EVOLUTION OF BPR

Re: A Company Like Me, Part 1

Posted on the May 12th, 2008 under CRM, Change Management, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

Paul Greenberg initiated a very interesting discussion. It is an excellent read in it’s entirety, but I will quote just a part of it here:

the contemporary empowered customer is enmeshed in some way with a network of peers, their expectations are dramatically changed. They are straightforward changes, though. They expect that they can interact with a company the same way that they interact with a friend or a peer who they can trust. That means that they expect a personal relationship to the company, not just to a person in the company, though that may be how the relationship manifests itself a larger number of times. That also means that they expect that the attributes, the characteristics of that deeply personal connection they have to a peer is part of the way that the company interacts with them. That means that trust and transparency have to permeate the company’s DNA. That means that the company has to have something distinct about them. That means that the customer is expecting the company to converse with them, not push corporate hype at them. It’s why you see contemporary marketing so geared toward buzz and word of mouth and engaging customers in conversation through use of social media like blogs, or engaging internal customers in a valued conversation through a wiki.

I also feel very passionately about the possibility of a “real” relationship between the institution and the individual, but I am less optimistic about achieving this state within the life expectancy of CRM 2.0.  There are three major obstacles in our way which imho would take much longer time to overcome:

1. Authenticity - many, if not most, institutions see the customer from the next quarter sales forecast point of view and no technology can change that. There is an opinion that the institution has no social conscience, only individuals that are part of the institution have it, so until there is a very clear, undisputable connection between authenticity and profitability it would be a long time before we see any meaningful change. I know there are exemptions and we all can name one or two institutions which have demonstratively got it, but we need much more - even now the truly successful implementations of CRM 1.0 are still only a relatively small minority relative to the number of attempts. Watch this video for experiencing an example of current institutional authenticity

 

2. Asymmetry - it is too common of an experience that an institution has a much louder voice than the individual. I can see great promise in current technology to change that, but the model has yet to emerge to the best of my knowledge.

3. Execution - it takes time to earn trust in a relationship, whether it is between people or institutions, time to observe a certain consistency in behavior and authenticity of intent, which I covered above. We all have experienced dealing with individuals who represented their institution in an exceptional way, but building processes and organizational changes to provide such experience consistently, across an institution, is still a huge challenge which is not a technology issue but a cultural one.

All these aside I do believe that change is the only constant and technology is a great tool to accelerate change.

Evolution of thought about CRM

Posted on the April 3rd, 2008 under CRM, Change Management by Gregory Yankelovich

I stumbled into the term in the middle of the 90’s when I found a set of CD’s, with Siebel software and manuals on my desk, along with brief instructions from my boss to implement it immediately. Since then I have been involved with dozens of “CRM” projects utilizing various technologies from Goldmine and Clarify, to Scopus and SugarCRM. A few of these experiences were very rewarding, but most…..

At some point I tried to explain the meaning of CRM to a non-corporate friend in terms she would understand, as a method and platform that can enable an “old time” relationship with customers in our “mass” markets. She lives in a small town in Pays de la Loire and shops in a small, local market where the proprietors know what and when she likes to buy better than she does. She understood the meaning of CRM, but the institutions that invested billions did not.

The institutions largely implemented CRM focusing on managing customers as opposed to building relationships with them, and often failed to transcend the blinders of departmentally-constructed processes/mentality, to become true “peers”. There are some very notable exceptions such as Amazon, 1-800-Contacts, LL Bean among others which have demonstrated an authenticity of interest in having a relationship with their customers, but I have never encountered one in the B2B space and would like to hear about it.

Paul Greenberg, the dean of CRM blogosphere, wrote an excellent post in his blog which you should read IMO, where I found this quote from Bill Band of Forrester Research:

“In this new world, traditional CrM solutions will continue to aggregate customer data, analyze that data, and automate workflow to optimize business processes. But CRM professionals must find innovative ways to engage with emerging “social consumers” enrich the customer experience through community based interactions and architect solutions that are flexible and foster strong intra-organization and customer collaboration.”

It seems that Web 2.0 tools and their proliferation offers an opportunity to re-focus CrM to CRm, to tip the scale for benefit of more authentic relationship not between Institutions, or an Organization and a customer, but between persons, whether they happen to be members of institutional groups or not. However there are two big issues we still need to negotiate to make meaningful progress:

1. change our behavior

2. change the processes, which support our “pre-historic” institutional behavior.

Forward looking organizations started to pay attention to the voices of their customers by “spydering” the blogs etc., but most don’t even treat customer issues brought to them directly with appropriate respect because they perceive these relationship as asynchronous, one to many. However, now there are a few web based platforms, like ResellerRatings.com or Getsatisfaction, promising to aggregate voices of many into a roar that can potentially dwarf squeaking of paid advertising messages broadcast without regard to reality of customer experience. They are still in infancy when it comes to their effectiveness, but the improvement of rating consistency and active connectivity with a product and/or vendor, will make it into a powerful weapon.

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC), Analects