CRMA Conference - What does Web 2.0 mean to you?
By Raj Choudhury on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007I just attended CRMA’s first National Conference in Atlanta, GA and was honored and fortunate enough to be invited to talk on a panel called “Embracing Web 2.0 – The new way to interact with your Customers”. The panel was moderated by Paul Greenberg who was the day one keynote speaker and the author of “CRM at the Speed of Light”. I was joined on the panel with Brent Leary (CRM Essentials), Sherry Heyl (What A Concept!), and Terry Bruehl (Macquarium).
In preparing for the panel discussion I found myself torn between talking about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 and what it means to CRM professionals in terms of technology, or relationship management tactics and the available methods of communicating and engaging with customers. As I looked over my notes it was obvious why CRM professionals should ALREADY have embraced Web 2.0 and I wondered if I’d provide information to the audience that they already knew. As with panel discussions, the title of the session may sway based on the questions and interests from the audience. Paul our moderator fielded some great questions and the panel responded with extremely valuable insight, however the discussion from the audience evolved into justification of using specific tools available in the Web 2.0 arena such as Blogs, RSS, del.icio.us, etc. I realized my earlier conflict in my preparation of technology vs. relationship tactics/strategy using Web 2.0 was abundantly the same conflict or confusion the audience had. I also realized that perhaps the terminology of Web 2.0 (blogs, RSS, Wiki, AJAX, etc.) is so fragmented in definition that a lot of the CRM professionals have already embraced/used some of Web 2.0 approaches both technically and strategically without even realizing it, and that the tools and terminology used is what they thought “embracing web 2.0” needs to be.
Web 2.0 in my humble opinion can be described very easily and does not have to involve any of the buzz words. Simply – Web 2.0 enables online users (regardless of environment or device) to communicate in two-way and even three-way conversations, discussions, opinions, reviews, etc. In other words a company or individual can communicate with other individuals/employees/customers/partners, etc., and in turn they can consume the information and even communicate back to the company or individual (two-way communications). But more importantly the whole group can communicate with each other providing a three-way conversation. That’s it, that’s all web 2.0 really is in its basic form or approach. So what’s the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, again, simple! Web 1.0 allowed a one-way conversation. A company or individual pushed out content, users had to find the content to consume, but did not have an easy way to start a two-way or three-way conversation.
Two things have brought us into the Web 2.0 arena.
1. Technology – Advances in technology have provided us tools like blogs (WordPress), RSS readers/aggregators (News Gator or Netvibes), AJAX, Flex, etc. i.e. the technology has enabled the Web 2.0 approach, and more importantly it’s affordable for companies and individuals.
2. Adoption rate – Social networking/review sites like MySpace.com, Flickr, blogger.com, YouTube.com, epinions.com; these early adaptors of the approach and technology have enabled the online user base to accept and demand this approach.
So going back to the CRMA panel discussion – wouldn’t any effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy involve Web 2.0 principles as its fundamental approach? I couldn’t imagine a CRM strategy to only have a one-way conversation. In which case I go back to my earlier two statements –
1. Am I telling the audience something they have already embraced?
2. Is the audience already engaging in Web 2.0 without knowing it, but are caught-up in the terminology?
I’d love to hear your opinions, comments, thoughts regarding the two questions/statements above. So in the spirit of Web 2.0 let’s have a two-way and even three-way conversation!
I realize I explained Web 2.0 in very simplistic terms and haven’t really touched on the emerging evolution to Web 3.0 and the convergence of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), however I feel we’ll miss the point of future evolutions if we don’t understand the basic approach we already live and breathe.
I also have to take my hat off to Art Hall and his team for putting on such a great conference.
Nice job on the panel today Raj and I agree, Art put together a fantastic event.
I’d say yes, most CRM professionals “get” Web 2.0, the problem seems to be either getting upper management to buy in to it and then finding the funds to implement the necessary changes to take advantage of the possibilities. I think very few of them are using Web 2.0 tools without knowing it - they seem to be well aware of the possibilities and equally as frustrated by their lack of ability to pull it off (again, not their fault).
Raj,
Excellent job on the panel and nice speaking with you at lunch. In terms of CRM companies understanding Web 2.0, I would like to back-up a bit and take a look at what CRM provides for their clients. In almost every CRM application beginning in 1999, you could find customer self-service portals which featured two-way communication between the client and their customers. It is not hard to think about the first sites that implemented customer portals that enabled this two way communication. Was it in the form of a Wiki, no. However, it was a proprietary equivalent. In fact, the Wiki grew out of an Open Source need for a self-service / forum requirement at a low cost of ownership more than a need for the functionality that already existing in most CRM and Knowledge Management applications. Podcasts are somewhat new, but I would question whether podcasts are really that new or just rebranded as podcasts given tech changes and emergence of the “ipod” to brand the audio concept. Youtube is new, but a lot of the content from the business world is just submitted material that exists on the old Web 1.0 website. Blogs are definitely new to CRM, and I think that the tools are struggling with different ways to leverage this technology. A thousand blogs talking about your product or service isn’t as easy to capture and analyze in a CRM applications as 1,000 customer service complaints in the call center or 1,000 angry in-bound emails that can be categorized on the fly with keyword and natural language categorization techniques in most CRM applications.
In summary, I would agree that Web 2.0 technology creates a new two-way communication, but I would also suggest that CRM companies already embraced many of the two-way concepts into the early capabilities of their applications in the form of self-service portals/forums/user groups. On the other hand, I would agree that the technology has provided us with many new advancements that are clearly creating new challenges for CRM with blogs being the best example. Either way, old or new, CRM companies have more work ahead to embrace all the emerging Web 2.0 collaboration tools.
- David Gearhart
Blog: www.enterprisesoftwareexec.com
Great post Raj. I learned more (or almost as much) from that conference as I have from events that focused entirely on Social Media or Web 2.0. I was so impressed with the level of understanding and the respect for online communities.
I have lots of notes that I am letting sink in, but I have already presented the concept of an online customer advisory board to a client today. What a great concept! Thanks to Paul Greenberg for his amazing insights.
David great comments. I definitely agree with you that the two way communications existed before what we term “web 2.0”. In fact you could argue that a lot of the social networking sites we term today as the web 2.0 era already existed before in some form or another. Sites like Geo cities, message boards and chat rooms were prevalent in the late 90’s, it’s also interesting you point out that CRM tools have had these types of features throughout however I’d bet if you asked a CRM professional, their perception of these features would not be web 2.0 like.
It’s also interesting how the technology/CRM industry have build extremely powerful tools to analyze and react to call center and email data as you mentioned. I wonder if the surge of blogs, review sites, etc. has provided a budget stream to push CRM vendors to build technology in order to address this clear need. I wonder which vendors have been proactive and forward thinking vs. reactive to the current needs, or have the needs become main stream yet to justify this?
The challenges early technology pioneers faced when determining how to analyze call center data (voice tone algorithms, keyword flags, multi-call centers, etc.) were just as hard to figure out then, as it will be to figure out a billion blog posts. As you said CRM companies have accomplished a lot, but still have a good ways to go, luckily it should take us less time and capital to solve the needs than 15 years ago:-)