CRM and Weblogs

Christopher Carfi—Cerado, Inc.
Member

Posted 17-Aug-2004 04:45 PM
What are your thoughts on weblogs ("blogs") as a component of CRM and way to bring an enterprise and its customers closer together?

Building on the internal/external model of blogs, it may be that blogs (and all social software) can bridge the gap in four different ways.

1) Enterprise to customers
2) Representative with customers
3) Enterprise with customers
4) Customers with customers, sponsored by the Enterprise
(visualizations of these four models here)

("to" implies a one-way information flow, "with" implies a conversation)

However, to round out the internal/external way of looking at things, we might want to think about the "external" interactions through the more traditional viewpoints of sales, marketing, and service. Some examples:

Potential Marketing blogs, in addtion to "branding"
- Product direction
- Uses of existing products
- Case studies of existing customers
- Calendar of events

Potential Sales blogs
- 1:1 blogs between representatives and customers/prospects
(question: would you be more likely to interact with a sales rep if he/she had a blog?)

Potential Service (or Support) blogs
- User groups (discussions among users)
- Problem resolution
- Publication of new features / updates

Any others anyone can think of?

From the "timely!" department...as this post was being put together, also saw that there is a new set of thoughts on Creating Customer Evangelists that may merit a deeper look.

Christopher Carfi
http://www.cerado.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 20-Aug-2004 12:50 AM
Christopher

A very interesting posting.

Like you I believe that weblogs have very significant potential for many organisations that has not been yet been recognised.

But the success of a weblog from the external perspective depends—as do all communications ultimately—upon the relevance of its contents, upon its up-to-dateness and upon its credibility. And from an internal perspective upon all the above plus control.

Ensuring the first two factors is relatively easy. It just takes the right people to contribute the right material, on a continuous basis.

The big difficulty is the last two factors.

External commentators such as customers and professional commentators (sometimes even competitors) will have more credibility in the market than an organisation's own marketers and salespeople. But they are free to post whatever they want to a weblog in an uncontrolled way. And that could include damning independent research of the likes that Nucleus Research made into the satisfaction of Siebel's reference customers. (I see that the Yankee Group has just published another damning CRM vendor customer dis-satisfaction report!) Whilst I am sure that the professionalism of Nucleus Research and the Yankee Group would stop them posting damning material on a weblog, anyone else would be free to post such public domain information as they saw fit. And post it they will.

Rather than marketers and salespeople, an organisation could enlist its technical people to post content to weblogs. But as a recent case study in the Harvard Business Review points out, it can be very hard to achieve a balance between controlling such an employee's postings and their own credibility. What do you do if your product is having problems that requires significant workarounds? Do you acknowledge the problems as Microsoft has done about its compatability problems between the new XP and MS CRM, or do you keep quiet and let users do it for you? And how do you keep the front-line salespeople up-to-date with the latest workarounds published on the weblog, some of which may not actually work, or have unknown and unintended consequences?

Paradoxically, the less control an organisation has over what is said about it, the more credibility the information has in the market, irrespective of the contents and their up-to-dateness.

Weblogs are and should be important. They are a welcome injection of honesty in contrast to the distorted truths that often pass for corporate communications. But they are so, so hard to control.

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Quote"...If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain..."Unquote
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

Raj Badarinath
Member

Posted 02-Dec-2004 04:23 PM
We debated this topic internally a few days ago.Here are some thoughts on the Service areas:

- Discussion groups traditionally have been viewed as serving the same function as blogs, except that they are moderated, and are less freeform as blogs

- Enterprises have been slow to adopt the concept of blogging since it goes against "control"—of accurate data blessed and approved by the management. There is really no way of ascertaining a blog "true value" without an important dimension—the reputation of the blogger.

So in summary—it should be possible to use blogging as an extension of CRM when and and only when CRM evolves from being a single source of data for customer interactions, to the keeper and disseminator of reputation. The plain fact that reputations are portable (and archived for eternity by Google) are concepts not yet embraced by enterprises.