notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

Getting to CRM 2.0

AS THIS BLOG’S TITLE HINTS, I am busying myself trying to figure out what’s next for CRM. Before going any further, let me clarify the context: we’re talking business. Technology facilitates automation and interaction, but what if Al Gore were right and we’ll have to switch off electricity for 12 hours a day so that we save the planet? We would still need CRM!

My beef with CRM 1.0 is that it’s a small ‘c’ customer, small ‘r’ relationship, and a BIG M ‘management’. It’s based on the same fallacy that’s behind the atrocious term “Human Resources”. As if people were predictable, interchangeable machines with a finite set of qualities and operations that could be performed on them. CRM 1.0 was regretfully one-way; it put too much emphasis on process and too little on people.

With the advent of the social web, customers have started to talk back to businesses, letting them know they won’t be managed anymore. Hence the need for a CRM upgrade - a largely philosophical one.

Notice the link to the CRM 2.0 wiki, where people congregate to discuss and agree on a new definition for CRM that would get all of us on the same page. I’ll re-post some of the ideas here as I work on my argument. Let me start with my own (partial) definition:

CRM 2.0 is an ongoing conversation between a company and its individual customers, as well as among these customers themselves, driven by a pragmatic desire to satisfy individual wants and needs. It recognizes the unique quality of each relationship and supports an ad-hoc reconfiguration of the value chain in order to create a truly personalized experience.

The first part is taken straight from the Cluetrain legacy while the second focuses on the fact that we exist in a multi-vendor, multi-cultural, multi-channel economy, where competition on the supply side is… if not perfect then intense; customers create their own value chains by combining output from multiple sources to achieve the most desirable result. Examples include the so-much-talked-about mash-ups (Yahoo! Pipes is the bleeding edge here); off the internet, it’s about de-packaging and letting the customer assemble the pieces himself… which means some serious opening-up, co-opetition, and so on.

The customer is in the driver’s seat now, and it’s going to be a wild ride!

Technorati Tags: ,

Additional reading

February 23, 2007 | Filed Under CRM 

comments

Leave a Reply