The other day I was cleaning up my emails in Outlook and moving some newsletters subscriptions to my Gmail account. During this process I was very surprise that many companies (some of them CRM vendors) do not have the basic functionality to change my email or profile in their email or CRM systems. I had to unsubscribe my old email and then subscribe my new email, and in a few occasions I had to delete my customer profile completely and then create a new one. In both scenarios these companies are loosing important data that the customer can update and they lost the opportunity to know more about me.
I wish they had some sort of OpenID standard or were using Facebook Connect to update my basic information. In my CRM blog about Latin America I wrote a few times --- Spanish content: Mi visita a Salesforce.com en México & CRM en el 2008 y el 2009... Mis Observaciones --- about the use of Salesforce.com and Facebook apps to do just this... where the user can use his or hers Internet identity to manage interactions and transactions with companies. Take for example the application from Startbucks Idea in Facebook and how users can share ideas using the "share this" option within Facebook.
Now, let's assume you are a financial institution --- you write a simple Facebook app in Salesforce.com to calculate different financial options and capture important data to pre-qualify the customer. All of these can be done within Facebook. Helping you collect the proper data and even measure word-of-mouth metrics based on the number of friends and referrals. And now you can extend this with the Facebook Connect functionality... Get the idea? This is true Social CRM ... this is a new B2C model... via social networking we should be able to better interact with customers in a collaborative way. I think this is the future of CRM... all in the cloud. Of course, there will be data portability issues and data privacy hurdles to overcome... but the consumers will decide where are we going with all of this SOCIAL CRM trend.
After my frustration changing my profile and emails, and reading more about Salesforce.com Sites for Facebook and the release of Facebook Connect, I see this trend becoming a reality. Tim O'Reilly mentions this trend on his recent interview with Robert Scobleizer. Tim mentions the fusion of social networking and CRM apps - where the user should manage his or her data... and many CRM systems depend on others users to manage the data. Let the consumer manage his or her data. See the interview below. Tim's comments about CRM are at the very end of the interview.
I see a race in 2009 for all CRM apps to get into the social networking bandwagon. Most of the major vendors already started the race. I see CRM vendors integrating Facebook Connect, Twitter, Comments from blogs and many other 2.0 technologies into their apps. Multi-Channel interactions and transactions will need to include 2.0 technolgies... it is no longer chat, email, phone and mail....
By Jesus Hoyos
