A blast from the Social CRM past

I found myself picking up Paul Greenberg's CRM At The Speed of Light last week - just the five-plus years after the fourth and final edition came out.

Paul's approach to CRM (and particularly the shift in orientation from company-empowering to customer-empowering models) aligns very well with the 'Art of Making Partners of Customers' approach delivered by The 10 Principles of Open Business.

So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to find a section by social customer champion Chris Carfi AND his reference to my own example of trying to put the customer in the driving seat (literally) through what I called a small experiment in vrm (Vendor Relationship Management).

I was buying a Toyota Yaris for my wife and tried to switch marketing/search roles with the vendors. I marketed to them that I wanted a vendor (via blogposts and tweets). They were given the role of searcher (usually the one we customers take up). For the details read both my blog post from March 2008 - and Chris's own take on it.

Any half decent social monitoring connected to any decent CRM would have delivered any number of wannabe vendors to me. But they didn't come.

When I was reminded of all this by reading Paul's book, I tweeted to Chris. He was blown away that the example is now six years old. Frankly, so am I. Because the gaps it revealed in the capability and philosophical will to serve the needs of the customer are still as wide today in too many companies.

I've worked with many companies since then to help them close their own gaps - by designing processes for the discovery of real time needs (through openly published conversation) and delivery against them, in developing systems to ensure the work and the data flow to the right places, in generating the desire to change required of a customer-led (rather than self-serving or even customer-centric) approach across the business. Yet still it is not the norm.

We still have that Yaris. It's been a great car - and continues to be. But at some point soon we'll change it. I wonder if at that point I can repeat my experiment and get a better result?

What does it take to get some service round here?

What does it take to get the attention of a brand using social media these days?

By which I mean - what does it take to get some service around here?

The reality is that any brand or organisation that gives a shiney one about its customers, members or collaborators should be listening to what we have to say - and ready to act upon what it hears.

If you know a brand or org that isn't - (assuming it's one that does care enough to consider it ought to) then by all means (shameless plug) point them at the kind of social media listening services the likes of Brando Social (where I work) offer.

But assuming any kind of half decent blue-chipped customer wrangler is already equipped to listen/search/audit its reputation online, let's perform a test.

Let's see how fast a real live human representative of any of these brands get back to the community that is FasterFuture (ok, responds to this blog post).

It'll be a fairly straightforward test. I'll post about a series of brands (etc) below. And we wait for a response from a representative of the brand or org in question. That response should be a comment made on this post (moderation remains on - but I have pretty much 24/7 access and I'll publish them in the order I receive them).

So:

• Qik. I love your customer service. Don't let me down.
• Toyota. Surely you have representatives doing the listening in the UK too? I'll help by using the term Toyota Yaris (good little motor my wife runs :-)
  
• Apple. I'm pretty sure you're listening. Just staggered you don't capitalise by responding. iPhone reference to help you out.
  
• Ford. I'll help you out by saying Ford Fiesta. You have the advantage of Scott Monty. Make it count.
• UK Government Director of Digital Engagement (he's never responded yet to my tweets or my article in PR Week for that matter). There you go, PR Week - you can play, too!
• McDonalds - had another bad experience with you this evening... (inspiring this post)
• Tesco - I dread my required and oh too regular visits
• Sainsbury's - just to put you head to head. Shopping. There.
• Coca-Cola - you better believe this is the real thing
• Disney - I am about to pass off many of your characters as my own (if that doesn't get their attention...)

That's your starter for 10. (image courtesy)

Let's see how the first batch get on. By all means let's hear your suggestions for round two. I quite fancy making this a regular test...

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