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CRM 2.0?

June 20, 2008

Conversations continue to take place bi-directionally between customers and businesses as they move away from the traditional uni-directional, tailored messages pushed to a customer base.  And the tools available to support these bi-directional conversations continue to proliferate.

Newly minted Web 2.0 enterprise thought leaders experience “ah-ha” moments after truly interacting with a customer for the first time – as if they were blinded by a shining sun as they emerge from a winter’s hibernation. Before now, customer interaction in the back office may be limited to an executive’s annual ride in the delivery truck, or manning the cash register for an hour to “get in touch” with the front line. But even in these cases the conversations taking place took place between the executive and the employee – not necessarily the customer.

Drucker explains that Quality is giving the customer what they asked for.  Peters described the Hedgehog concept as the one thing that an organization excells at better than any other organization in the world.  Now that organizations have the tools to find out what all the customers are saying, the challenge becomes aligning customer feedback with the corporate mission.  The risk of listening to all the customers is the distraction of delivering outside an organization’s Hedgehog concept.

What I find interesting about how far business has come with respect to listening to and interacting with customers is that these “new” concepts have been around since the beginning of civilization.  Why does it take so long for a business to change it’s model to align itself with the normal human communication behaviors?  Developing a Hedgehog concept is nothing different than, say, an ancient hunting tribe deciding to hunt black bear and not any other kind of bear, or moose, or bird because the tribe understood everything about the black bear and how it, more than any other bounty would best support the needs of the tribe. “Listening to the customer,” and concepts like crowd-sourcing, are these so much different than sitting around a campfire at night and discussing with the neighbors what works best and why?

Fast forward a few thousand years and we find these new communication strategies are generally bottom-up strategies. Technological limits tended to necessitate top-down strategies as delivery of radio, television, and newspaper messaging happened in one-way fashion.  As technology changes, opportunities to generate two-way communication exist somewhat ubiquitously.  And younger consumers will expect open lines of communication.  They are getting back to their roots.  We better be ready to deliver.

So when eWeek runs a piece on CRM 2.0 this week (June 16th, p32 – I can’t find a link) I have to bite my lip.  Yes, there are some great platforms out there like Salesforce Ideas and Dell IdeaStorm that allow customers to suggest ideas and allow the crowd to vote on them.  Yes, the conversation between businesses and customers has been enhanced in some amazing ways.  I just need to swallow my pride when I think that many open source projects pioneered these strategies 10 years ago, forget who gets the credit, and just be glad that we’re arriving.

- Andy

Written by AndyErickson · Filed Under Business & Leadership 

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