So, before you click away from here thinking this is a rehashing of the social CRM definition debate, stop. It’s not.
After I was awoken by my son last night at 2:15am, I laid back down and this thought popped into my head. I tossed and turned until five this morning, spinning it over and over and hoping I didn’t fall asleep where the thought would be lost. I suppose I could have gotten up and wrote this post then, but, hey I don’t have a white board in my bedroom.
So for argument’s sake, lets start with Paul Greenberg’s definition of social CRM:
“…the company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”
Ok, as some of you might know, I’m a technologist. I build stuff. But, the problem is I can’t build a “response”. Then I had a vision…at 2:15am. And, because I’m a right-brained techie (a rare breed), this vision wasn’t an architecture diagram, it was of an open book. A book as the platform. And not this platform. This platform:
Books contain stories. So, this book is the platform for communicating and engaging; customer with customer, customer with brand. Within those conversations are stories.
With me so far?
So what is contained within those stories? What do we get out of books? Knowledge, information, data. This information about our customers, their wants, needs desires, is taken into our corporate brain. And hopefully, we become smarter about those customers. We get to know them better. We establish a relationship based on mutual understanding.
Then what do we do with all that knowledge that our customers have shared with us through those stories and conversations? We create stuff – products, services, solutions and experiences. And, because that stuff is more relevant to our customers’ needs, those customers are happy customers….and they all do the wave in tribute to us.
Uh oh…have I just described good old CRM?
