Summary : everyone has an idea, even a rough one, of where social CRM is taking us but no one exactly knows what will be the levers. A common mistake is to keep on managing customers the old way, as a passive target whose only function is to buy in a system where value is created to his detriment. The whole by using new channels. This way of doing things does not improve anything and even harms those who practice it. So we need go step back to basics and manage the customer relationship instead of managing the customer. It forces us to rethink, point by point, the components of this relationship : its subject, the exchanges, stakeholder identities, its follow-up and its exploitation. Social CRM is not a matter of media but a new approach to a customer that has become a stakeholder and an active player of a value co-creation processus.

I had the opportunity to talk with Paul Greenberg, during the last Lotusphere. We shared our opinions about what social CRM was, wasn’t and the state of the art.

Our first acknowledgement was that, even if nearly everybody agree on the big picture, everyone has his own definition and vision. Is it a problem ? Not at all since it’s obvious that, as for enterprise 2.0, so many cultural, organizational and even industry-related factors play a role what makes that’s there’s not a single SCRM model but an SCRM concept that has to be adapted to each organization.

Our second point of agreement was about the “social channel”. Moving from CRM to SCRM does not only mean using new channels to replicate old behaviors. For instance using Twitter of Facebook to push the same special offers as with the old emailings. At best it’s social marketing, at worse it’s spam and, even more, it gets on people’s nerves because they are bombed with useless information while they get no answer when they try to use the same channel to talk to the enterprise. (Yes…it’s a two-ways channel, contrary to email that always mention “do not reply”…strange way to envision customer relationship isn’t it ?).

Consequence of these two points : social crm is rather an approach to customer relationship than a matter a channel. I’d even go further : people can do social CRM “face to face”, by phone, on any channel. What matters is to consider the customer as a stakeholder and draw all the consequences.

So, I suggested Paul what would be, in my opinion, a minimalist social CRM program :

• Segmentation of the audience and delivery of a message, of information and contents, and even specific services for each segment. Contrary to received ideas, enterprises don’t talk a one community but to many communities they don’t own. For instance, an airline will have its own fans, the Airbus A380 fans, those who love travels, their “high contribution” customers, those who are stranded in a far country. Each category expects something different : some want to dream, some “insider information”, some special ofers, some service. Some will never be customer but contribute to establishing the brand online, some are good customers that have to be engaged and retained, some need to be convinced to be acquired.

• Organization a customer case management system that makes that, whatever is the channel that’s used, the message goes inside the organization, is handled by the right person (what would look like the junction of advanced case management and social networking) then goes back to the customer without any break in the flow. (Keeping in mind that it’s not the perfect answer to everything).

It’s a little bit light and minimalist but that may be a good start. In fact, like we agreed with Paul, so few organizations have reached this point that it’s better than nothing for a start.

But, since it appears that it’s about a new vision of the relationship between organizations and their customers, here’s how I’d see things point by point. [Read more...]