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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
IIR's Mobile CRM, Bupadest, Dec 2008
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
Linkblog
Photos
Show Me The Money
I am interested in the world of ideas. At the same time, I only have time to be interested in the world of ideas of my own. Isn’t that true for most of us?
Point being, I keep writing about CRM 2.0 and the way companies should relate to customers, yadda yadda, and there are folks out there who are even further away, talking about how individuals should seize control of the B2C relationships are make them C2B, but you know what?
Talk is cheap.
Punditry is cheap.
In the days of Andy Warhol, everyone was supposed to get his or her 15 minutes of fame. I believe we are now at 30 seconds. Ideas coming and going all the time. Not much sticks. Stickiness is, still, a function of action. Not just talking but doing.
So I pledge to spend less time on taking cheap shots at companies struggling to “get it right”, whatever “it” might be. It’s easy, and tempting, to take on the big guys, and I should know, I’ve blogged like that too often. No, this isn’t me taking anything back, this is me saying we need less ideology and more pragmatic action. In business as well as in the world of ideas.
links for 2008-04-10
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The author lays out eight possibilities how to build a distinctive offering and avoid the Freeconomics trap. Highly recommended!
eBay thinks being a monopoly is cool
What is eBay Australia thinking? They will limit payment options to PayPal/cash only: no wire transfers, online banking payments or any other channels. With PayPal being their cash cow, this smells of very evil plans.
Bets are open as to whether this “protective measure” will hold.
Commentary here.
How Apple Got Everything Right (for now)
Is Apple successful because it’s so contrarian? Or is it because it’s purposefully creating a cult?
The Jehova’s witnesses might be more devoted to their Man (whoever that is) than Catholics to theirs. Yet they will never be mainstream. Their appeal is largely limited to people with certain mental dispositions.
Just how sick is Apple?
Says Edward Eigerman, a former Apple engineer, “More than anywhere else I’ve worked before or since, there’s a lot of concern about being fired.”
But Jobs’ employees remain devoted. That’s because his autocracy is balanced by his famous charisma — he can make the task of designing a power supply feel like a mission from God. - article from Wired
Your call.
Apple defies the “open enterprise” concept favored by me and most on my blogroll:
In today’s open source transparent co-creation business culture, Apple is the antithesis. Apple is opaque. Apple favors closed platforms. Apple doesn’t actively solicit feedback from its fans. Yet, the company succeeds. - John Moore (from Brand Autopsy)
But take a look at Microsoft that also used to like closed platforms (theirs) and how it opens up to its (and its customers) many benefits.
It works for Apple because it is really good at vertical integration and produces some really cool designs. But unlike Tom O’Reilly, I don’t think the future belongs to “three-tiered systems - that blend hardware, installed software, and proprietary Web applications” - just as consoles haven’t replaced PC gaming and the network still isn’t the computer, whether Sun admits it or not.
And as soon as real competition to iTunes rises up, so much for Apple’s monopoly in the music distribution business.
Cults work. They do, for certain time and within a clearly defined ecosystem, to which the outside world builds immunity over time. Love alone won’t help Apple uphold its strategical position in the long term. Especially since the company is a one-man show. Cults live and die with their leaders.
If you want to know what Apple would look like after Jobs, just remember what it looked between Jobs’s two terms. Opening up might not necessarily help it, but staying opaque and secretive and paranoid certainly won’t.
Video-quote of the day
Check out this presentation by Neighborhood America:
It’s sort-of a pre-enlightement peek into what the “2.0 experience” is all about, but good and solid for the un-initiated. And no, there’s nobody singing Kumbaya.
(via Paul Greenberg)
Nobody would miss you (for long)
There is some chatter about testing a company uniqueness by asking, would we miss them if they went away? Both John Moore and Seth Godin are on to something (which is to be expected).
I would argue, though, that unlike the loss of a loved one, a loss of a particular business establishment rarely inflicts a prolonged emotional response. We might remember them occassionally when their surviving competition cannot reach those levels of quality (or lack thereof) we liked (or disliked) about them.
Which is why there are no candlelight vigils when formerly grand brands (Enron) go bust.
When we talk about relationships in the business context, it’s good to bear in mind that these do not even come close to those we have in our peer group, family, etc. Hence I propose a different test, one that is slanted positively instead of negatively: Do I appreciate the company’s continuing existence? Does it make me (mildly, or perhaps even strongly) happy?
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.
Quote of the day
Passive “experience” is not what the experience economy is about:
Pine and his frequent writing partner, Jim Gilmore, penned “The Experience Economy” in the late 1990’s — the book from which much of the seminal thinking about customer experience comes.
Pine and Gilmore’s point was that active customization of an economic good produced another economic good of higher value. Thus a product was a commodity which had been customized and following that line of reasoning a service is a customized product and an experience is a customized service.
The pair’s conclusion was that vendors needed to consider actively staging experiences for customers but that proved to be too difficult and costly in many situations so a passive form of customer experience came to prominence. Today when we talk about the customer experience we usually refer to the after the fact assessment of whatever took place. We have substituted the value of a good customer experience, defined as one where the customer leaves a transaction without bad feelings, for a unique customer experience which was the original idea. - Denis Pombriant [emphasis mine]
links for 2008-04-01
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A trunkload of inspiring ideas of possible business models for the music / entertainment industry.
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