Conversational Marketing as CRM Navigation 

CRM - It was such a sensible idea at the time!

The one customer view, a corporate memory for the customer, the left hand knowing what the right is doing, treating different customers differently, measuring the return on marketing investment...

The results have frankly, been well......    underwhelming.

The irony is, of course, that the "C" part of "CRM" has too often just gone missing in action... 

It is not just that CRM intiatives generally lacked executive sponsorship or understanding; became IT projects, did not engage the natural stewardship of marketers and have been overly ambitious. All contributed to poor results.

Fundamentally - what has also been missing? The voice of the customer.

CRM projects have seen a rush to elaborate requirements gathering workshops involving a multitude of stakeholders, with one stakeholder missing - the customer. Arms-length market research hasn't cut it either.

Can you just imagine if you, as an innocent customer, stumbled on one of these workshops... yes, a frightening thought!

Of course, CRM systems are in some cases necessarily challenging with complex processes and integration points to satisfy even basic customer requirements. However, without any strong customer reference point or sense of customer priorities it is easy to see how CRM implementations might lose their way. Chinese whispers are the result.

And so, after 12 months, we get to the end of Phase 1 of the CRM implementation - and someone innocently asks - "Please remind me again, why is it we are doing this?"

What this has bred - has been a lot of CRM initiatives that are "inside-out" - the organisations view of the customer, as opposed to "outside-in" - the customer's view of the organisation (see Richard Owen's "CRM Grows Up" ). 

And even stronger than that, it represents "what we are going to do to the customer"  - an attitude that simply aint going to fly with today's customer...

Enter social networking, web 2.0, online communities and conversational marketing...

In comparison to our previous CRM efforts, these appear to have sprouted effortlessly and organically. And the message to us as marketers should be abundantly clear...

Things have changed. Customers want and are getting more control. They want a 2-way, no - multi-way dialogue with the brand. They have very little trust of brands but will listen to the recommendations of other customers. A small but significant proportion of customers in every category will engage with a brand online - if handled respectfully and authentically. 

Why is this important to our internal CRM initiatives - to the CRM infrastructure that is gathering dust or suffering quiet atrophy in the corner?

Well, at a very basic level, if an online customer community equals "I hear you" and a CRM system equals "I remember you" then we have the raw ingredients of a Customer Engagement Strategy.

The power of an online customer community lies in its ability to tell us "why". Properly functioning CRM systems should handle the other questions - who, what, when, how. It is the ability to gain quick insight and engagement that is the hallmark of social networking carefully harnessed by a brand.

The promise of online customer communities - quite apart from these immediate insight and engagement benefits - is the ability to rework, repair, re-calibrate CRM infrastructure (people, processes, programs, technology) to something more like what customers want!     

In future posts we will look at what CRM software vendors are doing in this brave new world.