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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
A gratuitous Flickr self-link
… because right now, I am starving for light, color, sunshine, beauty, warmth much more than for perfect CRM; this sorry excuse for Spring must end (it was snowing last week, for chrissakes).
Small is the new… small
When it comes to innovation, it pays to be small. Or does it?
I think sometimes programmers forget how much work it is to create software at large companies. What may seem like a no-brainer five line code change to us on the outside is perhaps five man-weeks of work once you factor in all the required process overhead. - Jeff Atwood
And the same goes for any other ideas; those who are represented by a programming code, and all the others. If you run a one-man shop, you only have to convince yourself to do such-and-such. If you have five bosses, you have to convince them and their bosses and a dozen more stakeholders, etc. So, how come big companies are still able to innovate at all?
Maybe it’s got something to do with the millions of dollars and man-days.
Ultimately, though, it comes down to a man with a vision. And the guts to make his vision a reality. Some of these men, despite the popular misconception, work at big companies. And somehow, somehow, they disrupt the existing order and by-pass the processes, regulations, compliance, and make shit happen.
And when they do, they have resources that small-timers can only dream of. That’s why Silverlight was developed at Microsoft and not in someone’s garage. Having the money and/or the clout helps.
Small it beautiful. Small is also… small. It’s only those times when markets change, completely, when a single guy with an idea and determination can change the world on his own, such as Wozniak did with Apple. As much as it pains me, those times are far and few in between.
Word of the day
Target Marketing’s annual survey of marketers revealed that direct mail delivers the strongest ROI for customer acquisition and second strongest ROI for customer retention (behind email).
My take: The direct mail-naysayers can take all the potshots they want — the marketing community has spoken. I would, however, like to see Target Marketing add WOM marketing and social media to their list of methods next year. Cumbaya marketing — the darling of some of you (you know who you are) — didn’t make the list this year, and hopefully never will.” - Ron Shevlin [emphasis mine]
Kumbaya marketing - hey, yeah, that’s me alright.
Tell you what, though: whoever purports to find “ROI” in direct-mail, of all things, in customer acquisition and retention is right in the sense that dead-tree mail is cheap and there are still people out there opening and reading all their mail instead of putting the spam-mail where it belongs, the waste basket. Fine with me. But is it really the method of reaching 21st century, educated, opinionated customers? Is it really?
Yes, the shock of seeing where the market is vs where it should be.
“Me, Inc.” revisited
What if all cubicles had a security camera streaming a live feed to YouTube? What if they do? What if the cubicle-dwellers are playing theatre as if they were, in fact, being broadcasted to unknown masses?
Via Johnnie Moore - “64 per cent [of Brits] said they in effect became somebody else as they reached their desk.” (Financial Times) As opposed to a third of the straight-talking Dutch, and I suppose the number doesn’t get any lower than that.
And come performance review time, there is no actual person in the room: only avatars.
I have just finished the Free Agent Nation, so count me biased. As much as I’d like to blame The Man, I can’t: we do it to ourselves voluntarily. Accepting the caste system (Junior Widget Cranker, Senior Widget Cranker, Vice President Of Widget Cranking), feeding on the corporate new-speak (team-player, goal-oriented, place-your-dash-separated-slogan-here), separating work (as in creating value to be exchanged for another value) from life itself; such is the unfortunate legacy of the Industrial Age. So yes, it’s only natural to play Kabuki theater while being “at work”. An actual human being wouldn’t survive there.
It will take a generation of free agents to change that.
Oracle, Hot or Not?
Does Oracle “get” CRM 2.0? Depends on who you ask, apparently. I waited until the hotshots have spoken and can now stand atop their shoulders and look at the bigger picture. Which one, you might ask? The one composed of both clear victories and dangerous misconceptions.
Let’s get down to business.
