Last week in I joined a group of social CRM experts and representatives from 14 software vendors for a 2 day social CRM summit. The event, led by noted CRM author, blogger and consultant Paul Greenberg and BPT Partners, was held in Herndon, VA (see the pic above, taken from the Westin Dulles during the snow storm that kept most of us there an extra day or so). The event generated some great discussions and networking opportunities. One of the biggest take aways for me is that SCRM is still on the bleeding edge new zone and there are some really smart people that are defining and refining it on an almost daily basis. I also believe that it's on the edge of trendy and is starting to attract some people around the edges that are trying to jump on the band wagon and yet, are not "experts" in CRM at all. I won't go through my whole social business speech again, but I do want to emphasize again that social business and SCRM are not social media or social networking. They are not defined by the consumer tools like Twitter and Facebook either. Social Biz and SCRM are about changing corporate culture and about relationships, IMHO. I also am joining Paul in the decision to stop trying to define and debate the definition of SCRM...it's time to do. OK, enough of that, on with today's point. There are some excellent write ups already published (CRM Strategies Blog and Brent's Social CRM Blog) on the summit so I won't try to recount the whole event, but instead I think I'll just hit on a few points that I think are worth repeating:
- CRM taught companies how to "manage" customer relationships, SCRM admits that companies cannot manage customer relationships...customers own their relationship with the company
- Web 2.0 empowered the individual. The world is becoming individual / customer centric and this often breaks current business logic.
- Web 2.0 has taught us very different behaviors, expectations and ways of interacting. Customer's translate these new behaviors into the expectation of near real-time interactions with companies. They want the experience to mimic other online interactions and want the experience to be personalized and delivered up "when, where and how" they want.
- The social customer wants a "self-managed' experience and expects the company to provide the plumbing.
- Customer centricity: the conversation is controlled by the customer.
- SCRM moves the point from management to engagement.
- The old saying of "like me good" not like me bad" is even more important in today's online world. Trust filtering is an important key to building trust. Video could add quite a bit to the "trust factor", visual cues are still very powerful
- SCRM is an extension of traditional CRM not a replacement. The underlying data is important, especially when tied to new sources of social data and coupled with socialytics.
- People are the new platform (yes, I've written about it before, but it applies to all people in a social biz, customers, employees, partners, suppliers...) The focus is not on technology or process anymore, it's on people.
- Make the customer a part of your business (duh). Think "mom and pop" business from main street USA only at scale.
- The goal is customer engagement and engagement comes from providing experiences to the customer. Create an experience for your customer, don't just "sell" them something...the strength is in emotions and emotional ties.
- Social business is a new business model that incorporates a company philosophy and culture of transparency and honest relationships with employees, customers and partners.
- Stop focusing inward... our web sites are designed for us, customer service is designed for the company (it is CUSTOMER service after all), we sell what we have not what the customer wants... focus on the people.
This is only a small list of the excellent topics we discussed last week, take a look at the other posts to see more details. Here's another post that incorporates some of the topics from last week from Mitch Lieberman. You might also want to check out Michael Krigsman's ZDNet blog that incorporates a video interview that Michael conducted with me and Forrester analyst Dr Natalie Petouhoff talking about SCRM and social business that we recorded last week at the summit.
