There is no such thing as Social CRM.
Back in the early 1990s we saw the first deployments of CRM emerge. Aided by the very fast rise of the Internet as a network to connect distant and disparate machines, we also began to see the adoption of email as a communication channel, and slowly saw the rise of chat as well.
Vendors realized that these communication channels could be used to enhance and differentiate newly minted CRM solutions, giving birth to e-CRM. Gartner debated whether to cal it e-CRM or to just add them as new communications channels. The prospects of having a “new” hot technology skewed the decision to launch e-CRM.
Gartner prepared especial reports, notes, presentations, even allocated space in the CRM Summit. The term was advertised, used, and disseminated around the world. e-CRM had arrived and how it was going to revolutionize the world and the way to do business. Vendors adopted the concept into marketing and new products, companies struggled to catch-up and named their VP of e-CRM. I was leading the charge for eService. We were making history, changing the world, leading a revolution of instant, perfect, integrated relationships that led to more business, less cost, and better way to do business.
Sounds Familiar?
CEO after CEO began to wonder why they had spent millions of dollars, time and resources to implement CRM if it was outdated already. One of my clients called me back about 2 months after they had made the decision to go for a CRM system almost yelling at me for telling them to go with CRM – they were now behind and they had not yet launched a single module. They could not understand what this new e-CRM provided that was so different.
And then we explained.
There is nothing in e-CRM that you cannot do with CRM. Actually, it is just an extension of your CRM setup where we add more channels and make it more powerful. It is not mandatory per se – but all the cool kids are doing it and it brings great new abilities to your implementation. You don’t have to change what you have, just add to your existing implementation and you are ready to go. It was an easy explanation.
Their answer? Why call it something new if it is just an addition to what I have?
Good question.
Care to try your luck at explaining that for Social-CRM?
(note: we tried to do the same with m-crm for mobile crm, and rt-crm for real-time crm with similar results)
Esteban,
The debate itself is half the fun – the other half is explaining to our clients, partners and customers. Borrowing from Yogi Berra – “CRM is 90% perception, the other half implementation”.
Along with you, I lived through the 90s and early 2000s CRM, eCRM, mobileCRM, CTI, Chat, Email – all simply represented a slightly different way for a company to communicate with their customers and prospects. More efficient, maybe – faster, possibly – better, not so sure. These are 1 to 1, 1 to Many – Many to Many, not really. The company more often than not, in control of the conversation.
The current discussion, from where I sit, is about something new – not because it did not happen before – customers talking to customers, prospects talking to prospects with a velocity that we have not seen. Social CRM or CRM2.0 or CRM Using Social has changed the rules – again, not because people talking to people is new, but the efficiency, velocity and lack of control make it new – a new challenge.
I applaud your posts, and seeding the discussions. Often I think we are all far more in agreement, than not, a healthy debate which I am learning from, by participating.
Cheers,
Mitch
I too debated if social CRM is just another channel for CRM. But MAYBE this time is a little different. Now the balance of power is shifted toward customers. Customer are talking with each other armed with tools not available before. Social CRM is what’s happening outside company. Of course, current CRM vendors could also add new module and change existing functions.New startup maybe able to do it faster and willing to take more risk to try new features.
Esteban, first of all please accept my heart felt gratitude to grant me my silly wish & take pains to post it after a long & hard day!
Now to the post.
Esteban, I did not live it through in the 90s, so this gives me a lot of perspective & lessons from history. I am thankful again for the lessons!
I however witnessed the push behind e-CRM & all the other stuff then onwards.
I started at the turn of the Millenium, in 2000.
I agree that all these stuffs were just the marketing mill running overtime & did not really need any vastly different mindset/philosophy when the addons were sold/implemented.
Same with the “social” thingamajig too. The same mindset that was propounded for investing in CRM & then incorporating the new channels is still bandied about for “social” too.
However, there is a key difference this time.
Implementing “Social” is not the prerogative of the business & something they can ignore like the other channels (I am currently working on a proposal where we are to implement the “e” channels for the investment in CRM).
Customers liked to get “social” with the businesses right from the day enterprises came into existence & people could no longer talk to the owner. However businesses forced the customers to talk to their palm … oops, phones/fax/email/IM/chat/etc.
