Next Principles

'Insight -To-Action' - Enabling Customer-Centric Businesses.
Fifteen years after the emergence of CRM,  companies still have a problem breaking down the silos across their various customer-facing departments. The emergence of social media has just made this an even bigger problem. While customer expectations are increasing, organizations are struggling with yet another new channel. 

NextPrinciples uses an integrated approach to help organizations overcome these challenges. Their 'Insight-To-Action' solution is designed not only to help you extract insights from social media channels, but also to integrate those into your business processes and CRM as actionable items.

CRM Idol Review: NextPrinciples

NextPrinciples was a semi-finalist at CRMIdol 2012. Download the independent review of NextPrinciples from the competition by Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light.

CRM Idol is an international award presented annually to the best independent vendors in the CRM industry.

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The Challenges:

Most businesses have approached Social Media as if it is in a silo separate from their enterprise systems. But social insight that you can acquire from these new channels is entirely worthless without action and action can only happen when the knowledge gained from social media is integrated into other enterprise systems and, in particular, Customer Support and CRM.

Marketing:

  • Do you really know who your key influencers are?
  • Can you really measure the overall impact of your social marketing initiatives?
  • Is there a crisis brewing in social media channels, how do you know?
  • Are you looking for new product or feature ideas? 
  • Do you use social media channels to support your new product launches?
  • Do you need to use social media to increase the reach of your campaign or event?
  • Are you being pressured by your manager to show the impact and success of your social media engagements?
  • Are you finding it difficult to convince your subject matter experts to respond to a conversation on social media channels?
  • Do you really know if your investments in social media are paying off? 

Sales:

  • Aren’t you always looking for qualified leads?
  • Haven’t you wished you could gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ business challenges?
  • Don’t you wish you could identify the key influencers within your accounts?
  • Are you sufficiently leveraging social media channels for lead generation?
  • Do you really know which of your customers are engaged in social media channels & what they are looking for?
  • Do you really know if your investments in social media are paying off? 

Customer Support:

  • Are you really listening to your customers on the social web? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to track a tweet from a customer and call her proactively with an answer? 
  • On the other hand, aren’t you concerned when you answer a call from a customer and have no idea what she may have communicated about you in social media?
  • Do you really know if your investments in social media are paying off? 
  • Are you able to identify your top-performing teams in order to build a culture of learning?
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Audience Engagement Matrix

The Solutions:

Next Principles addresses these challenges from the outset by building their solution (called "Insight into Action") with integration in mind. So far they have started with Sugar CRM & Salesforce.com and they have worked with SAP and Ariba as co-development partners to build a functionally rich product.

Marketing:

NextPrinciples can help you manage your brand across all social media channels and measure the true impact, not just vanity metrics.

Whether it is a product launch, an event or a campaign, NextPrinciples make it easy to understand what themes are resonating, who your influencers are and what the overall impact is.

Whether you are in social media, community management, public relations, product marketing, campaign and event marketing, or even the Head of Marketing in your organisation, NextPrinciples makes it easy to integrate and measure the impact of your marketing initiatives.
  • Track trends, conversations and relationships and gain deep insights on what themes are resonating in the marketplace and how the community is reacting to certain messages
  • Identify key trends and relationships and what tactics are working through easy-to-use, but insightful social graphs and drill-down capabilities across many dimensions
  • Mobilize your existing influencers and identify new ones
  • Assign subject matter experts to follow up on a conversation and track their  progress
  • Monitor and benchmark social media performance both at a brand level and across your business units
  • Track trends and relationships for your market and competitors and validate, or even generate, new product ideas across all social media channels and your entire product portfolio
  • Manage performance, risk and governance objectives across your entire social media portfolio
  • Receive early alerts of potential crises before they get out of control for you to take timely action

Sales:

Whether you are looking to generate leads, or simply understand your customers better, NextPrinciples can help you you fulfil the promise of Social CRM.

If you are in sales or sales operations, NextPrinciples makes it easy to generate new leads and gain intelligence into issues your customers care about, all while integrating your social media interactions with your CRM system.
  • Identify new leads across social media channels
  • Gain deeper insights into your customers’ business challenges and key influencers by setting up filters
  • Compile complete profiles of the people you are engaging with in social media so you can truly understand their interests
  • Gain deeper insights on changing brand preferences by simply entering keywords of the topics you are interested in
  • Identify key trends and relationships through easy-to-use, but insightful social graphs and drill-down capabilities across many dimensions
  • Seamlessly integrate leads identified in social media channels with your CRM system

Customer Support:

If you simply want to listen and engage with customers in social channels, or are looking to truly integrate social into your entire customer support infrastructure, NextPrinciples can help you focus on your customers' success.

