According to Gartner Social CRM is Going to be Big

I read an interesting article on information age a few days ago which references some new Gartner predictions around Social CRM. According to the article:

“Over 80% of growth in enterprise use of social networking tools will be driven by customer engagement projects, analyst forecasts

Enterprise adoption of social media will occur primarily in the context of customer relationship management (CRM), according to Gartner. The analyst has predicted that 80% of all market growth in 2010 will come in this field, as organisations struggle to find a clear business case for leveraging social media as a tool for internal communication and collaboration.”

Customer experiences are part of what makes a good brand great, Zappos is one of the most widely talked about companies when it comes to customer experience and that’s because they rock at it. We’re seeing several great vendors in the Social CRM space such as Lithium, however as with anything we need to remember that we cannot focus all of our efforts on the tools without taking into consideration the actual people, strategy, and culture of the company.

People don’t support the tools, the tools support the people. People are the ones that actually make the great experiences happen, the tools simply provide the means to do so.