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End VRM debates now

Is VRM primarily about companies ceding control to customers? Or about flipping the current segmentation model on its head and remaking the economy in a way where the customer initiates every transaction?

That these questions are being asked doesn’t mean VRM is poorly defined; anyone who has mined through the endless debates at the ProjectVRM mailing list should know. The problem isn’t definition or a lack thereof; it’s implementation. We’ve grown accustomed to ideas quickly gaining shape; thanks to an ever-growing pool of RAD frameworks and toolkits. VRM has been stuck in the debate club for too long. Now that people outside the club are peeking in, they better see something real soon.

The Mine! project could provide this long-overdue proof of VRM’s viability, as well as give guidance to people interested in starting their own VRM projects. Its adoption will provide a useful signal as to whether there’s sufficient demand for VRM solutions on the customer side.

I am wary of debating VRM in the open when there’s nothing substantial to back up its claims. Now that the CRM guys have caught up, it’s imperative that the talk moves from the library to the workshop. It would be unfortunate if the VRM idea got misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused before it had its chance to even demonstrate how it works.

January 31, 2009 | Filed Under General | Comments Off 

links for 2009-01-23

January 23, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

links for 2009-01-20

January 20, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Quote of the day

I have reached the limits of usefulness for apps that give me nice functionality but take away my ability to manage data across my entire ‘identity’.” – Adriana Lukas

Along the lines of “why would you need a multi-million dollar company to share your photos” – you do now, but as with blogs, that can change quite rapidly.

January 15, 2009 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Moving towards VRM in the Telco space

It seems that the good people at Telco 2.0 (a blog by STL Partners) have caught wind of VRM. Terrific: I’ve touched on VRM at a couple of Telco conferences past year, and it’s generated enough interest for me to conclude the time is right.

Right for what, you might ask. For starters, for turning the telecoms business model towards the customer – as in making money from delivering the customer what he wants as opposed to no matter what he or she wants (think broadband).

But this is not about that, not today. At the very end of the post, this quote:

“[I]s it time to think about IRM, Integrated Relationship Management, the intersection between CRM and VRM?”

No. And the time will never be right. Not because we don’t need to “build bridges” between individuals and organizations; both systems try do to both. But both do it with a different end in mind.

While I am all for “customer-company pacts” and such, parties of any contract naturally guard their own interest and their tools reflect that. CRM profits companies, VRM does (will) profit individuals. Plus, VRM is pushing for dis-intermediation in relationships (in the true web sense), hence I don’t see much sense in any “integration layer” between CRM and VRM. No, let both parties go all the way.

But enough abbreviations for today.

The post calls for some kind of “intelligent call api” if I read it correctly (it’s somehow hard to grasp at 1st reading), and there’s definitely some VRM potential in that. Calling (fixed but mobile, too) is essentially “stupid”; it hasn’t evolved much despite incredible advances in the IP/Internet application sphere. It could start with CDRs; instead of a plain call log (that you pay extra for), how about giving customer access to the “raw” data (how “raw” is a good question) so that they can make sense of it themselves? It’s the customer’s data! For analogy, think health records, financial records, etc. Think Wesabe and Google Health.

I wouldn’t go as far as to call 2009 the Year of Hope and Change in customer relationships, but again, VRM is catching on and that is good indeed. We might see interesting things (or not – how is that for a well-rounded prediction?)

January 13, 2009 | Filed Under CRM, Telco | Comments Off 

Panic not quite deserved

Salesforce.com was down for ~40 minutes, and the airwaves are full of “what does this mean for the SaaS market” reflections again.

40 minutes?

Just 40 minutes?

It’s a testament to the ever-increasing capabilities of on-demand vendors that we’re talking minutes not hours or days. And if you’ve ever been a client of a “traditional” software vendor (regardless of respectability), you can certainly appreciate it. You are probably paying top dollar for 99.9% uptime, which translates to roughly 7 hours of downtime a year.

Fact: software systems fail. Sometimes they recover without the user noticing it, sometimes they crash hard. The rates of failure are different in mission-critical systems (airplanes, nuclear power plants) and other domains (both enterprise and consumer). But they all fail sometimes.

We would have to see a systemic failure to start questioning the viability of the affected platform, and since Salesforce.com is not the only SaaS platform out there, I can’t imagine what would have to happen to drive happy customers back to the on-premise cut-throats.

PS … “In fairness, Salesforce.com’s uptime record is still the envy of many IT and business decision-makers” – same column as the one mentioned above.

January 11, 2009 | Filed Under CRM, Software delivery | 1 Comment 

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