I read a huge amount of stuff about CRM on this and many other CRM portals. Most of what I read is to be blunt, pretty pedestrian. It is aimed for the newbie to CRM, or it tackles one small part of a larger CRM challenge, or it just repeates what countless other CRM pundits have said before. It is interesting, but it isn't going to change how we look at CRM either now, or in the future.
Somewhere out there are the next generation of CRM thinkers; those people whose ideas are going to be game changers for us all. But who are they? This has nothing to do with age or experience. One of the CRM game changers is CRM consultant Paul Greenberg [1], whose CRM 2.0 ideas are now turning into reality. Albeit not without a few struggles [2] along the way.
Another pair of CRM game changers are academics Vargo & Lusch [3] with their writing about service dominant logic. The radical idea that marketing should be co-created with customers and should concentrate on the post-purchase period where all the value is delivered to the customer as products are used. This opens up a whole new world for marketers to co-create value together with customers.
Yet another is Tony Ulwick [4] of Strategyn with his emphasis on the jobs customers are trying to do and the outcomes they desire from doing them. Jobs & desired outcomes is already providing a vastly superior starting point for customer-driven innovation and is already being taught to B-School classes. And not just in Clayton Christenson's classes either.
But who are the other CRM game changers out there? The people whose stuff we ought to be reading now, so that we can be prepared for what is to come in the future.
Please tell us who you think the CRM game changers are.
Graham Hill
Customer-driven Innovator