Your CRM versus My CRM – Which One Is Better

I know what most of your are thinking.  You’re going through your personal list of issues with your implementation of:

• Microsoft CRM
• Salesforce.com
• SalesLogix
• Goldmine
• ACT! (?)

It’s not fast enough. It doesn’t have a button over here. This list is wrong. My mail merge isn’t working. I can’t see this Account. My Outlook integration is creating duplicate activities. It’s too hard to create a report. I ran out of user-defined fields.

I know, it’s very very frustrating when you figure out that your magic solution isn’t getting the job done.  Every single day, my trusty Google Alert displays case after case of software vendors trying to sway users loyalty with silly whitepapers tweeted about and blogged by their channel partners.

Our CRM has more satisfied customers

Your CRM? Your CRM solution? Solution for what? Everyone is looking for easy answers. If someone tells them a piece of software will drive the success of their business, they really, REALLY, what to believe them – because it’s easy. When polled, business people will agree that market growth comes from innovation, and then next day they are sold a new CRM solution by a vendor with a better list of features for their sales organization – and skip the work needed to drive innovation.

This is your CRM and therein lies the problem many of us have been struggling with for many years. This is not my CRM. CRM is not an object! It’s not a piece of software. So, if you’re a business owner or C-Level executive who knows deep down that there is much more work involved in driving success, I urge you to keep reading. I’m going to layout some basic things that you need to do to create your CRM.

What Is The Better CRM?

Better is a matter of perspective, so I will start be suggesting that while I know you all work hard, get ready to work even harder. Why? Not because you’re actually going to work harder. It’s because whenever you go out of your comfort-zone, fatigue seems to set in more quickly. But, I can assure you that each day you will begin to see more and more progress and this fatigue will quickly turn into forehead slaps. That’s because you will have revelations every single day that seem so obvious, you won’t know how you missed them

But you will be very happy your customers are missing them! Ready?

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Be prepared to change the culture of your organization

If you have a product or service, or resell a product, be prepared to change it. Yea, I’m serious! Stop making everything about your product. It makes you look needy. Start treating your customers like they’re needy – because the are! It’s about your customers’ needs, not yours.

Your customer’s needs are important for a few reasons.

• Reduce Relationship Friction. Make certain your process and workflow makes sense to the customer, not some internal need. Each of you have experienced customer facing operations where you entered information into the call routing system, only to be asked for the information again. And then, when they find out what that information is, you have to be handed off to a different department – and they give you a phone number to call, where you enter your information again, and then verbally provide it again, and again, and again. That’s not fun. Your business has silos like this that disrupt your workflow. Fix it!
• Opportunity! If you take the time to regularly understand the jobs your customers are trying to perform, you will find opportunities to enhance your product or service, create a new product altogether. And don’t forget related jobs. If you find gaps around their job, a little innovation on your part can have a huge impact for your customer and you!.
• Create An Experience They Want – If you know your customers you won’t make silly assumptions about their experience. For instance, don’t force them to interact in a social community just because it’s the hottest Twitter topic today. Some people want a phone call, some people just want to place a darn order! Don’t create a place to have a tea party with your product if it’s a brass fitting – and not an American Girl doll!

Develop a Customer-Centric Business Strategy That Fits Your Business

It’s going to take a new culture to look at your business differently and develop the right kind of strategy (outside-in). But once you do, you need to align your process to this new strategy. A process isn’t just about technology, it’s also about people, so culturally, the need to be onboard. But maybe just as important is the need to give them ownership in these changes. You can’t do that by simply announcing the change. People have invested a lot into a career that looks inside-out, so make sure they you get their help when turning outside-in.

At this point, you may not really know the needs of your customers when you begin thinking about the strategy. But, you should be taking steps learn whether you have different types of customers. Whether you have one type of customer or multiple types, it’s important to design your business around their behaviors or some other key attribute. This really depends on your business, but you may find that it makes sense to create complete teams around customer segments, instead of creating them around products or brands. Whatever it takes for you to deliver value to your customer in a way that keeps them loyal – which will deliver value back to you in the form of retention and possibly a more active relationship (buy more frequently, etc).

