With the recent grouping of forces around Paul Greenberg's stake in the ground on the definition of the term Social CRM, especially with the claims of various social technology companies as being Social CRM, there are some confusions and ribbing in equal measures.
The witty, nutty & immensely influential Enterprise Irregulars have joined the fray after Ross Mayfield of SocialText blogged a great megapost on Social CRM iceberg, making it a very interesting discussion in the immediate bloghood. Well, it isn't very popular in the blogosphere since you know ... enterprise software is not exactly sexy ... and so many people do not take such a keen interest in at as they take in consumer software. :)
Ok, let us look at what is defined as Enterprise 2.0 by the fountain of knowledge - wikipedia:
Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen defined Enterprise 2.0 in a report written for Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".See? Even wikipedia doesn't have one! But thats still far better than Social CRM since it doesn't even have an entry!
What I want to say is that though the people who follow Enterprise 2.0 & Social CRM understand what it is in the hearts of their hearts, there is not any widely agreed upon definition. In fact I have come to believe that it might be very difficult to define them as yet, this might be because these are still evolving fields.
Please do not get me wrong or misjudge me. I have had experience in implementing & using social software in the enterprises for the past four years. And I do "get" the thing about using social software in the enterprise.
I however like to differentiate between the social software implementations per the audience - internal facing for employees, external facing for customers, partners, etc. in the business ecosystem.
Let us see what the Andrew McAfee, who coined the term, defines it as:
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.So clearly the use of social software for customer facing purposes is also Enterprise 2.0. So does this not prove Social CRM to be a subset of Enterprise 2.0?
Not so fast there! Issue is that the term Enterprise 2.0 has predominantly been used to denote the internal facing social software, with internal collaboration, knowledge management/sharing, productivity, agility as the goal. So for the sake of this post let us treat Enterprise 2.0 as the use of social software within the organization. In such a case I believe Social CRM has an area of intersection with Enterprise 2.0 rather than being a subset. But lets not get too tied up with the semantics or get too pedantic. :)
I believe that there is a clear necessity for Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM to co-exist, since efficient employees lead to better customer experience.
Technology wise too there is overlap in many aspects if you consider the usage of blogs, wikis, forums, microblogging, etc. in both internal facing & external facing aspects. But the way the blogs, wikis, etc. are managed for internal & external use is clearly demarcated and is not advisable to be handled by same people.
There are many differences in privacy, rights, roles, permissions, integration & other perspectives that make a huge differentiation in the base technologies. In an internal implementations you do not bother about the personal privacy, but do take care to provide access rights & permissions based on roles & team/department one belongs to, where one is in the organization structure. The permissions are set either by the user or at a system level by the administrator or even a manager. In an external implementation personal privacy of the users is paramount (Marshall Lager has a great post about that on the CRM Playaz blog). Also, the rights & permissions are set by users based on the degree of separation in their social relationships, not team/department/organization structure.
Additionally, for a social CRM implementation, the kind of integration with other enterprise systems is different from that of an internal implementation. For internal implementations you do not need the feedback loop to be completed by the social media monitoring tools nor do you need integration with the user components like OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Connect, etc. So there are differences in architectural considerations too!
In Cognizant we have various Enterprise 2.0 tools like our ChannelOne forums, Ch1blogs, Cognizant 2.0 collaboration & project management platform, wikis, etc. But they cannot be used for an online customer community involved in customer advocacy, brainstorming, resolving issues, disseminating information, etc. nor can we build a Ideastorm like community or a Coca Cola Facebook community. Nor can the team that implemented the internal tools do the external implementation. Just because a mallet & gavel are related does not mean you can always use them interchangeably. :D
I believe Enterprise 2.0 (internally focused) & Social CRM need to tango, not fight. :)
How about you? What do you think? What has been your experience?
Another possibility is that the era of enterprise software and TLAs (three letter acronyms) are finally over. There are only so many ERP, SCM, CRM, BPM, WTF spins that analysts can put on software.
ReplyDeleteRecession is not a time to sell snake oil successfully. Going by the looks of it, Lithium, Helpstream are growing in revenues & profits. So evidently there is something there? Era of enterprise software might not be over as yet, nor do I look forward to it. ;) But I sure want an end to the TLAs! :D
ReplyDeleteThank you for the comment ML.
Building on customer tweets is a nice tactic, but limited to B2C scenarios. I fully expect Twitter to capitalize on this opportunity with a Twitter Pro offering soon.
ReplyDeleteSBS and Enterprise 2.0 seem to be taking the CRM replacement path.
"Social CRM" is leveraging an enterprise term, therefore a more strategic approach would build on existing CRM, not make it obsolete.
B2B customers are not as likely cast their issues in a public forum such as Twitter, but would find KB article comments, ratings, and tags on a suppliers site very helpful.
Customer Portals are a more likely foundation to start building Social CRM in B2B (IMO).
Interesting blog. Glad I found it.
Good post- the opportunity is to look "socially" back into the enterprise to change processes from within- Enterprise 2.0 is like that change agent that is necessary. Social CRM brings companies the realization that customers don't need or want to be managedby CRM going forward. They must tango.
ReplyDelete@socialmediawave
Twitter is not enough for Social CRM. Agree with you about Twitter in this context. This Helpstream blog post might also be of help. :)
ReplyDeletehttp://corpblog.helpstream.com/helpstream-blog/2009/8/10/twitter-is-not-enough-for-social-crm-its-not-even-a-start.html
Not sure though about your reasons behind your observation that "SBS & E2.0 seem to be taking a CRM replacement path". Interesting perspective (I "collect" different perspectives you could say!). Can you please throw more light on that for me? I haven't gone that way before. Glad that you have given me a glimpse. :)
Am glad you found the blog ML. :) You should also join us in #scrm on twitter. We keep discussing stuff around social CRM in twitter using that hashtag to keep track of the conversations. :)
Wow! Thats a pretty nice of putting things in perspective!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Craig. And thank you for the comment. :)
I think in terms of Sales 2.0 -- Service 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM.
