This post by Michael Maoz, a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, reinforces the observation that I made during the course of my “baseline” presentation at VRM+CRM 2010: If you’re looking for a path from today’s customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to more user-driven vendor relationship management (VRM) interactions and e-commerce, social CRM is *not* the answer.

Moaz characterizes efforts to build a roadmap whereby CRM subsumes social initiatives as a “train wreck” and uses it as grounds to solicit calls from Gartner clients or prospects to discuss how a such a wide variety of descriptors can be mapped to the same concept. But the real challenge for enterprise marketers – sometimes called “The Brands” – is to strengthen the bonds between and among customers and prospects in order to provide better service, promote loyalty and build profits.

By contrast, current solutions that are based in CRM and social CRM capture and conduct analysis on a broad set of customer generated data and metadata. Companies think they are doing a better job of paying attention but, whether they admit it to themselves or not, they continue to use their resources to analyze activity, target messages and promotions and influence future activity. That’s not listening or engaging in a meaningful conversation.

VRM involves a totally different engagement model. “Users” (be they shoppers, searchers, mobile subscribers or “other”) initiate conversations with their selected vendors through a trusted resource or advocate. They can compare notes with other shoppers/customers and, while they may be loyal to a brand, they are more loyal to themselves and their peers. In the ideal, the power shifts to the shopper in ways that will disintermediate traditional channels (like the contact center) and influencers (meaning commercials and advertisements).

The train wreck is not the result of there being too many names for the social CRM phenomenon, it is that CRM and VRM are on a collision course whereby one side seeks to grant more power to buyers while the other seeks to retain nearly all the power by pretending to do a better job of listening.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Social CRM, self-service, VRM