Stop thinking in terms of your product or service. Maybe it isn’t even your product or team that will meet the need of your customer. Blasphemy!!!

Design Process From The Outside In

Are you doing things your customer doesn’t need? Are you doing things poorly that your customer expects to be done better. Do turf battles create process based on internal avoidance? When times are tough, do you snip 15% around the edges – potentially losing value and leaving dead weight?

A lot to think about. But this is how most businesses operate because they are in the product delivery business. Make product, deliver product. Source product, resell product. Acquire consulting force, all solutions look like their skill sets. It’s really ugly if you think about it as a customer. After all, you are a customer. Just think about it.

Think about how to remove obstacles and silos from your process so information flows smoothly, quickly and with zero failure rates.  Failure can come from missed hand offs, long queues, dropped phone calls with no call back, etc, etc, etc. Then there are the inefficiencies, redundancies and plain old we’ve always don it that way‘s. 

If you start mapping this stuff out, you will see just how silly it looks. And no, don’t go out and start using process-speak and flow chart symbology. Nearly everything looks stupid that way. Check out the approach someone like Dick Lee takes using pictograms (pictures/cartoons of people doing a job). It let’s everyone take part in this process design fun because they can understand it. If they can laugh at it, so much the better.

Adopt a Methodology For Understanding Customer Needs

Over time, markets tend to mature and flatten out. You can either go along for the ride, trading margin for revenue, but that will eventually tap out. Then you’re stuck or in a mad rush to innovate through mass marketing.

How about let’s try continual innovation by getting know the jobs of your customers.  No, don’t ask them what you could do to improve your product. They don’t have a clue! What they do know about is there job. The expected outcomes from the boss. They also have other jobs that don’t relate to your product. So?

• Ask them what they find frustrating or inconvenient about doing their job.
• Ask them what makes their job time consuming
• Ask them what makes their job get derailed
• Ask them where the waste and inefficiency is in doing their job today.

If you ask simple questions like these, you will uncover the opportunities for innovation. It could be a new product because of some new job that’s being performed. It could be improvements to your product. It could also be different product/service bundling. If you focus your attention on your product, you’ll simply miss the opportunity.

I would strongly suggest that this process be a combination of surveying and interviewing. A reliance on social media will derail your job unless you create communities related to jobs and not your product. And that my friends, could be challenging.

 

My Benefits Versus Your Features

 

My Benefits	Your Features
Increased Customer Lifetime Value	Automated quote generation
Increased Customer Retention	Twitter integration with Contact records
Loyal Customers Become Advocates	Automated newsletter delivery
Continual Innovation and Growth	360 degree view of the customer
	Graphical dashboard of over 1000 metrics
	A hyperlink to Google Maps
	An iPhone app
	etc
	etc

Oh look. You have more features than me….

 

I Could Go On Forever, But….

The key thing about my CRM is that it is an outside-in business culture, supported by a customer-centric business strategy, supported by outside-in process design -  and the processes supported by people (with ownership) and technology.

My CRM works because I know what to expect from it, it encompasses my entire organization and it delivers value to my customers, not just a product. My competition isn’t doing that – which is good. Yours probably won’t be either. Businesses that view the world this way outperform their peers – in good times and bad.

If designing a business around your customer, instead of a product, is weird….

Then be weird!

 

Recommended Reading

 

• Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
• CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers

Is Social CRM The Key To Innovation?

We all want our businesses to grow and most of us can agree that growth comes through innovation. To innovate, a company must understand the needs of their customers. But research shows that very few companies have a methodology for accomplishing this, let alone having complete agreement on a what a customer need actually is.

As a CRM consultant who is interested in customer-centric business design, I see this as a fundamental piece of the CRM puzzle. From a strategic perspective because it creates value, and from a technical perspective because we have to design solutions that allow businesses to collect and analyze this information. This is the work that must be done before a company can design products and services (or communities) around customer segments. That means we’re getting outside-in before we get to Social CRM, right?

