I have been reading lately a lot about “social software” and its impact on businesses large and small. It appears to me, and I am definitely not an expert, that the term’s definitions, which are many, boils down to three product groups:

1. Blogs and microblogs
2. Wikis
3. Combinations and derivatives of the previous two

The last week’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston was well attended by software giants like Oracle and Microsoft, and many small companies who try to cash on the latest developments. It was also well attended and reported on by a large group of media, technology, etc analysts and bloggers. I am not sure where the demarcation lines between the two are. I couldn’t go myself, but I was reading the experiences of bloggers who did, and got an impression that the most interesting part of the conference was not about software, but about a cultural change. Sandy Kemsley captured some very interesting points, which you should read at her site in it’s entirety:

Stowe Boyd talked about the disappearance of the “third space”; most people typically have three spaces that they inhabit: home, work, and a social location like a barbershop, a pub or even church. With the rise of both television and suburbia (see Clay Shirky’s recent Web 2.0 presentation for more about this), we started spending less time at our social location, a bit more time at work, and a lot more time at home watching TV. In order to fulfill that basic human needs for socializing, some of us started taking that socializing online, spending less time watching TV in favor of online social networking.

He harkened back to Henry Ford, who once fired someone for laughing while working in the assembly line, positing that anyone working for a large conservative corporation should keep their online identity discreet, quoting others who recommend blogging anonymously if you work for a big company. Many large enterprises are disturbed by the idea of their employees having any sort of public persona that doesn’t follow company guidelines, and social networking inside the enterprise is a huge stretch. These are the same companies who didn’t want to give employees Internet access, IM, external email, or (in a long-ago world) a telephone on their desk because it might affect their productivity, without considering that it might actually increase their productivity as well as their creativity.

I find it fascinating and can’t help but wonder how does it all apply to the CRM paradigm and whether it makes the Customer Experience better. All these tools are nothing, but different platforms for people to communicate between each other in a variety of ways. I do like variety and options, but I prefer to have a uniformly positive and consistent customer communication with my vendors. It would be interesting to see how the enterprise uniformed processes execution model is integrated with these technologies. I can see how it would potentially improve communications between institutions and their customers, but Customer Experience is more than that.

When CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) technologies started to penetrate enterprise, the premise of greater customer service was very exciting. At the time the disparity between organizations in quality of CS were very dramatic. So what can we report now? It is hard to be objective, but I feel that it has universally worsened with most companies’ half-assed implementations of dysfunctional call centers and declared that “Mission accomplished”.  It maybe just me, because I expected more knowing what can be done if you really care. I would love to hear about your experience.

There is always a give and take, when it comes to progress. We got telephony which is mobile, less expensive, and has a lot more functionality than it use to, but we had to give up a quality and availability of connection. Do you think it will come back?  I used to call it a Microsoft model. When you call them to report bugs, they would promise to fix them in a next release. The next release would come with a lot more functions and features, but bug is still unfixed until everybody is so dazzled with functions and complexity of upgrades, they forget about the bug.

So CRM promised to put the Customer in the center of a paradigm, so enterprise would get a 360 degree view of you, your needs, your requests, your bill paying history. Presumably all employees who have permission to see that, would be able to deal with the Customer in a holistic way. That did not work very well for a variety of reasons, and in retrospect, it is probably not a bad thing. Personally that picture of being in a center of Enterprise attention gives me the creeps. Doc Searls works on a somewhat reverse model, called VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) which I like a lot more as a consumer.

Enterprise 2.0 proponents declare that they want to do more.

Many believe that Web 2.0 implementations are the vehicle for making this customer centricity possible.  While those are indeed the tools, foundational elements within a corporation need to be laid first.  Chief among them are what I call a companies - “Social Quotient”  - the likelihood of an organization to effectively utilize Web 2.0 solutions to drive greater customer intimacy.

Will I really get better products and services if I let Enterprise become even more intimate with me? Or just more personalized explanations why I did not?

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