Mark J. Reuter

Hi all.  A few weeks ago a few of my colleagues at Slalom Consulting and I had a discussion about driving the use of Social Media technologies with our fellow employees and our clients.  We came up with the idea of using more Social Media tools to comunicate and drive awareness and adoption of these tools – so for a week we are going to go without email.  I plan to update this post with my thoughts/observations while I do this.  Stay tuned….

May 29, 2012 11:30am  O.K., so here’s my first hurdle.. scheduling.  It turns out I use my email program for more than just email – things like scheduling/connecting with people.  The integration of email and calendar is very tight in Outlook, Google, and iCloud.  So, until I find a better solution, I’ll be using Outlook to schedule meetings… it’s all I can think of short of a tweetup.  More to come, I’m sure…

May 29, 2012 9:00pm  So here are a few other thoughts from the day without email; MAN IT’S DIFFICULT!  It is surprising to me how much I use email as memory enhancer and a to-do list.  While I tried not to send/receive email throughout the day, it was absolutely necessary to search email for things like names, dates, specific questions that needed answering, and a host of other very small (but very significant) details I needed to be productive.  I imagine I could easily search my Twitter DMs and other activity streams, but the transition would be the difficult part.  In addition to that, it’s amazing how frequently I use email to start a conversation with someone – especially someone I don’t know personally.  It’s so easy to reach out and make an introduction via email.  Again, it would be comprable with Twitter – assuming I had people’s Twitter handle as often as I have their email address.  In other news, I’m still working on the calendaring issue, but plan to use drop box (or our internal Chatter and SharePoint instances) for file sharing.  That’s all for now…

May 30, 2012 10:00pm Day 2 had a better feel.  Connected with a few colleagues from work on Twitter and was able to have a few conversations via DM.  Still struggling with scheduling/calendar, but have thought that the iCal function on the Mac is less connected to email – i.e. you don’t need to use email to setup or respond to invites (though technically, it uses email in the background).  A single ‘emergency’ exception about using email for attachements, but it’s for client work – so we’ll let it slide  On the positive side, it’s nice to be focused on a smaller set of applications – Twitter, FB and our internal tools (NewsGator and Chatter).  Once we get our internal tools integrated it will be easier still.  My biggest challenge is getting connected on Twitter with all my contacts, though the more that happens (especially the people I communicate with the most) the easier it all gets.  More tomorrow…

May 31, 2012 10:00pm  Getting much easier  I’m using iCal to manage my schedule – though I still need to use Outlook/Exchange to send invites.  More people I interact with regularly at work are on Twitter and following me – so DMs are much more frequent and effective.  Also having good success with our internal tools (Chatter, NewsGator, and SharePoint).  Next task will be to help Slalom figure out how to use each of these tools effectively and in a coordinated manner.  This is getting to be fun and I’m learning a lot that I hope to share with clients.  Cheers…

June 1, 2012 6:00pm  Ah, Friday of a short week.  The week has been an experience with ‘no’ email.  I guess more accurately, it was limited email.  As noted above, there are some good reasons to use email at the moment – but I hope that over time I can find  other alternatives to email that are more effective and efficient.  In addition to the ones listed above (searching, initial contact with someone, etc.), I’ve found a few others; sending a discrete message to a group of people, responding to such messages, and keeping connected with clients – especially those not up to speed on social media.  That said, it’s been fun and I see a greater potential; as more people (work and personal) connect with me on Twitter and I figure out what internal tools work best for certain tasks and activities, I find myself excited to see where this could go.  So I’ve decided to keep it going – limit my use of email as much as possible, while I continue to explore, refine and catalog the use of other tools for communication and collaboration.  I know this last post has been a bit rambling, but I will continue to post (though less frequently) on this experiment.  My thanks to my colleagues Bill Ryan and Ginger Cearley for their support and participation in this experiment.  You can follow Bill’s journey on his blog Practical Collaboration.

Much has been discussed about the impact of Social Networks on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), how they are related, whether or not they are fundamentally the same thing, what is Social CRM, how the two will work together, will CRM integrate with social networks, will social networks integrate with CRM, is Twitter the next CRM application, etc.  What I’ve tried to do in this post is crystallize my thoughts about the relationship between CRM and social networks.  Please let me know what you think!

While not an ‘official’ area of business concern until the early 1990s (thanks Tom), CRM has been around as long as there have been customers.  I tend to think of CRM this way:

For companies, CRM is, or should be, the execution of a business strategy designed to achieve business objectives; how a company wants to interact/relate to customers.  And that strategy is supported by specific processes and designs.  Those processes and designs are supported by various systems, channels, and technologies which make up the CRM toolbox.  It’s a little more vague for the other side of the equation; for customers, CRM is sum total of your perception of a company based on the direct interactions with that company and interactions with others that involve (pertain to) the company.  It is emotional and visceral and, to some degree, influenced (hopefully) by the execution of that company’s CRM strategy.

As everyone has experienced, CRM can fail for any number of reasons; bad strategy, faulty or poorly executed processes, faulty or poorly maintained tools.  But CRM will only succeed if everything not only works, but if everything is properly aligned and works together.  The key point is this: For either the company or the customer, CRM is about relationships: the sum total of interactions – and the heart of interactions is communication.

