Reason No.1 why Social CRM is an oxymoron
Social is all about people, their relationships, the way they connect. People who worry about the social enterprise care about a new way for people to help each other.
CRM is all about ignoring people (let them talk to the automated receptionist). The last ‘relationship management’ thing CRM did related to you was to mine the hell out of your records to shove product and no support down you throat, and hanging up on support at the same time…
Remember MCi and AT&T calling you 100 times a day? That was CRM at its ‘best’.
People who care about CRM are people who could care less about you, the customer, being helped. It just matters to them if you are influential in Twitter. Are you? I am not.
Who puts “Social” and “CRM” in the same sentence? CRM vendors. Usually, SalesForce.com, trying to pimp Chatter. There you have a great social relationship: the sales person that has been ignoring you ever since you bought that lousy product from them. Now he wants to know more about you, what your opinion is about this and that, in the hope he can sell you “that”. That’s how “social” this is.
Why is SalesForce.com also doing it? Well, they market an alternative to traditional CRM, and do it very well. Which, considering the competition, is not really a big feat. But let’s face it, they are good at that. However, have you ever used SF? If you have, compare it with a good social enterprise platform like Jive.
Yep, now imagine that quality of experience coming from SF.Com. Nuff said: if you don’t get it you haven’t experienced true “Social”.
So, I understand that SFC wants to bring some glitter into their tired, exhausted, anything-but-interesting set of customer-ignoring products. I understand that anything “Social” today glitters like gold, and there are way many gold diggers out there needing a revamp. So, I DO understand why SFC is talking “Social CRM”. Unfortunately for SFC, it still doesn’t make any sense.
If you disagree, I ask you to just take your pundit hat off for a minute, and put on your customer hat (yep, the same “C” on the front). Now go ahead, look at this oxymoron called “social CRM”. Go ahead, smile.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 1st, 2010 at 10:56 am and is filed under enterprise collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on April 6, 2010 at 1:05 pm Dave Evans wrote:
You know…you’re right about a lot of this. The points you raise are exactly the points I make in my book (I won’t mention it here–the post isn’t about “me” and my stuff, after all.) When marketers control the channels, customer data can be used in all sorts of ways that customers may not appreciate. AT&T and MCI are great examples.
But wait, there’s more…. (You knew this part was coming, right?)
Social CRM **does** make sense NOW because consumers actually have a voice — not necessarily w manufacturers (CRM) but with each other (social). Jive is an awesome platform (I’ve designed commercial apps that run on it) as is Lithium’s. (Disclosure: I am Lithium Reseller.) But I also like SF.com “Ideas” platform (Starbucks, Dell). I was talking to a friend in Starbucks yesterday about the no-splash stirring stick, an innovation that came from My Starbucks Idea, built on SF.com.
So here’s why I think it’s less of an oxymoron that it was 5 years ago, and certainly 1o. Now, customer conversations (social — between themselves) are literally forcing retailers, hospitals, manufacturers…to actually get social right. It’s all public now– they have to. (Final disclosure: I’m writing a new book…on, you guessed it, Social CRM.)
on April 6, 2010 at 2:58 pm Carlos Caballero wrote:
Thanks, Dave,
Hey, no problem with mentioning your book, on the contrary, let me do it for you: Social Media Marketing, An hour a day. As it turns out, I think your book makes a good point for my argument, if you consider it as follows:
* Social services are changing the world, and in the process turning customer dynamics upside down
* The control-centric paradigm so well mastered by CRM is dead; it may not know it yet, but it’s dead
* Smart companies will change their *marketing* first to keep reaching and engaging their customers (the subject of your very nice book)
* Engaged customers will buy in an increasingly social manner (i.e., filtering their choices, reactions, product experience and even expectations through the crowd)
… you see, so far we agree on everything, right? OK, let’s stop that
Here is where I disagree with the rest of the “social CRM” meme:
* I believe it will NOT be CRM tools/vendors/products/interaction models that will just “add social” to their mix. *That* is an oxymoron, because they are already dead (even if they don’t know it)
* Rather, it will be the social web infrastructure that will develop relationship management mechanisms that will make CRM even more obviously dead (as a matter of fact, those mechanisms are already emerging independently of any CRM-related guidance). That relationship management will be controlled by buyers, who will interact through a zillion different social backbones, and will be supported in their interface to businesses by good Social Business Services products like Jive.
It will not be “social CRM”. It will be just “Social“. Yes, it will be the SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE the one that will (and to a great respect already has already) take over the management of relationships between vendors and buyers. How will companies catch up with this is a totally different story, one that has to be yet written.
That re-writing will take time, not for any complex reasons beyond the fact that, for that to happen, many three-piece-suits in boardrooms and executive suites have to become sneakers and jeans. In other words, the old jerks have to retire and or die
for their control-centric business knowledge to fade away. In the meanwhile, the social web will keep digesting what is left of CRM without even flinching. Why invent “social CRM” to explain a future that is already happening as part of “social”? It’s like bringing in intelligent design as an additional hypothesis to explain evolution: redundant! Evolution IS the explanation. Social IS the process.
No “social CRM”, just “social”. Or its equivalent form: CRM is dead (I know, I know, “it” doesn’t know it yet).