Relationships between companies and customers have evolved throughout the times, so must CRM tools. Traditional customer relationship management programs aim to control interactions with customers in term of business process. The idea is to organize these interactions to make it simpler for the company to process. These CRM tools have shown their efficiency but also their limits in term of customer satisfaction.
Hence to create FAQs pages on websites and call centers to deal with customers' inquiries make sens in terms of investment and running cost, but how could you expect customers to be happy whereas human transactions have been left behind?
Social CRM is a vague term, and might not be appropriate. It aims though to use the new social media technologies and ideas to enhance these traditional crm tools to incorporate more its customers.
Indeed, it is difficult to make coexist both traditional and social CRM, because they don't have either the same goal nor usage. The idea is to keep CRM structures in terms of data collection and cross unit management, but also to get more content driven by using what is going on in online communities to bond with customers.
That is the reason why community management is so important. The community manager needs to mak the link between both traditional CRM and social CRM to have something that makes sense to end users.