As I read about methodologies for understanding needs, two questions are whirling around in my head. First, does the concept of Social CRM, or even the tools of Social CRM, move the ball forward – or possibly replace the ball -  in understanding the jobs our customers are trying to do with our products? Are they trying to do things (and failing) that we hadn’t envisioned and/or are they trying to do jobs better? Looking for answers here requires us to understand the inputs we are looking for, suggesting some structure in the process. We can’t really rely on our customers to give us the ideas can we? The research I’ve read, and my experience, suggests not.

Second, as a CRM practitioner, does Social CRM offer any innovation (either strategically or as a toolset) to my business as a consultant? Is it opening up opportunities for me as a consultant to deliver value to my customer. And when I say value, I mean something that is understandable and measureable. That question is exactly why I’m think about this. Even if social only extends the existing capabilities, it will probably have value from my customers – and therefore me.

Social CRM: The Concept vs. The Toolset

While I’m still struggling with the understanding others have of Social CRM, I’m pretty clear on what it is to me. Essentially, it’s a conversation we’re having to address the fact that consumer habits, expectations and opportunities have been slowly changing with technical advancements in communication. And those changes are beginning to accelerate now that the technology is solid enough that ideas are able to multiply like rabbits. They’re not all good ideas, but they are planting the seed for major changes in the way we operate as both businesses and as consumers. There’s no doubt about that.

Outside of my personal thinking, other schools of thought are that it’s a comprehensive strategic replacement for CRM; implying that outside-in business design didn’t exist until online communities with built-in sentiment analysis existed. Others believe that SCRM is merely an extension of CRM, with a seemingly heavy bias on the technical side of things. And of course we have the Social Media people who are trying to take ownership of a market segment that they don’t traditionally occupy.

Whatever it is, it has to pass muster on the value-add side of things. And with success so often tied to growth, and growth being driven by innovation, the question that needs to be asked is how does Social CRM help us to identify customer needs? Can we just listen to the unstructured chatter of teenage girls (Oh, m’ God!) and suddenly understand the jobs being done with products we sell? Will we suddenly understand what people are trying to do with our products; especially where they may be struggling – so we can design solutions? How do you find this information when you haven’t defined the questions you are seeking answers to? And how can you guarantee they questions you need an answer to are being answered in a cloud of confusion?

There are those out there that I know truly believe that Social CRM – at least the way they perceive it – is the holy grail. Frankly, I’ve yet to read any research that demonstrates that social anything, generally unstructured in nature, can lead a company to have the understanding of it’s customers that it needs. At least no on its own.  Nor can it independently provide the information required to design products or services to support emerging job processes or needs, or fill some type of efficiency gap.

Just as with regular old CRM – which, by the way is not software – methodologies have been in place for years to design outside-in business process, understand customer behaviors and patterns or more importantly, understand the requirements of the jobs our customers do with our products. These have been around, and they’ve delivered value – and the value is measureable.

So I ask you, is Social CRM the key to innovation?

The Search For SCRM Accidental Community 2.0

Some of you may have heard of the Social CRM Accidental Community if you’ve been following Social CRM. Most of us met on Twitter early last year using the hashtag #SCRM – and while it’s a challenge having a real conversation on Twitter, we somehow figured each other out. Since then, we’ve actually developed strong relationships with each other, ultimately meeting in Herndon, VA for the first Social CRM Summit (#scrmsummit).

It came to a point where we felt a need to move on from Twitter due to it’s inherent social weaknesses. Social relationships can’t be maintained in 140 character, unthreaded, sound bites.  So, we tried Google Wave.

Google Wave

I had high hopes for Google Wave. Unfortunately, it was too slow, some said it was too threaded (threading 2.0), some said it wasn’t threaded enough, real time group conversations were impossible to follow and it had no email notifications (that one has changed).

We barely gave this idea a few days before our group members began dropping like flies. The leader of this pack was crusty old Esteban Kolsky (Gen X). One of the leading proponents (me) was next (Gen X / Baby Boomer).  Was it our age? I mean, I remember black and white television. Maybe our brains just don’t work this way. So, it was time to move…

The AC Back Channel Finds a New Home With Skype

I can’t believe how long it took. Not to find Skype, but to get invited to the new back channel conversation happening on Skype. I didn’t even know Skype had groups even though I’ve been using it for IM for a few years. Us old farts just don’t pay attention.