Oracle has peppered its Release 15 of CRM On Demand with Web 2.0… thingies. The gist of which I can summarize by quoting Larry Dignan of ZDNet’s BTL blog:
- Oracle CRM On Demand can be customized via widgets, gadgets and personal portals.
- Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.
Widgets, gadgets, thingies. Thinkies? Not really. If all there was to Web 2.0 was widgets, then yes, it would seem that Oracle has it covered. The one part of Web 2.0 ecosystem, the driving part that has gone largely unnoticed by traditional vendors, is the behavioral shift from consumption to co-creation, from listening - however passively - to conversing. Which has led some, for instance Christopher Carfi, to comment:
While an interesting technical step forward, the fundamental embrace of true, big-R customer Relationships is still missing. The product, the presentation, the glossy online video demo — it’s not about the Customer — it’s all about how the two fictional sales reps are closing the next deal
Indeed. It’s still a tool sold to empower businesses to “take on” their customers, to get to know as much as they can about them, so that they can sell to them, better.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course.
But it’s not just a technical step forward. Look, CRM 1.0 was all about building silos. Actually, about connecting multiple company siloes and merging them into a single one. An intra-company bible of everything the company knows about the customer.
Which isn’t much, really, but you would wait a long time before a CRM vendor would admit that. Or the company itself, for that matter.
That businesses now realize there is a world around them, full of information and interactions that are relevant to their business, is huge. No dancing around that. Opening up that big CRM silo and mashing it with outside bits and bytes amounts to a small revolution. Let me re-play the second bullet from Larry Dignan’s post:
- Can incorporate information such as contacts from iGoogle or MyYahoo. Other sites can be added via RSS.
Yes, it’s the on-demand version of Oracle CRM, and the on-site users might wait a bit before Oracle hits them with Web 2.0 goodness. On-Demand is supposed to be sexy, after all. It has to. But still: this is no small feat. The hierarchies, the business rules, the workflows written in stone; all that is getting disrupted by this innocuously looking feature.
Once you let the devil in, there is no going back.
I believe Oracle will not lead the CRM 2.0 wave. Not because of their product legacy, not because of their customer legacy. And primarily not because CRM 2.0 won’t be a shrink-wrapped product but rather a loose collection of rather cheap yet very effective tools: company blogs that promote actual human contact between the organization and its customers, wikis that let the company innovate with, not only for, its customers, etc. You know the drill.
Still, it’s heart-warming (yes, about time we sing Kumbaya) to see actual progress done by the software behemoth. And it provides some clues about acceptance of Web 2.0 mindset by large organizations. May that be a sign of good things to come.
Are Web 2.0 Companies Getting Serious?
Perhaps there wasn’t much to twitter about at SXSW08, but this is certainly a healthy development:
These days, many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest are working hard to turn their visions into sustainable businesses, or they’re toiling away within the larger companies like Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) that bought them out early on.
“Serious people” don’t take Web 2.0 seriously. And many times they are right to laugh at it. Nobody wants to ride into another Bubble.
What makes it different this time, though, is that big players are getting onboard. Web 2.0 might have started as an insurgency but it’s being co-opted by the establishment. Company-wide “Twitters” will be as common as company-wide IM.
Selling out to the enterprises is only one way to monetize but it sure could be a good way, given how enterprises like to throw money bags at buzzwords that have gained momentum.
(via Alan Patrick)
Presentation Zen, not only for making presentations
I am reading devouring Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen, in that nostalgic way that comes with having read his blog for a long time and also seeing it having a definite impact on how people present. Yes, it’s that kind of book that is best enjoyed after you’ve joined the author’s camp.
Which is also why I won’t elaborate over the book’s contents. If you are unfamiliar with Garr’s approach, and perhaps keep spend too much time wondering whether six bullets is enough or not, you will be well advised to read Garr’s blog first. It will open your mind.
I believe you can use the book in different ways. Its main use case is, of course, to teach you a thing or two about presenting. The other, implicit use case, is to get you thinking about how you are presenting yourself in general.
