Social CRM, and how it could show how important employees are

(Nov 24 2009) CRM Blog

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Technologies: Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Blog, ERP, ERP Blog, Green IT, on-demand, SaaS, web-based

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  1. By Chris Bucholtz, CRM Blogger


    The Internet is screwing up one of my favorite cliches – “a sea of ink has been written about…” I guess the ne equivalent would be something like “a virtual avalanche of electrons has been generated....” Anyhow, the cliché could be applied to Salesforce.com’s Chatter announcement, which commanded the attention of the CRM blogosphere last week, and the reverberations are still being heard and processed. Check out Paul Greenberg’s two-part analysis on his Social CRM: the Conversation and PGreenblog, Esteban Kolsky’s post about Chatter’s significance, and Marshall Lager’s summation of the announcement.

     

    There’s a lot to digest about Chatter, and as neat as the features promise to be, it’s important to realize there’s no set time for its release yet, which indicates that Salesforce understands what it wants to do on a philosophical level but isn’t quite there with the development of technology to deliver against that. As an astronomer friend of mine said, it’s one thing to have vision, but it’s another thing to actually build the telescope. 

     

    But the ideas behind it are strong. Denis Pombriant did a great job of summing it up in his blog. One of the sections of Denis’ analysis that intrigued me was the idea that a platform like Chatter could expand the amount of useful business information through a community-like platform:

    Now, where is all this information and where are the applications.  Of course they are in your in-house repositories, in the data center.  But there is also information stored in people’s heads that has potential value such as the deep backgrounds of employees, their skills and things they know that may not directly impact their jobs.

    But what if that information too could be surfaced and stored for easy applicability?  In Chatter all of that information is easily rendered as well as information about information and all of it can be subscribed to. 

     

    I always talk about how the application of CRM disciplines to the entire business can be absolutely transformational, and what Denis has outlined is a great example of that. What he’s stated could lead to a dramatic change in the employer-employee relationship. If a CRM system can incorporate the unique, personal libraries of information that individual employees bring to their jobs, it can harness their experiences, unique stores of knowledge and understanding of real-world best practices. That can only improve how companies understand their customers, and behind the scenes make those employees more valued for what they bring to the table. In a recessionary work world, experienced employees are often target for layoffs because of their higher salaries. In the next recession, should this idea catch on, this could help clarify the value of experienced, knowledgeable workers and demonstrate their real value.

     

    The cynics might say that the ability to store and share that information would immediately make those experienced workers obsolete, like a CD after the songs have been ripped to your hard drive. I don’t think that’s the case. The information these workers bring to bear is only as useful as its interpretation; someone coming to it fresh would not likely understand how to best put it to use and realize the maximum value from it. Additionally, those less-experienced employees would not have the ability to relate new events to older information and adapt processes on the fly. This is something that would be old hat for experienced workers; they would become the leading innovators within an organization and, by example, the mentors to the next generation of innovators.

     

    Chatter, as it’s been defined, won’t necessarily be the catalyst for this; a cultural change is perhaps even more critical than a technological evolution. But CRM needs to be understood as a bi-directional technology – it needs to take in information and provide actionable data to better understand the customer, but it also needs to be able to understand how its users work, apply data and interface with technology. The idea of harnessing the vast as-yet unshared repository of information in each worker’s arsenal promises to more closely link the two sides of the CRM equation and, in the process, emphasize how important smart employees are to smart applications of CRM.

     


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