The Social Customer Manifesto

It's People!

Over the past couple of weeks, have been fortunate to have had conversations with nearly two dozen C-level execs, about how they choose their business partners (in this case, suppliers). And from this set of conversations, what's important to them?

• Is it "price?" Somewhat, but not so much. "Just be in the ballpark."
• Mind-blowing technology? Not really. Not so much.
• Process. Yes, to a degree. Have a plan to show what's going to get done by when, and how it's going to get measured.

But, almost across the board, they've been saying things that are much more surprising. Talking about "cultural fit" and using words like "comfortable." Saying they chose Company A over Company B because Company B's people "put on airs."

Relationships aren't dead. Not by a long shot.

Offtopic Shiny Thing: With a headline like that, how could I not link to this?

Persistent Conversations And Relationships

A few thoughts, continuing the discussion started here.

• A conversation is a set of exchanges of information.
• A relationship is an implicit or explicit agreement to have continued conversations in the future.
• Persistent conversations can form the basis of the relationships between members of a social network.

In the article Managing Long Term Communications: Conversation and Contact Management, the authors note a wide variety of techniques that their interview subjects used in order to remember what they had committed to doing next to hold up their end of the conversation. All of the typical modes you would expect were exhibited: everything from handwritten notes to online diaries to sticky notes to writing crib notes onto body parts (hands, usually, but I s'pose other parts would work as well).

This is where the tools come in. Contact Management or CRM systems, etc., should be used to manage these conversations. But that's not how these systems are thought of or, frankly, used. Contact management systems are typically used as a Rolodex; stagnant, frozen, and one-dimensional -- what are the person's digits? A subtle shift in thinking, however, leads to show that instead of merely acting as repositories for the mechanical contact aspects (phone number, email address, etc.), these systems could be used to understand where one is in an ongoing conversation, what has been said, who's turn it is to speak next, and when it should be said. Subtle, but critically important. Most of these systems have the capabilities to track notes...but the big "a-ha!" comes in when those notes are no longer thought of solely as relics to be filed away, but instead are thought of as the "placeholder" in an ongoing dialogue.

Now, that being said, equally important as the ongoing conversation is that same past record of conversations. Why? Because that conversational record may be important to other members of the network. An example, from the Long Term Communications paper:

"We had a housewarming party where we sent out an invitation and gave everybody three by five cards, and they had to come back with a recommendation. Because we moved into the new neighborhood and we didn't know plumbers or dentists or doctors or anything...All the recommendations are in here. And people know we have this list now, and so they call us up to recommend an X. And so we're becoming sort of a local knowledge group because we did this at our housewarming."

So, in this case, the fact that these participants held onto the conversational record transformed the newbies in the neighborhood into the neighborhood experts for all things domestic.

What does this all mean? Once the conversation's started, keep it going (and know if you have the responsbility to do so). And as it unfolds, know where it has been, as that knowledge can easily be the basis of the next conversation.

Holding Up Your End Of The Conversation (Part 1)

"Fezzik...jog his memory." - from The Princess Bride

Was tipped off to the BlogPulse "Conversation Tracker" feature today, and yes indeed, it's nifty. (hat tip: nevon, shel) This is a capability that shows how, where, and when a "conversation" is moving through the blogosphere, by tracking links and how they are disseminated over time. Very sharp.

But then, started thinking more about some of the things discussed here, and started doing some poking around...and tripped across a very interesting bit of research that came out of AT&T within the last couple of years (couldn't find a pub date in the doc, but some of the cites were as late as 2001, so I'm guessing it was published around '01 or '02). Entitled "Managing long term communications: Conversation and Contact Management," this piece focuses on the different challenges that arise when individuals attempt to have conversations over time, and the coping mechanisms that they employ in order to do so. (No, you're not the only one who re-sets the "unread" flag on emails in an attempt to remember what to do next.) Fascinating stuff. The key pull-quotes right from the first 'graph:

"Contact management and conversation management are linked. Many busy professionals discourage voice calls and messages, because email enables them to better manage their time, conversations, and contacts. People also spend large amounts of time transcribing voicemail, browsing email archives and writing todo lists – all of these activities are intended to help track the content and status of outstanding conversations." (emphasis added)

and

"Key properties of technologically-mediated conversations identified were: (1) they are extended in time, which means (2) people typically engage in multiple concurrent conversations, and (3) conversations often involve multiple participants. These properties led to a significant memory load for our informants: they spoke of the difficulty of keeping tracking of conversational content and status, as well as the identity, contact information, and expertise of their conversational partners."

Bam. That's it. That's the core of what's wrong with so-called "Customer Relationship Management" or "Contact Management" systems today. It's not a technology issue. (Well, duh. It rarely is.) It's a mindset issue.

There needs to be a movement away from the "pipeline" mentality which, by definition, thinks about using a CRM system as solely the means to "manage" the relationship interaction between a customer and a representative as a closed-ended transaction ("the prospect gets to the end of the pipeline, and a discrete, one-time transaction, either a win or a loss, occurs"). Instead, we need to start thinking about these tools (CRM, Sales Force Automation, etc.) as ways to augment our capabilities in remembering where we are in the ongoing conversation with a particular customer.

Update: Conversation continues here.