CRM in 2018

Owen H Lewis
Member

Posted 25-Oct-2006 09:14 PM
According to Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder, twelve years from now, devices such as mobile phones, will have 256 times the computer processing power they currently have, giving them more processing power than current desktop computers. With these technological advances as a base, could you give me a bit of insight into how this will change CRM in both a B2B and B2C respect.

Cheers OHL

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 27-Oct-2006 01:02 AM
Owen

According to a recent post at Think Customers: The 1to1 blog...

"This topic (...Customer Insight) also came up earlier this week at Oracle's Open World customer conference. During his keynote, Cisco president and CEO John Chambers said that the ability to catch market transitions three to five years before they're obvious is imperative, because if you wait until they're happening you're too late. Chambers predicted what he feels are the next wave of market transitions to watch for. Among them, he cited the growing power of the human network, customer experience (including users defining that experience), collaboration, and the blurring of content/device boundaries."

Although it is simply impossible to gaze in to the crystal-ball so far ahaed, Chambers' suggestion of social media (think Ebay, YouTube & Second Life), customer experience (think Virgin, Harley Davidson & Lands End), customer co-creation (think P&G, Mastercard & Lego), collaboration (think LinkedIn, MySpace and Skype) and everything mobile (think about everything your phone could ever do... now that's mind-boggling) are fully aligned with my own thoughts.

The other important question for us CRMers is what will CRM look like in a customer-driven future world?

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant

Jeremy Cox
Member

Posted 02-Nov-2006 09:08 AM
My guess is that by then 2018 or whatever, there will be intelligent agents with much greater learning capabilities than we have now, and this will enable firms to sense change a little bit further out than you might get from immediate customer feedback or datamining.

Firms will want to be more 'plugged in' than they are today typically.

This will wrap strategic market management round CRM as firms will want to respond to current needs and wishes of their customers, as well as increasing their sensitivity to longer term trends or spotting 'the next big thing'.

Picking up on Graham's co-creation forecast, I reckon that the emerging science of 'value network management' will foster wider/deeper co-creation possibilities, that might create great numbers of spin-offs or spin-outs with the parent company acting as more of a venture capitalist.

I of course will be retired and floating along a French canal on a Dutch Tjalk, blissfully ignorant of all this change.

regards

Jeremy

Jeremy Cox MA DipM
Managing Director
The Wisdom Network Ltd,
www.thewisdomnetwork.com

Graham Hill
Guru
Member

Posted 02-Nov-2006 01:27 PM
Jeremy

To pick up on your idea of intelligent agents, we already have something like this today, albeit in two still unconnected areas.

The first part is agent-based simulation, already in wide use for simulating individuals in complex adaptive systems as their interactive behaviour emerges. Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem is one of the most advanced thinkers in this area. Take a look at hew Icosystem website at http://www.icosystem.com/index.html and in particular at their excellent free publications section.

The second part is real-time marketing, where smart applications that know about your behaviour can make intelligent recommendations. Think in terms of the ever ubiquitous mobile phone with a whole range of capabilties plus intelligence built in. Prof Roland Rust wrote a prescient article on Real-time Marketing in Marketing Management magazine. You can download it for free at http://www.cba.uri.edu/faculty/varki/realtimearticle.pdf . Some of this is already being trialled by the Reality Mining Project at MIT at http://reality.media.mit.edu/ .

And see Alan Moore's excellent blog Communities Dominate Brands at http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/ for a socially-networked cross-over between the two worlds.

On the one hand, agent-based simulation will provide companies with the ability to simulate aspects of emergent customer behaviour. On the other hand, mobile phone real-time marketing will give customers the ability to recommend appropriate products at teh right time. Social networks may be the glue that sticks the two together.

As William Gibson of Neuromancer fame said, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed".

Graham Hill
Independent CRM Consultant