All roads lead to Social CRM; But "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast"?

Image by libraryman via Flickr

The accidental community around twitter hashtag #scrm has been pretty busy these days.

John F. Moore (CTO, Swimfish) asks a great question regarding Social CRM, as a follow up to Ed Thompson's (VP, Gartner) view of the future of Social CRM in the next 10 years that he shared with Esteban Kolsky.

This is what Ed foresees:

"I’ll look out 10 years. Social CRM will move from 0.1% of CRM application spending to 10% of all spending by then. Still not anywhere near as big as traditional SFA, Campaign Mgmt, Customer Service but vastly bigger spending than today. I don’t think it will be revolution but it will be a big change from today. Personally I think 2020-2030 will see the bigger transformation of CRM applications and processes."

John feels 10 years is too long a period to wait & gives businesses an interim option of Social Support Communities, which, AFAIK, is providing customer service leveraging the power of online communities & other social media. And then John asks a pointed question:

"Will you invest your time and energy on a vision that is a decade away or will you will you choose to invest in technology and services that will make you successful today?"

And then there is the guest post by Anthony Nemelka (co-founder & ex-CEO of Helpstream) on Esteban's blog where he asks pretty poignantly:

"Will Social CRM eventually be viewed as an extension of existing CRM or as just one critical component in adapting to the realities of a Web-connected world? Will companies deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we improve customer relationship management?” or will they deploy SCRM as a result of thinking “how can we transform ourselves into a socially-driven business?”"

Another must read post on Esteban's blog (which is not?).

And this set the gears in my tiny brain whirring! Let me try wrapping my thoughts around this profound debate. For that, lets start at the basics of Social CRM.

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I agree with Paul Greenberg on this one, Social CRM is a strategy first & the one thing that makes it different from CRM is that it is a reactive one. Customers are talking about the businesses & their offerings, both good & bad. This is not exactly news, its been happening ever since the first business was done by man, the social animal. But the internet did something very disruptive to that age old tradition.

The internet, especially after creating content was easy for every human with a net connection, made it possible to share views with more people, faster. [N.B.: More & faster - pretty key here and remember that ALWAYS!]

So businesses rather provide better customer satisfaction - at all stages of their experience with the business, mostly covered by the buying decision process. This has nothing to do with social media at all! But social media forces the businesses to stay true to that axiom.

Businesses are slowly yet surely losing control over the conversations that are happening around their brand &/or offerings. And its not just the consumers who are talking away to glory. Its the others in the business ecosystem too - partners, distributors, analysts, governments, key opinion leaders, etc. - are all using social media heavily (well, not all over the globe, but pretty much everywhere in the digitally connected regions of the world).

Add another side effect of all the digitization & connectedness - Gen Y. They are a pretty big unknown, but they are slowly unraveling themselves in very interesting ways. Who'd have thunk of a Whuffie?! But the times are a-changing!

So though there is no fundamental (paradigm?) shift in the business axioms, there are very disruptive forces at play.

I believe that social technologies are shifting the equilibrium & it is imperative that the businesses brace themselves for whatever they might face.

Social Support Communities - sounds like a support system for forlorn people, which in all probability is how the customers feel - are the lowest hanging fruits. Forums have existed for quite some time as a means to chat together for the people and have already been in use by the businesses too for some years now. It is no wonder that they are now being touted as Social CRM technologies. I admit there are some value adds over plain Jane forums - like the ability to manage the reputation of the members, build knowledge bases out of the conversations using a mishmash of forums threads & wiki features, many best practices for building & maintaining a lively community using Community Health Index, etc. Or by providing Crowd Service like what GetSatisfaction.com does.

But they are just one aspect of how businesses can leverage social media & communities. There is the aspect of marketing & brand building espoused by the social media marketing agencies & PR alike. Though this field abounds in witch doctors providing you social media as the panacea for all business ills/ailments, there is wealth here too. We just need to use the proper means, but they are all tiresome, not the quick fix solutions of the witch doctors - like get a 1000 twitter followers in a day kind (why bother about all the spam accounts anyway which you will get as followers?).

