I’ve been looking a little closer at Social CRM recently to distinguish the differences in what different experts mean by the concept. I noticed particular parallel notions in a brief Twitter exchange with Martijn Linssen, founder of We Wire People, Jon Husband organizational strategist with the Wirearchy, and Sameer Patel of Sovos Group yesterday.
In one definition, a number of experts push the view that there needs to be a new perspective on how we view and interact with customers, a new social form of customer relationship management. This turns the concept of CRM—an inside-out view of managing customers within our predefined categories and contact databases—into an ‘outside-in’ perspective, per Martijn Linssen. It shifts from pigeonholing customers into the vendor’s notion of existing channels, calls scripts, categories and databases, to treating each customer uniquely and communicating with them the way the customer prefers instead.
To me, this view of social CRM expands the many channels of how an organization interacts with any one customer. In this case, a customer may be a person (as in retail sales), or even an entire company and all its contacts with them. In addition to the expanded channels is also the larger perspective of what many customers are discussing about your company, its products, services, people, values, decisions, and interactions.
Improving both your organization’s listening and interaction skills on these different levels and channels can create new opportunities. There are two possible types of new opportunities here: private conversations with the customer that create cross-sell or up-sell opportunities; or public conversations with one or multiple customers that can create new leads from yet others. The latter falls often into the domain of what a traditional organization view would call ‘educating the customer’. In reality, it is as much educating people in your own organization, as sharing insights, ideas, and views with the customer.
The above is the condensed view of what I understand so far as the description of social CRM. Much of it stems from what many have called social media for years now. With no ill-intention here—I myself am technically within a marketing group too—this view of social CRM gets a lot of attention because it has fallen within the dominion of marketing professionals who tends to have a louder voice in the external online social world.
However, there is another related but big story here that I don’t think gets as much attention: how employees within a company can collaborate or socialize what they know about customers, to discover the serendipitous opportunities there. This is about finding ways to improve how to understand and manage customer relationships within the vendor.
Reiterating a little of my earlier post, serendipity is the unexpected discovery of relevant information or of new opportunities, and that can apply here quite well. Employees may know a lot about a client. This becomes increasingly important when the more employees you have working with a customer, be they a single person or a company.
Think of it: a customer may have multiple situations where they use the same vendor for different products, lines of business, projects, services, or partnerships. The vendor may also have people in different roles involved, each developing their own perspective and knowledge about the customer. To the vendor, this information is gold. Such knowledge is mobile; it may even leave the company when employees move, taking that value with them in their heads without necessarily any ill-intention, on their part.
I’m talking in particular about the gold in the form of relationships that people have, and their understanding of the differing perspectives within the customer company. This is tactical knowledge with a limited lifespan, but with intense value. Most companies prize top people in sales and other client relationship roles who have such tactical knowledge. Becoming eminent in such sales and client management roles includes being able to collect and analyze this contextual information that maximizes the business opportunity.
Should that context be stored entirely in private by the person, or localized to a small cadre of people they work with, you will find reduced serendipitous opportunities for the larger organization. For the long-term value to the organization, we need to motivate these roles to share that knowledge in ways practical to them. [There is a tangent here that I won’t follow in detail because I’ll simply end up on a soapbox: incentive mechanisms for client-facing roles in many organizations are designed directly against developing the long-term value of sharing such tactical context.
The domain of capturing this sort of information about customers falls on the people who manage the customer relationship management tools available to the company. With so much CRM now entirely based on software, this tends to fall on IT staff with the view that getting this information is a database and knowledge capture problem. I agree improving such systems is necessary to make it easier to identify, link and save knowledge. However, I still think getting people to contribute, build and evolve this information falls into the hands of the people in the client-facing roles, and how they can collaboratively evolve the understanding of the customer from the internal perspective.
As a whole, Social CRM certainly has the external perspective of how we interact with the customer, but as I’ve explained there is much potential in collaborating within an organization on what employees know about the customer as well. This is not only to preserve knowledge and history about the customer but also ways to drive new value from the same customers or those in related companies or fields. Achieve business gains in this area involves addressing a combination of issues in IT systems, employee collaboration, and client-facing role responsibilities. As Mr. Patel said, “[Social CRM] is [dead on arrival] if it stays in the front office”. Mr. Husband added that this “interweaving [between front office relating to the customer and the back-office] must be [easy] and intelligent.” Therefore, in parallel to the external-facing side of social CRM on improving relationships with customers, there is much opportunity in seeking better ways to improve our understanding of customers within the Enterprise 2.0.
