Tags: CRM, Social media

If I had a pound each time that someone has asked me “what is CRM?”, I’d be on the beach in Malibu right now. And for everyone you meet, each person seems to have a different idea of what this CRM thing is. Everyone seems to be able to agree that it is based on creating a relationship directly with a single customer or prospect, and most agree that it involves personal data in some way. But that’s where agreement stops and CRM fans out into a million flavours.

Old school CRM was all about business to business salesmen recording information about their prospects so they could ask Mr Johnson from Amalgamated Aluminium whether his handicap was better than 14 now or whether Joan (Mrs Johnson) was still working as a spy. The fundamental value behind CRM was there from the beginning though – personal data that allows you to make the interactions with your company more relevant to each individual customer.

Then came B2C call centres and big software packages that strip and deploy personal data throughout the call. If you want to understand the extent to which call centres use CRM, go and visit a mobile phone call centre. Every screen for the agent is packed full of tailored info based on the callers call patterns and the marketing priorities. These mobile phone companies have a huge benefit of being able to collect every last detail of the calls being made by their customers, and being able to use that data to offer tailored packages and offers. Impressive.

So, where does CRM turn into Social Media? Well, CRM is about creating a personalised relationship or a personalised environment for a single customer to experience your brand. Social Media is where the customer drives the interaction based on the value they get from the interaction. On the face of it CRM is seller driven and Social Media is customer driven. Social Media appears to be a huge democratic exercise of just “putting yourself online” but the marketer must take old school CRM and make it appear to be Social Media. People have to be seen to be in charge now, not companies. The reality is that people are allowed to do the things that are offered by the organisations, you just choose which one to do. It’s a bit like politics, you can vote for whoever you want, but only from a list of choices that other people have put together. Why those sneaky politicians, anyone would have thought they were in it only for themselves.