Now that there is a “social” platform built all over again on the digital infrastructure & one that removes even the physical distances from the equation, people are beginning to blur the barriers b/w their physical & virtual communities.
It is not only becoming imperative for the businesses to join this channel but they are being forced to join a platform in which they have no control over the conversations! One where the velocity of change in perceptions is far too high to even begin comprehension. (Well, that nears a FUD but thats how it seems to me)
Business is only becoming social all over again.
So yes, this is CRM too, but we are mostly discussing whats making it different this time with the introduction of “social” to the equation on the #scrm hashtag on twitter.
Great post Esteban. I follow the #scrm hashtag on Twitter and throughout a few thoughts the other night, thoughts I wanted to take a moment to expand upon.
scrm (or Social CRM) = hype
crmus (CRM Using Social Extensions) = clarity
Social CRM, like e-CRM and m-CRM, is an unfortunate term, one that leads to confusion and an endless hype cycle. As with your example for e-CRM, to many people ask what this new Social CRM is, when it will be available, and what exactly is it.
CRM Using Social Extensions is a much clearer term, one that is less confusing for executives and consumers alike. It is available today in some applications, and can easily be added to CRMs that are not yet investing their internal resources to build it. As examples:
- Leveraging the power of LinkedIn to map relationships is something that has been available in some CRM system (such as Lexis Nexis InterAction) for a while now.
- Including RSS feeds from Twitter to monitor the buzz around certain companies is already leveraged in other CRM systems.
For CRM using Social Extensions to move past the early marketing hype to a concept that is well understood and widely deployed we must force ourselves to speak about it in clear terms. We must also agree amongst ourselves on one term, with one clear definition. If we cannot do that amongst ourselves we will never see the full potential be achieved.
John Moore
http://twitter.com/JohnFMoore
So here’s the issue- yep you are right. You could theoretically do everything you can now do with social CRM, with the old dog chow CRM. But why didn’t that happen?
Because old CRM lacked the transparency of a witness. The data about customers was all there… but it was/is stored in databases that no one can see.
Social CRM- is on the internet, is there right before the public, for every CEO to see the dirty laundry exposed. When the dirty laundray stays in the database, its not actionable.
If Old CRM wants to catch up, it needs to figure out how to be transparent and witnessable…
otherwise it’s just a bunch of bits and bytes that will forever stay stored in a relational database that has little ability to change customer relationships.
@drnatalie
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Wei,
Thanks for commenting. Trust me, there are probably few if any people in this world that want to give the customer’s voice power. I spent numerous years at Gartner trying to bring about the revolution via EFM and feedback management. And that is what gets me most excited about Social Media.
Alas, I want the change to stick. Hyped-about change like calling something social-whatever is not real change. It is falling into the hype on the way to the top of the hype cycle (peak of inflated expectations). And, the faster their rise through it, the faster and harder they fall.
If we can put social media, which existed well before CRM by the way, into perspective and extract the value as opposed to just rush to claim it a new system that will change the world we have a better chance to do that. And that is what I advocating or working for. Slow, progressive change that sticks around for good.
I hope that this one does, and does it well. E-CRM, M-CRM, and RT-CRM have all stuck around, but in bruised model that is not what we intended.
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Mitch,
I agree that the debate is the fun (I would say that it is more than half, but I like to debate).
You hit a key point in your comment. The difference between 1-1 and M-M relationships. The social media bring the M-M to bear. And they also bring the reverse 1-1 (hard to show when both parties are the same, I guess the really change is going from organizations–>customers to customers–> organizations). It also puts the power of crowds at the disposal of the customer (whereas before I could always send a letter, now I can talk as a community, or have the community talk together with as M-1 relationship).
That, bringing the voice of the many to the organization and make it visible is what makes the key difference. I am not sure our CRM systems are prepared to handle that. It is more than putting an interface that listens on Twitter, or collects feedback from a community. It is about what to do with what is collected. How to draw insights from it that are worthwhile, how to distribute those insights, and how to make something out of that.
