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

Why CRM won’t save your soul

Rude shop-keepers. Web-mail that doesn’t accept your ID anymore. Trains that are 2 hours late, yet no refunds are forthcoming. We keep expecting things will behave according to an agreed-upon set of rules, and whey they don’t, we feel like we’ve accidentally slipped into a parallel universe - one in which we do not exist.

This happened to my wife’s friend in Bulgaria: she went to the passport office with her mother, and they told her, this cannot be your mother, your mother is dead. They flashed their IDs to no effect: the officer refused to acknowledge that the woman standing in front of him was, actually, not dead and indeed there.

Maybe you haven’t experienced anything as dramatic. Maybe it’s only happened to you that an operator at the other end of the line couldn’t match your name with your account that you kept with the company for over X number of years. And you be who? Sorry, Mr Smith, we do not know you.

Why is that?

CRM’s traditional answer was: bad information. Disconnected siloes. Employees unable to tap the information they needed at the right time. Centralize the data, unclog the information pathways, and all would be well.

But it was the wrong answer. Or put differently, it was the right answer to the wrong question.

The real question was, indeed, how do we as a company manage to treat our customers with some sense of dignity without actually bothering to zoom in on them from the extreme wide angle (customer base, segments) to telephoto (households, individuals). Hence the effort to power up the operational CRM with capabilities of analytical CRM (that is, building some sort of number-based insight into the scary X-gigabyte swarm of operational data).

But the analytical CRM cannot build any meaningful “insight” into who your customers really are while treating the customer data as any other kind of transactional data. We humans are made of shape-shifting bits. We don’t stay transactional very long.

Which is where CRM 2.0 comes to the rescue. No, it won’t save anyone’s soul. But the simple acknowledgement that customers (=people interacting with your business) are relational and want to interact on a peer-to-peer basis is a good start. When people inside an organization have the tools and processes to not only “tap into” but be part of the vast “social network” of their company’s “customer base” (I know, too many scary quotes don’t make for a fine article), they won’t say I do not know you, Mr Smith anymore.

Because they will know Mr Smith. Even though their internal “CRM” doesn’t know much about Mr Smith, the network he belongs to does. And the people inside the organization will, too, if they are belong to it as well.

I believe the quest for CRM 2.0 is one of finding the real network that can connect us all. It won’t be Facebook. It won’t be the blogosphere. It might not be a single network at all. And until we find it, we will, from time to time, feel as if we were teleported into a land in which we do not exist.

How’s that for metaphysics.

April 3, 2008 | Filed Under CRM, Rants 

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One Response to “Why CRM won’t save your soul”

  1. Maybe CRM *can* save your soul | Tomas Kohl on December 15th, 2008

    [...] a Telco event here in Prague. My talk isn’t Telco-specific but then, anybody can benefit from opening up a little, except perhaps [...]

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