Whether you are a customer support agent or the Head of Customer Care, NextPrinciples makes it easy to provide exceptional customer support over social media, all while integrating your social media interactions with your CRM system.

  • Track and respond to customer support-relevant conversations across social media channels
  • Measure the quality of support your customers are receiving across social channels
  • Assign customer support issues to to a support agent by leveraging the workflow capabilities of NextPrinciples
  • Get a complete view of your customer for your critical support issues, so what you see is just not the last transaction, but the human side of the person you are engaging with
  • Automatically create support tickets for customer-facing issues you identify on social media channels with the built-in integration with leading CRM systems
  • Manage performance across your entire social media portfolio, through insightful social graphs identifying key trends and relationships and drill-down capabilities across many dimensions to see the underlying data
  • Measure and correlate the decrease in number of calls your agents are fielding
  • Track trends in support issues across all social media channels and your entire product portfolio
  • Receive early alerts of potential crises before they get out of control for you to take timely action

Product Description:

NextPrinciples has 4 core modules:

  1. Event & Campaign Analytics
  2. Community Engagement
  3. Contact Management
  4. Social Performance Management
CRM integration features across these modules in the form of aggregated customer profiles (Next Principles describe this as an "Uber Profile") and business process integration, for example, integration into lead generation or complaint management. The Uber Profile can either be accessed through Next Principles, which would pull customer data from the CRM system, or it can be pushed to the CRM to create an integrated master profile of the customer or prospect.

1.   Event &  Campaign Analytics

The Event and Campaign Analytics module allows Marketeers to create social analytics containers to match their key marketing events or campaigns.

The events are simple to set up and once set up, they capture and analyse the activity in social media relating to the marketing event, the time period and the hashtags or accounts that you include or exclude.

That one it’s own would not be particularly differentiating. However, Next Principles Event and Campaign Analytics then creates an infographic for the marketeer, reporting on the success of the event or campaign.
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  • Leverage easy-to-use but insightful infographics and social graphs identifying key trends, influencers and relationships
  • View summary reports with drill down options showing you the impact of your social media initiatives and export those to Excel or your Business Intelligence platform
  • Customize reports easily based upon previously saved, or on-the-fly filters, including dates, keywords, regions and inputs
  • Use infographics to get summary views of your entire social media portfolio
  • Measure reach, engagement and impact metrics for each of your social media accounts and benchmark their performance
  • Drill-down and explore detailed performance across multiple dimensions (e.g. time-based, across accounts)
  • Compare performance across campaigns and events to identify what tactics are working
  • Identify top-performing campaign / event managers to leverage their expertise
  • View and act on real-time data from campaigns and not a report from last quarter

2.   Community Engagement



  • Listen to conversations, and engage with your social media communities across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and blogs in one, easy-to-use solution
  • Track trends, conversations and relationships influencing your industry today
  • Use workflow to assign subject matter experts to follow up on a conversation based on specific keywords and even track and report the progress
  • Monitor performance and activities across campaigns and communities
  • Respond directly on those channels through the publishing features that are specific to each channel
  • Compile comprehensive audience profiles based on activities across social media and traditional channels

3.   Contact Management

  • Track Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn interactions for your key contacts
  • Monitor your colleagues’ interactions with your key contacts
  • Set up rule-based alerts to notify you when key influencers take a certain predefined action
  • Identify and consolidate identity of individuals across multiple social media channels
  • Integrate profiles and activities with those already in your CRM system or create new profiles with one click
  • Automatically create and assign social media interactions to your CRM system
  • Import campaign / event analytics into your CRM system so you can capture a complete view of their performance

4.   Social Performance Management

Most organisation have tens if not hundreds of social media accounts. Quite simply, Social Performance Management aims to consolidate all your accounts in one place and analyse their performance. NextPrinciples gives you  easy to use functionality designed for a business user that aims to help them accelerate some otherwise painful tasks.
  • Get insightful and timely information to ensure Governance, Risk Management & Compliance
  • Receive alerts of crises brewing on social media channels before they get out of control so that you can take timely action
  • Ensure brand compliance in terms of what is being said and how
  • Automatically approve new social media accounts that meet corporate guidelines
  • Set up rule-based alerts to notify you of under-performing accounts