"How do I look?"
"Wonderful, your majesty! Your new Social CRM coat really brings out your customer-centric side"
"Do you really think so? It was made by the tailors in Silicon Valley you know, using the very latest Fabric-as-a-Service (FaaS). The fabric is so fine it looks almost invisible"
"Incredible, your highness. You look just like the King of Zappos, or his Royal Highness, the Prince of Threadless.com"
"Excellent. What do you think my subjects will think?"
"They will marvel Sire. They have long expressed a desire for you to set up a Facebook Fan Page so that they may honour you" Read more »

Often I ask clients to describe their multi-channel capabilities. Most start by focussing on the channels that they own and control like their contact centre, their web site, their field sales force. CRM taught us to think that way. But customer's don't necessarily abide by those rules. For many customers, peer to peer is often the first channel they use to interact with an organisation and it is certainly the channel that they trust the most. We all use the customer-to-customer channel to ask what our friends think, recommend a local supplier or fix a problem with a product (see my post on outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers). Read more »

OK - let me say from the outset that rumours of the death of CRM have been much exaggerated! CRM undoubtedly went through an early wave of hype, crashed, but has now bounced slowly back to become a healthy buoyant market. Gartner describe this as a wave of hype. Talk of 60-70% project failure rates may have been true 10 years ago, but that figure is now more relevant when talking about success rates (and that's conservative). The market has matured. CRM buyers, vendors and consultants are, generally speaking, savvy about how to deliver value from CRM projects. That doesn't make the projects any easier, but in general they work and they deliver value both to companies and their customers.

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No - the title of this blog post is not a typo… nor am I suggesting you ask your customers to set up an offshore call centre in Mumbai... Some organisations have customers who are so passionate about their product or service that they do their marketing, their selling and their customer support on their behalf. Of course there's nothing new here. Word of mouth has been around as long as trade and commerce, but the internet has enabled connectivity and a network effect to drive scale like never before.

Let's take a practical example. A few months ago I had a problem with my iPod - the screen had frozen. I looked around for a reset button but couldn't find one. So what did I do? Phone Apple's call centre? Of course not, I Googled it. Someone called "Apple_Fanatic" had already posted instructions on how to reboot a frozen iPod in an online support forum. Apple had, in effect, outsourced the first line of their customer support to their customers.

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A few years ago, when I was working for SAP, I posed a question to my team: "If Google were to launch a CRM solution, what would it look like and how would SAP respond both tactically and strategically"? I mocked up some fictitious "Google CRM" screenshots showing Google CRM mashed up with Google Docs, Google Adwords, Google Maps etc and I described the solution as a free CRM solution funded by advertising revenue that would shake up the CRM market.

The session promoted heated debate. Some ideas, like mashing SAP CRM screens with Google Maps were fed into SAP's CRM Product Development and were embraced into the product, others, like partnering with Google to create a SaaS solution, never left the room.

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Much has been written about Social CRM. Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM is one of the best I have seen. Paul describes Social CRM as a natural extension of CRM as follows:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Or his shorter tweetable version: "The company's response to the customer's control of the conversation."

It strikes me that one of the fundamental tenets of Social CRM (and one of the toughest challenges) is the need to shift from an "inside-out" culture to an "outside-in" culture. Key characteristics of an inside-out culture include:

• Marketing assume they know what products a customer will want to buy
• Marketing bombard customers with offers hoping a small % of customers will bite
• Sales people launch into product pitches without first listening to the customer Read more »

Let me say from the outset that this is not a "Virgin Media lies Virgin Media sucks" post. I am a relatively happy Virgin Media customer and on balance I would recommend them to a friend; but my last customer service experience with them was mixed. I've chosen to case study the experience for precisely that reason. It's incredibly hard to create a good cross-channel, joined up customer service experience and get things right every time. Even the best companies struggle. Most organisations do some things well and some things badly. They are siloed, they fire-fight and they have done little more than dabble in social media. The purpose of this post is not to criticise Virgin Media, it's to highlight learning's from my recent dealing with them.

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I first came across Lean thinking in CRM when I met with the COO of a large Dutch financial services company. At first I was sceptical, I had previously only associated Lean with Japanese automotive companies; particularly Toyota where the concept was created. But lights began to go on in my head when the COO described the application of Lean principles to customer-facing operations and I have been a fan of Lean CRM thinking ever since.


Lean thinking starts with the customer
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The other day I was trying to explain to a client what social CRM was all about and what the difference was to the first generation of CRM. Knowing the client was a film-fanatic, I used a Star Wars analogy.

Despite the best of intentions first generation CRM systems were about technology-enabled command and control. Think of the Original Star Wars film, Darth Vader and the Death Star. As Supreme Commander of the Galactic Empire, Vader built the original Death Star to defeat rebel forces in the Galactic civil war. The Death Star was a monumental technological feat designed to control the Empire and attack the Rebels. Relating this to the first generation of CRM (the boom before the bust)
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