Suddenly, as the rest of the community got on Skype and added to the group, we began having high speed conversations (CRM at the Speed of Light?). These were real time. They were happening with group members from all over the world. And no matter what time of day, you were likely to see a pencil race, as we began calling it. It was fun. It still is fun. We’re actually getting to know each other here – which made meeting face to face very easy.

The other great thing about Skype is that we could/can have group video conference calls, or video one on ones. To me, growing up with rotary phones, that’s pretty cool. I’ve been hanging out in BBS’s, forums, communities and IM for nearly 25 years and finally we have something the Jetsons had (yea, I watched that in first run).

The Next Evolution of the Accidental Community

The back channel is great – for us. However, we’re looking for ways to get back in front of the world to move the CRM and Social CRM conversation forward. As it stands, we’re all doing our own thing and then coming back to the back channel to hash out our thoughts and ideas – and sometimes just to have fun, since we’re all becoming good friends.

So, we’ve begun looking for the perfect way to do this as a non-enterprise enterprise. There are solutions out there that do the enterprise stuff, social blog consolidation sites (I don’t know what they’re called and I don’t do research), domain-based business social suites like Social Text and Yammer and the list goes on. We’re not finding what we need yet. So, instead of bashing tools that others may find valuable, I’m going to begin a list of things we seem to be looking for as the Social CRM Accidental Community.

1. We want a group IM (or micro blogging interface that works) interface that is private and only for the core members of the SCRM group. It has to handle our real time conversation needs. It should also handle threading. Threaded context can not be an inhibitor as it is in most solutions we’ve tested to date. We’re looking for the ultimate real time group chat. One that lets us follow the conversation in real time without hopping around (enter key must post the message!)
2. We want to extend this capability out to the public either through a public micro blogging interface, or the ability to publicize certain threads. Many of us are not thrilled by how difficult it is to find one that is easy to follow (like Skype).
3. We all blog. And while we intend to remain independent, we would like a place to aggregate the blogs of core members as well as do some article or blog collaborations.
4. We need a place to work on projects in small groups, or as a whole group
5. We need the ability to search all content
6. It has to extend to portable devices like the Blackberry, iPhone and Android.
7. I should have a full featured Windows (or Air) client for those of us with an aversion to web applications
8. If there is a workable threaded feature, the ability to open multiple threads in separate windows (web or Windows).
9. The ability to brand a public presence on the web.
10. The ability to broadcast messages not only within the application, but to sources like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. TweetDeck and others can do it, so what’s the big deal.
11. We need to know when other community members are online, both private members and the public members.
12. We need to be able to create Accounts using whatever email address we choose (not domain based!)
13. It has to cater to what this group is, not for profit.

So far, there is a somewhat general agreement that the solutions we’ve seen to date fail in at least one major way (for this group). I’m not sure what that says for Enterprise 2.0, but it is what it is for the Social CRM Accidental Community 2.0. I’m sure other members will keep the world up to date on our search for the ultimate platform, or expand on this list of requirements.

Social CRM: The Center of Your CRM Strategy – Or A Complete Strategy Itself?

I just got done reading through Altimeter’s new paper entitled Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. While there is little to argue with regarding Altimeter’s report on the 18 use cases of Social CRM, there are some statements that I feel could have been worded differently – or simply left out. I also feel it could have buit a 5M chart that includes more traditional uses cases (even ones most business don’t do well), and how the two aspects of customer engagement relate to each other (traditional and social). The bottom line is…

Social CRM is not an all encompassing strategy

Sure, the Social Customer is different than customers of the past. A Social Business is one that recognizes this. However, Social CRM is a channel – another means of communication and engagement; regardless of the dimensionality of it. Do you really know your customer by monitoring social channels? If the answer is no (and it must be in my opinion), then the strategy must incorporate all listening and understanding methodologies and frameworks, including social, if you really want to avoid product design failures and/or business process friction.

Here are a few excerpts and some of my thoughts. Understand, we are all trying to move the ball forward. Differing opinions will, hopefully, keep the ball in the center of the playing field and not let it drift too far towards any sideline.