Listening to the customer and collecting valuable feedback is something I have been preaching since I realized that EFM alone, simply by asking questions, was not tapping into the collective power and knowledge. It was still 1-1 relationship. I started recommending customers to listen to unstructured feedback (communities, web, chats, etc.) for the last six years… Before we had the tools. These tools make me happy, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel (no, it is not an oncoming train).
I think that if we take it slowly and think about how and what to do with the wisdom of the crowds (don’t confuse with crowd-sourcing) on a M-1 relationship we can really make a change this time.
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John,
The more I hear it, the more I disagree – respectfully of course. It is not about the term, or the hashtag. As Prem said earlier today the #scrm tag is more like a study group. It is a conversation (not a strategy, not something anyone is selling). Within the group discussing it, it is not over hyped – many of us often put socmed its spot. Actually, what is (possibly) over hyped right is the real value of Extending CRM into Social Media. The ROI is logical, but not yet quantitative. The how, what and why is the topic of many threads, blogs and presentations.
LinkedIn (Jigsaw and ZoomInfo), sure a great extension to enhance a sales process, and extend reach – but what does it actually do for the customer in terms of a relationship? Monitoring an RSS feed, important to the company (for marketing), but again, what is the value to the customer?
How about a forum where customers actually interact with eachother? I think that is valuable, but I am not aware of any extensions from CRM into Forums – nor should there be any. How about a HOG meetup? (Harley Owners Group), no technology there, other than motorcycles.
Social CRM is an approach which tries to consider that it is about strategy and we are social creatures (Graham Hill reminded me of that). Social media has simply increased the velocity of the interactions – but not in all cases (offline and not connected still exists). Most people (as much as we hate to admit it) are not online.
You are of course free to use what ever terms make the most sense to you and your clients – the beauty of the net. I will continue to use #scrm to engage with others – peers mostly – in conversation. In speaking to clients, prospects and larger groups I will use many different approaches, depending upon the group I am speaking with – always know the audience and speak appropriately.
I hope you will continue to join in,
Mitch
John,
I appreciate your comment and I think you have nailed it when you said the difference between social CRM and CRM with extensions is understanding on the part of the people signing the checks. Which is the ultimate goal – right? at However, I want to make sure we don’t add too much to the “possibility” that social CRM or even CRM with extensions can bring. Look, when we look at bringing in social aspects to CRM (and I wrote about this in 2003 – before we had “social media” as a term) we are really looking at the ability (ais someone mentioned it in another comment) to truly bring the voice of the customer and the voice of the collective into play. That is all we are doing, seriously. We are bringing what they say or do in L-in, F-book, Twitter, etc. to bear — but the ultimate goal as far as CRM is concerned is to augment what data we have about them in our systems to increase our ability to interact with them. If we learn more about them, including their opinions, we have better profiles. And those profiles are the promised behind CRM working as expecting – with predictive analytics and all that.
There is not a lot of magic behind running a CRM system, despite the many years things remain the same: collect data, analyze, use that analysis in predicting behavior, use that prediction to grow your company.
While I appreciate the new stuff like anyone else, and even embrace it, I want to make sure that all of us doing CRM are somewhat pushing or pulling in the same direction.
And, if we need some taxonomy for that as Mitch said tongue-in-cheek earlier, this could be a starting point. I hope.
Thanks for the great comment!
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Great feedback, Mitch. I love the idea of the HOG meetup, that could be a great social extension to CRM.
While I will agree to disagree on the terms I agree with all else that you wrote. There is a clear ROI for these social extensions, but there is not yet a clear method for demonstrating the ROI. I have made some poor attempts in this area but am continuing to find the right formula.
For now I will stop pushing on the name and return to focusing on the vision for what this needs to become.
John
Mitch,
Great comment. I like it. I will allow you to continue to use Social CRM as long as you make two concessions:
1. There is no ROI for social CRM (or whatever we are going to call it) because we have no idea what we are doing yet! We are learning as we grow (amazing how many “experts” and “gurus” we have for something we don’t know sufficient about… Kinda like having someone who is an “expert” at nano-robotic operations in humans). You mention that in your comment, so I think we are in the right place already.