ReplyDeleteSales 2.0 is next gen sales, Service 2.0, next gen service. Enterprise 2.0 - internal productivity tools and Social CRM, using technology to integrate and manage customer interactions across sales, service, marketing and PR.
Prem,
ReplyDeleteIn claiming "Crystal gazing? I have never done that, but always wanted to for the fun." This is a forward looking post. My read is that you are putting your own stake in the ground, and it is with much insight.
While there is no official stake in the ground for Enterprise 2.0 (Paul, feel like taking a stab?), each definition for E2.0 focuses first on technology, then on what to do with it. Our stake in the ground is that Social CRM focuses first on philosophy, then strategy...oh, by the way, there is a technological need as well. Your stake is in defining the relationship, which is more important.
There is good reason to believe that E2.0 can be part of the Social CRM supporting infrastructure - as you point out - "there is a clear necessity for Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM to co-exist, since efficient employees lead to better customer experience." As the BusinessWeek article I referenced yesterday (Costco as an example of good loyal employees hitting directly to customer sat and the bottom line), happy employees lead to happy customers. E2.0 is one vehicle to the happy employee part.
Good stuff, took me a while to recover from vacation to put all this together given my brain is not yet at 100%!
Mitch
I am reading along, thinking you are doing a good job of distinguishing between internal and external (there are some flags in my head, which was going to be the base of my comments, about the possibility of building silos if you differentiate them too much, but manageable problem) when all of the sudden I get to this paragraph:
ReplyDelete"Additionally, for a social CRM implementation, the kind of integration with other enterprise systems is different from that of an internal implementation. For internal implementations you do not need the feedback loop to be completed by the social media monitoring tools nor do you need integration with the user components like OpenID, OAuth, Facebook Connect, Google Connect, etc. So there are differences in architectural considerations too!"
Well, I have to say that I disagree with you on this aspect. I even go back to 2004, the first time I wrote about social networks when I said that we needed to make sure that we do not differentiate dramatically between internal networks, social networks, and external networks. Sure, there are certain security and isolation precautions (like direct access to systems, un-ferreted access to networks and data, etc.) but for the most part the integration between internal or external networks and systems should be similar.
Sure, there are functions that are privy to the internal people that external people won't have access to, and I agree with that. But, in the realm of the community you are building and how you want to build the social components internal and external must share equal access, or external shall be granted no access at all. If build a smart infrastructure you can manage that easily through roles and responsibilities that controls the external folks access to the data and systems. This will enable you to build internal-sharing, external-sharing, and hybrid communities essentially giving the customer participation and engagement in E2.0 functions.
Otherwise, make sure you don't create silos (that would have been my entire comment if you would have not written the above paragraph).
BTW,
ReplyDeleterelated to my comment above, I found this article that is also interesting and talks about the pain of meshing internal and external networks... it obviously explains better than I do what I was trying to say (there is some fluff about other stuff in the post, but interesting to read nevertheless)
http://www.tomkotek.com/blog/management-issues/corporate-twitter-the-three-ss-that-must-be-overcome/
Thanks for the comment Mitch. :)
ReplyDeleteMichael Krigsman, Bob Warfield believe that social CRM is a subset of enterprise 2.0 You should follow the conversation I had with him today on twitter.
Esteban, I think there is only misinterpretation here, not disagreement.
ReplyDeleteThe part that you quote is totally from a technical perspective. For internal employees I do not need to implement OpenID, OAuth, etc. nor do I need SMM since it would be far easier to map fields in the tables of the social software database with my existing enterprise databases, since I can build my social software so.
However, when you want to get data from the cacophony of the external social web into your enterprise systems you need SMM.
Otherwise I agree that we need to have the same community site for both internal & external people, but this will not happen overnight.
We have had internal blogs for three years now, but I do not see the maturity levels of our employees to be enough to open up their content to the whole world or let them interact with our customers.
You need to understand that for organization the average age of the employees is very less & there are thousands upon thousands of not so experienced employees.
Oh and BTW, our communities are built using blogs not forums though they too exist an option and conversations do happen there too. :) In our organization, the forums are more for ad-hoc reasons, especially discovering the right people. It is on the blogs that people bond and form communities.
I must say, excellent article, good inights! My two cents worth: ""efficient employees lead to better customer experience" - I would say that you can react to external threats and opportunities more efficiently in a more timely and apt fashion. We could then say that Enterprise 2.0 is a prerequisite for the 'better customer experience', or at least a competitve advantage in customer service.
ReplyDeleteWhen you go to a Four Season's Hotel, the service you result is the result of many people interacting to make your stay as pleasant as possible - check-in clerk, hotel manager, room service, pool attendants, restaurant staff and whatnot, and they have all been taught to work together to make this happen for you.
So, Experience 2.0 is a prerequisite for gaining a competitive advantage in the field of Social CRM, but likewise implementing Social CRM tools without organising the company to communicate and collaborate can potentially be very damaging.
As the market for Social CRM matures, customer expectations in terms of customer service will increase - Enterprise 2.0 may not only be a prerequisite but also a necessity to maintain a competitive advantage and - hopefully - customer loyalty.