That goes for individuals and organizations alike. In the world of Serious Business(TM), only facts are allowed. If the right brain is used at all, it produces clichés and stillborn imagery. Hence why clip art is included in office suites and everybody’s mission statement is full of crap-words like “strategic”, “customer-oriented” and “shareholder value”.
Garr’s approach recognizes that the audience, though a terrified speaker can see it only as a mass, is still composed of individual humans - who need to see, hear, touch and smell to understand. And I am looking forward to the day when organizations people inside organizations get that, too. And employ such communication strategies start talking like they want to get the attention of, well, humans.
Demographics aren’t what they used to be
Are operators going to get this, some day?
“So, why do Web 2.0 services work? Because they mirror the user’s social graph and focus on user generated content (UGC is a form of communication). In contrast, the mobile services do not in most cases. All your friends are not on the same Operator – you don’t live your life like that! Since mobile services are not interoperable(excluding voice and SMS) – they do not reflect the social graph.” - ajit @ Open Gardens
(But the same really applies to online communities - hence the need for inter-operability between all the facebooks of the world. I am more and more pained every time I ponder asking my friends to confirm me as their friend, again, when I sign up for yet another service.)
Quote of the day
Not so familiar to me since Southwest does not operate in Czechia:
That’s the real power of corporate culture: When you’re distinctive in the workplace, it allows you to be disruptive in the marketplace. There is an iron-clad connection between how your organization competes and why and how your people collaborate. So the next time someone dismisses corporate culture as fuzzy, or soft, or not “real” business, point them to Southwest Airlines, which continues to thrive in the worst business in the history of business. And suggest that they report to work the next day in high heels and a pink dress. [emphasis mine]
(by Bill Taylor - commenting on original NYT article)
PS Although when I gave it a second thought, I could imagine a cross-dressing boss as the ultimate tumor of the Dilbertian corporate “culture” (as in “Hawaiian shirt day” from Office Space), which may not be Southwest’s case; all things considered, what the CEO does and how he behaves has little to no relevance to what it really is like to work in that particular company; what really matters is whether or not you can cross-dress, and not just on Halloween. (Not that I would want to, obviously… 
Coffee as benchmark of CRM maturity
Benchmarks, schmerchmarks… talk about CRM metrics and ROI and whatnot, it’s really not that difficult to identify the important value-generators.
You can judge a company’s level of CRM maturity on a single benchmark - the quality of coffee offered as a perk to employees - since no CRM is mature if it doesn’t include employees as a very, if not critically, important customer group.
I’ve experienced 3 basic levels of Coffee CRM Maturity Levels (CCML - should I trademark it?)
- No coffee - perhaps there’s a Starbucks next door and who can compete with that…
- Egregious Instant-Vomit Nescafe, or lower-quality replacements thereof. Just add a kettle, artificial sweetener, and powdered milk - you couldn’t care less. This is so prevalent in my corner of the universe that my eyes are completely blinds to such sights, and just bring my own $5 cup from Coffee Heaven
- Full-auto Coffee, Tea, Water dispenser - some of these produce consumable products that don’t introduce dozens of toxic chemicals into your bloodstream.
I have yet to visit a place with a real, actual, authentic espresso machine (preferably semi-auto) but I suppose they may exist. That would qualify as a potential CRM Excellence Indicator, especially if accompanied by a regular supply of quality beans.
That’s it. I submit to you that no company that treats its employees as deserving anything less good than a Rancillio Silva is serious about CRM.
PS: Offices without any coffee supply whatsoever may not be indicative of low CRM maturity, but mostly are; the question is: can I get my cup of java without having to compensate for the work break?
PS 2: Reading Starbucked, which has definitely prompted my “analysis” in that coffee is, no kidding, the fuel of knowledge workers (and who isn’t one, nowadays), and you wouldn’t run your BMW on recycled vegetable oil, would you.
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