Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The customer is in control; but there is hope for your brand..


As he has done many times in the past Paul Greenberg has inspired me to write based on his recent post titled: “Thinking it Through Some More: More on What Else? Social CRM”; this is a long post (which I recommend read in its entirety) so allow me to surface a couple key nuggets with some commentary:
  • “The business ecosystem is controlled by the customer”
Absolutely agree; no contest. However there is plenty that the Company / Brand can do about it; among the most basic ones is truly engage in a two way communication with these customers, establish a relationship based in really caring for the things they care about and trough this relationship influence (not direct, not command) the “business ecosystem”; a good read in this space is: “Influence: The Psychology of persuasion

  • “even these non-savvy customers are being impacted by the communications revolution”
Indeed; the friction has been eliminated and now a large number of customers are in the position to find each other and discuss / exchange around those things they care about and inform each other of likes and dislikes; in this brave new world brands / products are truly what the customers say they are..
The good news for brands / companies is that this works both ways; the fact that customers are using these technologies means we can now discover who is talking, where, about what and with what kind of impact… The question is: how good is your company about taking advantage of these and turning this into actions that satisfy your customer needs and bring you business results? This has less to do with technology and more with disposition, structure and organization wide efforts to structure around the customer… If you are used to one way communication managed by different silos of your company it is time to gain some new skills…

What do you think?

Filiberto Selvas

2 comments:

Unknown said...

hey man.... i like your blog... im wondering how you are number one? for socail crm ... no offense but lithium.com and oracle.com are competting for that phrase... anyways can you give me an idea of how much traffic you get for the search term socail crm....

joelca said...

Companies sometimes forget that the only purpose they have is to create a customer, companies also used to have only money as the main exchange currency for the values they produced to acquire that customer. Today customers on top of money bring references, ideas, and resources. Transactional systems were enough to capture money; relational and collaborative plattforms will be required to capture the rest of values from the customer. SocialCRM needs to become the interfase that extracts and leverages on that customer values.