When I spoke about the “Social Worker” last week it struck me that all the talk of customer-centric operations and processes are starting to finally come true, it’s just never been the domain of one sector but a combination and with the social enterprise looming fast now is the time to capitalise on this.
Social BPM is bringing new levels of process collaboration and transparency across the enterprise from the inside and across the supply chain, Social CRM is doing exactly the same but as the outward face of the organisation, and in the middle is that new type of glue, Social, that seems to allow technical and management convergence of the two areas.
After watching the Salesforce demonstration this week it’s apparent that a lot of thought has gone into enterprise social software and opening up the doors from the inside but there’s still a lot to be done on the outward path towards the customer to allow them to interact with an organisation in the same way. Seamless and transparent interaction have to be the keys in order to create real customer-centricity, a customer should not have to think about who, what, how or why they are engaging.
In order to engage on their level though I feel that internally the enterprise has to transform to be as flexible as possible, that both knowledge workers and social workers will rise to the fore because of the way they interact with the unstructured processes that touch customers and that community based structures will emerge as the business model of the future.
Whether it happens in 1 year or 5 years, this is the just the beginning. The clock has started ticking….