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Social CRM is more that just another channel.  Properly practiced, Social CRM recognizes the depth of the relationship and understanding the current state – good, bad or ugly.

• Yet, at the end of the CustomerThink post, Ray Wang lets you know they are ready to help you design a Social CRM strategy. What if the company doesn’t have a CRM strategy yet? Are we going to apply social tools to inside-out organizations and hope for the best?
• This doesn’t analyze the relationship. It only analyzes the aggregate of sentiment (maybe some ideas) at a point in time (good, bad or ugly)
• A relationship is still 1:1. If the ultimate goal of a customer-centric business is to understand customers needs (not project the needs on the customer), then social media will tell them little. Why? A vocal minority may not be statistically valid (not every customer is social) – nor will they represent real needs of the overall customer base. And, the company doesn’t really have the ability to use an open-ended, iterative interviewing process to uncover the true needs – things that they may not know individually, or even collectively in a social community.
• Reading the social channels is like reading the wind. It reflects what’s happening right now, and right now and now and now and now. Can you really call something strategic when it’s going to be used to react right now?  Sure, you can say you’re making a strategic change…right up until NOW when the next set of sentiment comes in. Real relationships carry history and can also discuss the future. The strategy is the framework for reacting to information you glean from tactical pieces of the strategy.

Social CRM programs may start at the departmental level, but over time, must gain corporate buy in to transcend functional fiefdoms in sales, marketing service, etc.

• SFA started at the departmental level and CRM took over, remaining at the departmental level – especially in middle market companies. Starting here makes little sense. Cultural change is required and it starts at the top. Always.
• It’s easy to penetrate the department, which is what software vendors, resellers, consultants and evangelists have known for ages. This is the easy way out, and delivers the least value. A cultural change leveraged across an entire organization is what really delivers value to the customer, and to the shareholder. This should be emphasized, even though more companies will take the easy path – let’s not help them, though.
• Why tell us “Get Value: Adopt the 18 Social CRM Use Cases?” I mean, if it typically starts at the departmental level, why then argue that all 18 need to be adopted? This sounds a lot like tools to support a corporate-wide customer centered strategy – without the customer-centered part, or with the other 90% of CRM.

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Tech Maturity

If the underlying value driver for CRM (or business)  is customer-centricity, then shouldn’t cultural maturity on this point by tied to Market Demand? Whether we’re talking about Tech Maturity of a business, or Tech Maturity of a <ahem> Social CRM solution, why are we returning to technology as a driver when we’ve learned, clearly, the cultural evolution toward customer-centricity is a key piece of the puzzle – and that tech focus has often failed us (no offense vendors – us consultants are to blame too).

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Tie back social world and channels to existing innovation, marketing, sales, support and service processes. Triage profiles to create prioritization frameworks.

• A better way might be to not start at the tactical level and then fit it into a series of other tactical, silo’d processes and then call it a strategy. Maybe it was just the way I read this, but seems very backwards to me.

Organizational friction, customer experience and customer advocacy do not require "Social” CRM. Sure, advocacy is easier in an online community, but #SCRM can’t lay claim as the only, or even the best, way of creating advocacy. Let’s face it, social solutions are unproven in many ways – time being one of them. But, advocates have been around, outside-in process consultants have been removing friction for a long time and companies have been designing great customer experiences – all without the social piece. The failure has been the tendency to rely on technology first and unfortunately, this is still fairly prevalent.

Complement existing CRM processes.

• I just can’t get past the customer-centric strategy part, I guess. Shouldn’t this really be expanding, enhancing or evolving the CRM strategy with social engagement? Processes are support of strategies and technology is supportive of process. The process is not creating substantial customer value, it’s more operational in nature. The value has to be driven from a higher strategy- within which you will find social aspects.

In Closing

My common theme is customer-centricity and designing CRM strategies around this sort of cultural change. Core to this is defining a methodology for understanding customer needs. Certainly, companies that have well known brands should incorporate social tools to protect their brand as well as empower their customers (to some degree – after all, it’s still a business). But let’s face it, do lesser known brands really have enough chatter to worry? I don’t know the answer to that. My middle market customers have never really identified this as a problem, and isn’t this where most of the businesses are?

