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?)