The current evolution of CRM involves social networks.  Taken in its most simplistic rendering, social networks are nothing more than another channel that needs to be integrated into the whole.  However, there are some additional properties of social networks that, however subtly, change the game.

What is evolving with respect to the impact of social networks on CRM is the framework of the communication between companies and customers – and this is happening in three distinct dimensions; the first dimension of this evolution is the channels of communication; whereas the current construct involves a small number of channels for communications, the latest evolutionary form of this construct involves an exponentially larger group of channels – if you think of Facebook Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. as distinct channels.  The second dimension of this evolution is the directionality of these communications; in the past, the predominant vector of these communications was directly between individual companies and individual customers – two way and point-to-point.  More and more, communications are happening in additional directions; between customers, groups of customers, competitors, etc.  The last dimension of the construct arises from the first two.  Given the plethora of channels and the ability to connect with any number of companies and ‘other customers’, there is an evolution in the magnitude or volume of the communication; think of it like this – back in the day, if your company put out a horrible version of a product that many people relied on they would all independently provide feedback to the company.  The result was many individual conversations.  These individuals were often unaware that others were in the same boat – or at least lacked a platform that enables them to converse among themselves, discuss, reach conclusions, and ultimately demand restitution or some other action en masse.  In this day of instantaneous and mass consumed communications (enabled by these new channels) customers are no longer alone –and, more and more, customers know that.  Now there is often a few massive conversations happening in these channels.  It is common practice for customers throw a compliment or complaint ‘out there’ and get immediate feedback from a large number of people, just as some companies are throwing new ideas ‘out there’ to solicit feedback from a broad swath of customers.

Each of these dimensions – taken on their own – provides companies and/or customers withopportunities to help build strong relationships with each other.  With increased channels, barriers to connecting with your companies or customers are reduced and communication becomes almost instantaneous and more numerous.  With increased connection with other customers and competitors, companies no longer control the conversation or the brand.  As for the last dimension, volume, the effects can work for either company or customer or both; you can know instantly if you are in the minority (i.e. a got a lemon or are being a squeaky wheel) or the majority… and companies can know instantly whether they have a full blown crisis or not.

The main point here is that when you put all three dimensions together, you get a fundamental change in how companies and customers can interact with each other.  You have evolved from a construct that was constrained along these dimensions to one that is free from such bounds.  In short you have filled in a fragmented ‘mesh’ or ‘net’ point-to-point connections and communications and woven them tightly together and created something more like a fabric – the Fabric of CRM.

Social Networks and Social Media are not CRM.  Just as the phone, the call center, email, chat, and the world-wide-web are not CRM.  All of these things, however, changed the way CRM is designed and executed by expanding and evolving the construct of customer interactions and, ultimately the customer/company relationship.  The processes will change and evolve, as will the systems that support them – the same way call centers and CTI co-evolved to support the telephone channel.  CRM, at its heart, is about the relationship between companies and customers – that does not change.  What are changing are the dimensions of this communication; the number of ways companies and customers are communicate is growing and expanding, the participants engaged in conversations related to a company are expanding, and sheer number of individual conversations is expanding.  All this expansion is changing the fabric of CRM from a ‘net’-like model to something more akin to a burlap sack and eventually into a model along the lines of silk.  Accordingly, customers and companies must adapt to take advantage of this new fabric and find ways to use it effectively to build stronger relationships.  But that’s another post.

One of the primary obstacles in implementing Customer Relationship Management systems and processes are organizational silos; those isolated systems and processes that keep information and transactions from moving freely – as needed – throughout an organization.  Ever call in for technical support only to be told that there is no record of your product order or registration.  And that you must call into a different number in order to resolve this issue before you can be helped by support?  Or ever respond to an email or direct mail offer only to be told by the salesperson that they are not aware of that offer, but that they have a different offer for you?

These are examples of silos; different parts of an organization working independently will the seeming goal of frustrating you, the customer.  Silos are borne out of a companies needs to get things done (i.e. transact sales, provide support, etc.) without a strategic vision of how there operations are all interconnected (i.e. by you, the customer).  Over time, processes and systems are designed and implemented which do not account for transactions that span one or more process areas (Traditionally Sales, Service and Marketing).  This leaves the company unable to adapt to, and satisfy, it’s biggest concern; the customer.

As companies struggle with how to engage in the Social Media buzz, they must include a review of their organizational silos and how they can positively or negatively influence their engagement in Web 2.0.  Do they have the right degree of communication and shared vision between the various business areas before engaging with customers out in the open field of the Social Web?  Or do they need to take a step back and evaluate the degree of separation between these groups and fully understand the impact this will have once they step out into the myriad of Social Networking sites that are available?

To date, it appears that many of the companies that are currently engaged on the Social Web are small enough/new enough that they don’t suffer from silos.  But as more and more established companies begin to engage, I predict that many will have done so without such an evaluation and will make the mistake of presenting a new face to the Social Networks of the world, but will be leaving the same old first-impression; the left hand and the right hand are not talking to each other.