Waterbed or watershed - CEP smokes CRM ?
For as many years as I care to remember I have battled with the idea of CRM, those letters make me cringe - Customer Relations Management ? it's an oxymoron in itself, without even trying to comprehend a concrete systems implementation of managing relationships whilst still pretending customers are actually people. Yet over those years if I had been paid for the number of times businesses contracting me have sought 'CRM solutions development', I should now be retired on my luxury yacht, moored of some perfect Caribbean isle. The truth is however quite the contrary, the CRM dream fails to materialize every time and instead is replaced by various forms of Sales Force Automation (SFA).
But there is hope on the horizon, marketeers are starting to get things like 'conversations', organizations are waking up to the fact that customers ain't just meat for the grinder, but are actually real people just like them. Of course real people in the real world engage with each other, this engagement in the commercial world is what turns the financial cogs of production and consumption, that eternal dance dictating the beat of all business.
Thus it will come of little surprise that smart folk will put two and two together and work out how to grease those cogs to make things run smoother or faster. Much of this 'smart folk' work has already emerged, 'The cluetrain manifesto' (Cluetrain) is one of the seminal pieces leading to the emergence of what I call the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP).
The second major ingredient of infrastructure required to make the leap from CRM to CEP is also now emerging, after it's Darwinistic period in the petri dish that is the internet - social software in it's many forms has risen from the quagmire. These forms are important, we have unwittingly been experimented on by these mutations over the years : Bulletin boards, email, user groups, irc, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, mailing lists and numerous emergent social platforms. This combination of social patterns, social production and social software, when combined with the social works such as the Cluetrain form the new CEP. Think of the CEP as hands reaching out from an organization ready to welcome, support and to help the people previously known as customer relationships. The big trick here is not to think about them as relationships anymore, rather engagements, you must engage your customer as a person and as an equal, just like you would a friend or associate. That means working with your customers so they aren't just customers anymore, they are part of your organizational fabric, it's like your all on the same huge waterbed, when the customer is making ripples you need to feel them and react to them instantly.
Why am I bringing this up now ? Well apart from it having been something I have been passionate about for the last decade, the time has come for action. Recently many of you have asked me what my Rel3 project is and where it came from, this post represents at least some of the motivation behind Rel3. So am I saying that Rel3 is a social waterbed attempting to kick CRM's butt? No, not quite, but it is most certainly something I envisage as forming part of that CEP fabric that I allude to here. Although the time is coming to enumerate Rel3 in more details over the next few months, I would be interested in what you, the smart folks, think about CEP concepts generally, does what I suggest here ring any bells, do you feel passionately about engagement vs relationship management or am I crusading alone on this horse?
*Update All occurrences of 'engagement' should be replaced by 'empowerment' its obvious to me now, thanks Doc.
But there is hope on the horizon, marketeers are starting to get things like 'conversations', organizations are waking up to the fact that customers ain't just meat for the grinder, but are actually real people just like them. Of course real people in the real world engage with each other, this engagement in the commercial world is what turns the financial cogs of production and consumption, that eternal dance dictating the beat of all business.
Thus it will come of little surprise that smart folk will put two and two together and work out how to grease those cogs to make things run smoother or faster. Much of this 'smart folk' work has already emerged, 'The cluetrain manifesto' (Cluetrain) is one of the seminal pieces leading to the emergence of what I call the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP).
The second major ingredient of infrastructure required to make the leap from CRM to CEP is also now emerging, after it's Darwinistic period in the petri dish that is the internet - social software in it's many forms has risen from the quagmire. These forms are important, we have unwittingly been experimented on by these mutations over the years : Bulletin boards, email, user groups, irc, blogs, wikis, instant messaging, mailing lists and numerous emergent social platforms. This combination of social patterns, social production and social software, when combined with the social works such as the Cluetrain form the new CEP. Think of the CEP as hands reaching out from an organization ready to welcome, support and to help the people previously known as customer relationships. The big trick here is not to think about them as relationships anymore, rather engagements, you must engage your customer as a person and as an equal, just like you would a friend or associate. That means working with your customers so they aren't just customers anymore, they are part of your organizational fabric, it's like your all on the same huge waterbed, when the customer is making ripples you need to feel them and react to them instantly.
Why am I bringing this up now ? Well apart from it having been something I have been passionate about for the last decade, the time has come for action. Recently many of you have asked me what my Rel3 project is and where it came from, this post represents at least some of the motivation behind Rel3. So am I saying that Rel3 is a social waterbed attempting to kick CRM's butt? No, not quite, but it is most certainly something I envisage as forming part of that CEP fabric that I allude to here. Although the time is coming to enumerate Rel3 in more details over the next few months, I would be interested in what you, the smart folks, think about CEP concepts generally, does what I suggest here ring any bells, do you feel passionately about engagement vs relationship management or am I crusading alone on this horse?
*Update All occurrences of 'engagement' should be replaced by 'empowerment' its obvious to me now, thanks Doc.