by William Band, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester Research

A hot topic of debate among customer management thought leaders right now is the business value of Social CRM. My clients want to know how much investment they should make in social computing technologies such as blogs, wikis, forums, customer feedback tools, and customer community platforms. They also want to know whether and how these new capabilities should be, and can be, integrated with their transactional CRM systems.

In my opinion, there’s a lot of hype right now with respect to the business value of the social media and how to leverage this phenomenon to more deeply engage with customers. My own recent survey of 286 companies shows that only 21 percent currently have established customer communities. Admittedly, however, that same data also shows an additional 16 percent piloting customer communities, and 26 percent interested in implementing them. Recent research by Forrester’s Natalie Petouhoff on the application of social media to customer service provides evidence of a high ROI.

My colleague, Alex Cullen, just published a report, “The Top 15 Technology Trends That EA Should Watch,” that places this debate in a broader context and pinpoints “social computing in and around the enterprise” as one of the most important technology themes to pay attention to. Specifically, he forecasts that customer community platforms will increasingly become integrated with traditional CRM applications. This is supported by recent announcements by Salesforce.com and SAP CRM with regard to integration with Twitter to enable the monitoring of customer sentiment, and RightNow Technologies’ acquisition of HiveLive, an online community platform. These are examples of early efforts to integrate social computing capabilities with transactional CRM applications, efforts designed to extend customer service problem-resolution processes into new social media channels.

Businesses are building or connecting with customer communities to gain better insights into customer behaviors and monitor reactions to business actions. Organizations can use customer communities to support market research and product development, accelerate the distribution of marketing messages, provide deeper insights about individuals and accounts for the sales force, and promote customer self-service to drive down support costs.

As the quest to achieve the Holy Grail of a “360-degree view” of buyers continues, over the next three years I expect a shift from standalone customer communities to communities integrated with internal enterprise systems such as CRM.

William Band is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, where he serves Business Process & Applications professionals. A leading expert on CRM, his research focuses on helping organizations establish and validate CRM strategies, prioritize and focus CRM projects, build executive consensus, facilitate CRM vendor selection, and plan for project success. He contributes regularly to The Forrester Blog For Business Process & Applications Professionals, where this blogpost first appeared. He is also a contributor to CRM magazine, which named him one of the industry’s Influential Leaders. You can find his articles listed here. He can be found on Twitter as @waband.