How to manage social CRM in Malaysia for business success

Social media users in Malaysia increased by 2.3 million from 2021 to 2022, according to the Digital 2022 report by DataReportal. This makes social CRM a great way to manage and maintain customer relationships. Many brands have started to explore CRM social media integrations and generated impressive results because of it.

Still new to social CRM? Read on to discover its potential and advantages.

What is social CRM? 

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Social CRM, also known as social media CRM, stands for Social Customer Relationship Management. It has been a long-standing, reliable tool used to engage and interact with both existing and prospective customers. No matter if it’s on Facebook, Instagram or what’s most relevant app today, social media messaging apps like WhatsApp, 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 software

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 media CRM, it can be difficult to see how social CRM tools can actually help your business. So, what are some useful tasks that social CRMs can accomplish?

Boost engagement and start quality conversations

Caption: Brands can boost engagement and start conversations with a social CRM tool such as automated comment replies. Once the customer decides to purchase, a payment link can be sent in the chat for them to pay instantly.

Other than increasing online presence, social media platforms are best for cultivating customer relationships. Communicating with the customers and your online audience improves the quality of engagement and makes your customers feel important.

No time for that? Take advantage of technology. Make use of common social CRM tools such as Facebook or Instagram comment auto reply to impress both your existing and prospective customers. With this advanced automation feature, you can set automated replies to ensure that those who comment on your posts get immediate attention. You can even start a conversation with these commenters to give them a little push, as they are very likely interested in your products.

Track customer journey with CRM social media integration

Caption: The cross-channel customer journey can be displayed right next to the chatbox. Agents can label and segment them according to different priorities.

Omnichannel selling is the new norm. However, many businesses find the management of multiple channels troublesome. They have failed to find a solution that integrates all channels well, making it challenging to follow through the customer journey when they visit the offline store to understand products or services, but in the end, make a purchase online.

What if there's actually a way? In fact, you can easily monitor the progress and track cross-channel sales with tools such as the Salesforce social CRM integration. With this type of CRM social media integration, you can easily access the source of leads and categorise them according to importance. When the customer comes to you online, you can even view these details on a comprehensive customer profile right next to the chatbox.

Provide effective business marketing solutions 

Social media 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.

On the analytics dashboard, businesses can observe customer behaviour through their purchases, track the website and page visitor activities, and engage them through real-time conversations, reviews, and comments. From there on, it won't be difficult to 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

Offer stronger customer support

Social CRM software allows you to understand each of the customers better. By using proper segmentation and labelling, your customer service or sales agents can offer accurate assistance promptly.

Especially for retail O2O and e-commerce businesses, a lot of effort and attention is required to keep up with the decreasing buyers’ patience. For example, a customer who purchased your product on Instagram may reach out to you on WhatsApp to enquire more about new products. If you have good CRM social media management, your team can instantly identify the customer's needs and the type of product that he/she is interested in. With greater customer satisfaction, these happy customers will then spread words about your products to friends and families, increasing your brand exposure effectively.

More than half of the consumers will stop doing business with certain brands after just one poor service experience. - Hubspot

Plan 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 software for Malaysian businesses

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

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

Boost sales and conversions

Upon analysing the customers’ purchase behaviours using the detailed data acquired from analyses on social media 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. 

Learn about how businesses are taking advantage of Facebook for e-commerce in Malaysia to engage customers.

Seamless workflow for smooth internal communication

Social media 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 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.

Through SleekFlow, our staff members can handle 3-4 conversations at the same time instead of one to one. The result is quadruple.

Jeremy Tong

Managing Director, Lalamove

Creating success with social media CRM in Malaysia - some examples

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 spends 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.

Interested in setting up Facebook Messenger CRM with SleekFlow? Head to our blog for a step-by-step guide.

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 itself 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.

See how ZENXIN Organic pulled off CRM social media management with SleekFlow.

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 to the 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.