What I like about this paper is that it does a great job of taking what have been complex, theoretical concepts and putting them into a readable format. Each of us participating in this space are being social. There are conversations being attempted (and failing IMHO) on Twitter, there are social communities cropping up where many of us are able to write lengthier posts to move the topic forward, and there are also back channel group (and individual – NO!) conversations going on related to Social CRM. It’s time that we begin building public digests that people will actually read. Real people – not just us. This is a good step in that direction.

The next step, I feel, is for someone to simply describe a complete customer-centric culture which drives CRM strategy, process and technology – each level addressing the need for, and execution of strategy or tactics for embracing the social customer – if even required

Social CRM: The Social Media Plugin To Make Businesses Customer-Centric

“Sure, we’re customer-centric”, I hear you saying. “Now, this new social stuff…how can we use it to promote our products?”

One of the big dangers, each time a new term is introduced to the world, is the “latching on” that takes place. People and companies latched onto the term CRM and sucked it dry until it really had no meaning left – and it had been commoditized. The term SCRM is also in grave danger – already. While it has been clearly defined (and a stake put in the ground), social media gurus and consultancies are trying to lay claim to a concept that has little or no cross-over into their specific skills and experience. Sorry for being blunt, but it has to be said (repeatedly).

Whether you like the term Customer Relationship Management or not, the underlying concept is important to understand before you start running out the door waving your CRM or SCRM flag for the world to see. Nothing against software vendors (including social media solutions), but they do it. I get why they do. But when social media consultants do it, I have to draw a line. CRM is about changing business cultures to focus on customer needs and design experiences that add value and reduce friction. The process derived from these strategic changes is supported by both people and technology. Somehow, we allowed the term to be tightly associated with the technology.

I think we’re prepared to fight this battle on the SCRM front. The social extension to CRM is really a means to expand something customer-centric businesses already do – listen to their customers, understand their needs and adapt to fulfill them in a way that creates value. SCRM has more roots in technology, yes. But, it doesn’t change what we’re really talking about here. So, if we’ve already licked this software is the solution problem – after a decade of death spiral – what is the new danger we’re facing?

Enter the Social Media Consultant

Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). ~Wikipedia

The next time a social media consultant tells you that you can’t run your business without social just keep in mind that the only tool in their arsenal is social media. You can’t just plug in a piece of technology and transform your business.  Read the definition above- written, no doubt, by a social media person.

At first glance, this appears to be a definition for a new SPAM channel. But then it moves on to many-to-many, so maybe that’s a little bit harsh.  I have this bad habit of assuming that certain types of people believe if you make something (like an email) look pretty enough, it’s effective – and not spam. Unfortunately, too many graphic designers have taken over marketing departments – it’s all about touchy feely with them. But do they really understand customer relationships?

Darren Roanoke: How can you be the Love Guru if you’ve never been in a relationship?
Guru Pitka: Well, there is someone I like. But until I learn to love myself, I can only go out with three girls named Ann.
Darren Roanoke: Three girls named Ann?
Guru Pitka: Yeah. Ann Visible, Ann Flatable, and Ann Job.

Let’s be frank, social media gurus are popping up all over the Internet and also in your local business clubs (maybe your board rooms) – trying to use the momentum of SCRM to jump start their consultancies. Maybe they actually believe this is a new market, and that this market will transform a business by simply adopting solutions in their arsenal. And let’s be honest, these solutions didn’t transform any businesses to customer-centric, or improve the customer experience, before the term SCRM, so why would we believe it to be the case now? Where’s the track record to back it up?

Don’t get me wrong, I would never pretend to be an expert in social media. If it becomes a component in a CRM strategy I’m working with, then I will bring an expert in soc med onto my project team. But, what I won’t do is come on board a project that started with a social solution and tries to work itself backwards to a comprehensive customer-centric business strategy. Or worse, it never even attempts to work backwards as it’s seen as the complete solution. In these cases, businesses will simply leverage the solution more and more until it’s simply abused. Gotta get results, right?

Sounds too much like the good old days of CRM failures. Leave CRM to the CRM people, even if there’s an “S” on the front. We’ve been there and done that.. Mariska Hargitay everybody!