As always, I’m certainly interested in different perspectives and deep thinking on these topics. How do you think can organizations improve their understanding of their clients and customers?
I’ve been looking a little closer at Social CRM recently to distinguish the differences in what different experts mean by the concept. I noticed particular parallel notions in a brief Twitter exchange with Martijn Linssen, founder of We Wire People, Jon Husband organizational strategist with the Wirearchy, and Sameer Patel of Sovos Group yesterday.
In one definition, a number of experts push the view that there needs to be a new perspective on how we view and interact with customers, a new social form of customer relationship management. This turns the concept of CRM—an inside-out view of managing customers within our predefined categories and contact databases—into an ‘outside-in’ perspective, per Martijn Linssen. It shifts from pigeonholing customers into the vendor’s notion of existing channels, calls scripts, categories and databases, to treating each customer uniquely and communicating with them the way the customer prefers instead.
To me, this view of social CRM expands the many channels of how an organization interacts with any one customer. In this case, a customer may be a person (as in retail sales), or even an entire company and all its contacts with them. In addition to the expanded channels is also the larger perspective of what many customers are discussing about your company, its products, services, people, values, decisions, and interactions.
Improving both your organization’s listening and interaction skills on these different levels and channels can create new opportunities. There are two possible types of new opportunities here: private conversations with the customer that create cross-sell or up-sell opportunities; or public conversations with one or multiple customers that can create new leads from yet others. The latter falls often into the domain of what a traditional organization view would call ‘educating the customer’. In reality, it is as much educating people in your own organization, as sharing insights, ideas, and views with the customer.
The above is the condensed view of what I understand so far as the description of social CRM. Much of it stems from what many have called social media for years now. With no ill-intention here—I myself am technically within a marketing group too—this view of social CRM gets a lot of attention because it has fallen within the dominion of marketing professionals who tends to have a louder voice in the external online social world.
However, there is another related but big story here that I don’t think gets as much attention: how employees within a company can collaborate or socialize what they know about customers, to discover the serendipitous opportunities there. This is about finding ways to improve how to understand and manage customer relationships within the vendor.
Reiterating a little of my earlier post, serendipity is the unexpected discovery of relevant information or of new opportunities, and that can apply here quite well. Employees may know a lot about a client. This becomes increasingly important when the more employees you have working with a customer, be they a single person or a company.
Think of it: a customer may have multiple situations where they use the same vendor for different products, lines of business, projects, services, or partnerships. The vendor may also have people in different roles involved, each developing their own perspective and knowledge about the customer. To the vendor, this information is gold. Such knowledge is mobile; it may even leave the company when employees move, taking that value with them in their heads without necessarily any ill-intention, on their part.
I’m talking in particular about the gold in the form of relationships that people have, and their understanding of the differing perspectives within the customer company. This is tactical knowledge with a limited lifespan, but with intense value. Most companies prize top people in sales and other client relationship roles who have such tactical knowledge. Becoming eminent in such sales and client management roles includes being able to collect and analyze this contextual information that maximizes the business opportunity.
Should that context be stored entirely in private by the person, or localized to a small cadre of people they work with, you will find reduced serendipitous opportunities for the larger organization. For the long-term value to the organization, we need to motivate these roles to share that knowledge in ways practical to them. [There is a tangent here that I won’t follow in detail because I’ll simply end up on a soapbox: incentive mechanisms for client-facing roles in many organizations are designed directly against developing the long-term value of sharing such tactical context.
The domain of capturing this sort of information about customers falls on the people who manage the customer relationship management tools available to the company. With so much CRM now entirely based on software, this tends to fall on IT staff with the view that getting this information in a database and knowledge capture problem. I agree improving such systems is necessary to make it easier to identify, link and save knowledge. However, I still think getting people to contribute, build and evolve this information falls into the hands of the people in the client-facing roles, and how they can collaboratively evolve the understanding of the customer from the internal perspective.
As a whole, Social CRM certainly has the external perspective of how we interact with the customer, but as I’ve explained there is much potential in collaborating within an organization on what employees know about the customer as well. This is not only to preserve knowledge and history about the customer but also ways to drive new value from the same customers or those in related companies or fields. Achieve business gains in this area involves addressing a combination of issues in IT systems, employee collaboration, and client-facing role responsibilities. As Mr. Patel said, “[Social CRM] is [dead on arrival] if it stays in the front office”. Mr. Husband added that this “interweaving [between front office relating to the customer and the back-office] must be [easy] and intelligent.”
Therefore, in parallel to the external-facing side of social CRM on improving relationships with customers, there is much opportunity in seeking better ways to improve our understanding of customers within Enterprise 2.0.
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