Having awakened from a dearth of CRM innovation to discover the landscape radically changed, we as vendors have discovered we’re behind the eight ball because our customers now control the conversation!

The CRM world is in the middle of not one, but two massive paradigm shifts:

Those two paradigm shifts are the shift to SaaS, already well under way, and the new massive shift to social. The amazing thing about the second shift is that our customers have already made it. Many companies think of social as the new shiny thing. Meanwhile, their customers have been using social for a long time now, and they’re wondering why their vendors still can’t manage to connect in the way that they’re already accustomed to. 

CustomerThink released a startling survey that said two-thirds of US consumers are ready to engage with social media for service and support right NOW! Gartner says Web 2.0 will have a transformative impact (their most impactful category) on the mainstream within two years. Let me repeat, this is a massive impact on the mainstream, not some bunch of early adopters still in the experimentation stage, within two years.

Some of the people hearing this asked me whether “revolution” was a more appropriate term than “retooling.” My problem is that we’re past the revolution. The revolution ended and our customers won the war. They’re waiting on us to catch up and give them what they think of as table stakes these days. It’s a retooling issue in the same sense that manufacturing plants are forced to retool when they are no longer competitive with the old tools. I’ll go on record right here and now saying I can’t imagine any company using CRM today not having an active Social CRM program in place within the next five years. It will become a matter of survival. Your customers won’t tolerate anything less.

At the same time, the Web is driving a subtle shift in how we think about products. Everything is becoming a service. It has to be when you look at the ramifications of frictionless communication among customers. The old product think had us engaging up until the point of sale, and once we had the customer’s money, engagement became optional. Customer Service was an exception-handling mechanism for that (hopefully) very small portion of the customer base that did not have a normal, happy experience. It was a cost center, and that cost was to be minimized in every way possible. A variety of mechanisms to prevent customers from making an expensive call to an agent were tried -- these ranged from much higher quality control (to minimize problems in the first place) to various means of deflection which encouraged customers toward self-service. Companies got further and further from their customers, ultimately entrusting that engagement far offshore and outsourced to entirely different companies.

Today, we have to reverse that trend of isolating ourselves from our customers. No matter what you sell -- product or service -- engage like you’re selling a service. Think about the emotional response customers will have to your service. Figure out how to use social media to facilitate and personalize that engagement.

Related Articles

• SmoothSpan Blog, What do Customers Want, and How Can Social Media Help?
• Customer Experience Matters, Customer Service Attracts Loyal Customers by Bruce Temkin
• Gerard Mclean, The Trajectory of Social Media
• CRM Intelligence & Strategy, A Brief History of SCRM by Esteban Kolsky
• CustomerThink, Social Media Based Customer Experience Strategy by Axel Schultze
• CustomerThink, CrowdService: A Clear and Present ROI for Social CRM by Bob Thompson
• CRM Evolution Keynote, Voice Of The Customer 2009 by Paul Greenberg