2. It is all about the aggregation of data as the end result here. I mean, what else are you going to do with SCRM if not collect more data to augment your knowledge of the customer? (I wrote more about this in my reply to John above)
One more thing. You say that you are not familiar with forum extensions. I will concede that it has been done very poorly, but the eService vendors have had Forums as part of what they do for some time. OK, there is difference between offering and selling… But they are there. The DELL ideastorm is considered a form of forums as well. But they all still suffer the same problem: they cannot categorize information, or to say it better… They cannot quantify quality (no saying comments or forums are good quality, just saying that the non-quantity data is considered quality data). This has been ny pet peeve with forum vendors for a very long time. I am not even sure we can claim a solution to this before we arrive at the Contextual (Semantic) web — in any generation of it.
But that is the fodder for another post…
Thanks for a great comment!
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Mr. Scorps,
First, you are very welcome. I am nothing to happy to oblige. I just wish I had more time and less things to interfere with writing and continuing the blog. I do agree with you that social is becoming more important.
It is not that the social media was not there before, it is that some of the tools we had today did not exist, the value was not evident to businesses, and they did not adopt it. They are certainly listening now. The phrase “jump the shark” is replaced in business settings with the phrase “peak of inflated expectations” from the Gartner Hype Cycle. I have never found a better tool to explain how all these — thingamajings (to use your word) progress through organizations. It is very valuable.
However, my concern is that once tools and technologies reach the peak, they begin their descent into the “trough of disillusionment” – or the point where people stop talking about them and being interested. Of course, as with any good rollercoaster or any other ride, the speed of descent is directly linked to the speed of ascent. And we moved very, very fast and with lots of hype about Social Media.
I am concerned that as the decline begins (read Oprah and Ashton forget what was good about Twitter and people follow suit), we are going to lose the momentum we have. And having a silly label like social CRM will make it harder to sell and continue the process of adoption. I am fighting that by making it another channel because I know we can, as Mark Behrens said, convince Biz leaders of the value of CRM Using Social Media — but not on the value of “Social CRM” which they may perceive as a “new” thing. I hope that message gets across…
John,
To paraphrase Scott McNeely – There is no ROI… Get over it.
If you cannot find formula is because there is no proven value – yet – on these implementations. Social Media adoption for CRM is still all about Leap of Faith. And that brings my favorite sort of ROI calculation — the famous black-box ROI.
In go the costs and benefits, out comes the ROI — don’t know how it happens.
At least that is my 250 yen (you can add that to the benefits)
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Natalie,
There are so many aspects of what you are saying that are wrong, I don’t know where to start.
Let’s see…. for once I guess you missed the point of the post. There is no OLD and NEW CRM. There is one CRM with more channels and functions added. “Social CRM” is about bringing the voice of the customer to the “relational database” like you call it. In many ways that it was no possible before. I wrote in another reply how that brings more perspective to what we know about the client — what we are trying to do with CRM.
The comment about bringing transparency… apparently we know different companies. I don’t know a single company that wants to put their “dirty laundry” out – their data out for customers to see. They do want to address public concerns – but that has nothing to do with dirty laundry… it is about,again, giving the customer voice. BTW, before we had this “revolution” customers would also complain. Difference was that companies were not listening, not acting, or not getting recognized. This only changes the degree of value that customer complaints have. In the old days there was no way to integrate that into CRM – but by implementing social media integration we see that information making its way into the “old relational database”, into product marketing for improvements, etc.
When you talk about transparency… you do realize that social media today is still a one-way channel? there is limited value on information that goes back to the originator (be it the customer or the company). As long as integration between KM (for example) and Twitter does not exist, most interactions will be solved on a one-bye-one basis or escalated to a channel that can keep track of it.
I will ignore, because i don’t understand, the sound bite about old dog-chow. But to close my comment…
There is not a new software or technology or tool called Social CRM. the fact that someone in your position of advising customers wants to make the distinction scares me for the same reasons I wrote in my post… CEOs and other Sr. Management don’t want to think there is something new to replace what cost millions to implement. Yes, they want to expand and increase the value of what they have — but if you tell them to “move from the old dog-chow CRM” to a new, shiny Social CRM they will either ignore you or ignore the social media integration.
And — that is the danger of not seeing SocMed integrated with CRM.
Thanks for commenting…