And then how about recruitment, or rather, addressing your talent market? Its not only about sending out links regarding your openings or tweeting & retweeting about openings, though that helps. Look at this Orkut community of more than 17,500 members that I have been maintaining for the past 6+ years. Here its predominantly the college grads who interact the most & their questions range from when will I get my joining date (those who were selected in campus) to what is the promotion policy of the organization to what do you think of the avatar of the above person in this thread.

Sales is a bit tricky for me. The best use case for me is the one being built by Oracle - more & better internal collaboration among the sales force. Another is getting leads, but this is trickier & needs a separate post.

And to answer John's original question - I will draw up a vision which is nothing about using social media or social CRM, it will be all about really, really wanting to be customer centric, not just paying lip service. And then weave an enterprise architecture which leverages the social technologies.

And here is where things begin to get interesting & we face some confusions & draws in the terms enterprise 2.0 & social business - both of which encompass social CRM, but I believe the vision would still be the one drawn as per my suggestion above.

Businesses need customers to exist. They also need employees to run, unless its a one person outfit. And since both the customer as well as the employee is a human, they can both be affected by the social technologies.

Leveraging the power of the social technologies by business, be they internally or externally is Enterprise 2.0 in terms of technology and Social Business in terms of business.

And Social CRM is a part of both Enterprise 2.0 as well as Social Business, since Social CRM is about the strategies as well as the technologies.

The internally facing social technologies like those provided by Socialtext & Jive software help in better collaboration across the organization & sharing & managing of knowledge.

I have been a beneficiary personally of such an implementation. We have a blogging platform in addition to wikis & forums in our organization. There are various business benefits, but the most lively & intangible boon that you just feel in your gut, yet cant derive an ROI for, is our blogging platform.

You just got to believe me when I say it makes people work together & teach each other and cross pollinate ideas and pass on business opportunities across silos and geographies.

So internally & externally facing social technologies will have an interplay & tango with each other. And as for the strategies, I will only repeat myself - efficient employees can effectively satisfy customers. So prepare your strategies in such a way that you enable your employees to be more social with each other within the organization and with the customers.

And that leads to the second part in the title of this post: "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or "Dilli door hai" or "Delhi is still far" - which is an euphemism for stating that the goal is still far. This can mean two things: there is a long way to go yet, so lets cross the bridge when it comes (to borrow another idiom) or that there is no need to be complacent just because the goal is far. The origins of the idiom are attributed to saint Nizam-ud-din Auliya but the stories differ.

The one that states that one need not worry about the future right away is something like this:

In the 14th century Nizamuddin, a sufi saint, was building a mosque in Delhi at the same time that the sultan Tugaluk was constructing a fortress on the south side of the city and the two were in constant competition for workers. Tughaluk was often out of the city waging wars and expanding the empire while Nizamuddin was expanding his spiritual practice. On one of Tugaluk's military excursions Nizamuddin took away all of Tugaluk's workers and set them to building his mosque. Eventually word reached the sultan as he was finishing a campaign in Bihar and he sent a message back to Delhi that said that he would "deal with" Nizamuddin when he returned. This of course meant that Nizamuddin's days were numbered. But when Nizamuddin heard of Tugaluk's plan he was not concerned. Instead he sent Tugaluk a one line note in Urdu that read "Hanoz Dilli Dur Ast" or, "Delhi is still far."--meaning that Tugaluk had to be in Delhi to exercise his powers. Tughaluk headed back to Delhi while riding on a war elephant and had started to set plans in action to kill Nizamuddin. However, when he was only a day's ride outside the city his elephant was crossing over a bridge which gave way under the animal's weight. Both Tugaluk and the elephant perished and Nizamuddin was safe.

The other meaning comes through because of another legend which states that Nizamuddin kept on saying "hanuz delhi door ast" until the emperor reached Delhi and he had not done anything to save himself.

Like the legend & the saying, it is perfectly fine to either delay the decision or to be forewarned & prepared!

And finally, again, don't forget to read the excellent posts that triggered this long post as well as the excellent discussions happening out there in the comments: John's #SSC vs #SCRM & Anthony's Social Business vs Social CRM.

P.S.: If you are still wondering what is the bottom line of my post wrt the two questions: #SSC is a step to achieve #SCRM & #SCRM is only the public face of Social Business.