Photo by Palm Mall Seremban

Being ahead of most companies, Pizza Hut Malaysia has equipped themselves with an omnichannel customer strategy, communicating with customers across multiple channels including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and more. 

As Pizza Hut recognises the widespread use of WhatsApp among fellow Malaysians, they have deployed a WhatsApp chatbot to process food orders. Apart from common interactions about their menu, taking food orders and updating the statuses of those orders, they even supply in-app payment to facilitate the complete purchase experience. The sales number has then been increasing in double digits every quarter!

How to get started with social CRM in your business

What if I tell you that you can do all of the above on just one single platform?

Yes, it’s true! On SleekFlow, you can manage incoming enquiries from various social media channels, no matter if it’s WhatsApp broadcast messages, Facebook or Instagram campaigns, Facebook Lead Ads, live chat on e-commerce websites and more, you will no longer need to log in and out of each platform separately. All settings including automation and customization can be controlled on our omnichannel all-in-one platform.

Furthermore, multiple users can log into the same WhatsApp account with the same phone number on the app. Employees can stop fighting over the same device or avoid being forced to use their own phone number while businesses can stop worrying about salespersons leaving with customer contacts and chat history.

The best thing about this is that SleekFlow offers a free plan with no expiration for you to begin your journey. Simply sign up and connect your social media channels that your business is using, and you’ll be good to go!

Find out more about SleekFlow’s free yet efficient features that are offered without an expiration.