Customer Relationship Management

In very early days of the motor vehicle, it was so difficult for everyone to imagine a moving vehicle without horse that car carriage designers used to craft the vehicle with a dummy horse torso in the front and the motor car was actually called 'horseless carriage'. For some time, carriage designers still had the scope and structure of the designs fairly influenced and hence constrained by ghostly non-existent requirements (like horse whip holder). It took some time for the design philosophies, practices and standards to abandon older paradigm which I think was really necessary to give space to the newer paradigm. In some way, it was also argued that simulated horse interface of the carriage and the associated design constructs, though redundant from functional design perspective, were actually helpful in transitioning the paradigm for wider adoption. So there are two important points here:

1. When new paradigm arrives, there is a natural tendency to model its execution with the existing environmental constraints of the previous paradigm. Due to that, co-existence with the older paradigm continues for a while and it allows the uptake in lesser disruptive manner.
   
2. At the same time, square-peg-in-the-round-whole situation becomes a challenge for the emerging design practices. Despite having greater possibilities, design practices keep constraining the future solutions. It makes the innovation process slower and complex.

Something similar we are witnessing in the social CRM space also. There are many companies today that have quickly jumped onto new digital social platforms like twitter but the way they are using almost in the same way how they might use the conventional channels like e-mail, news-paper publication channel etc.  For customers, the experience is not much different (actually reported as worse in some cases) than what they otherwise are accustomed to with the convention channels. In many cases, customer most likely will ignore the overload of the faceless and useless information being delivered on the newer channels but in that process, on-boarding of the new digital social technology with their customer community will happen without much significant change management effort. And that's really much of social CRM 1.0 is going to be like.

Moving to social CRM 2.0 is going to be emergence of the meaningful engagement between customers and business, emergence of the policies, standards and legal guidelines that protect the best interests of customers and most importantly the emergence of new measurement parameters around which companies are going to compete in social space. I can hypothesize, speculate but seriously I do not know what those new parameters are going to be, I will doubt if anyone really knows today beyond obvious metrics of CRM. But that's not important here, it is part of the change, part of the transition. As we discover those new parameters, it will start changing the game in terms of realignment of the enterprise strategies as well as utilization of the new technologies. Till then, I could conveniently call it 'playing around' with the newer paradigms. To build strategic levers on the social CRM, enterprises need to challenge themselves to think beyond current madness of social networking, ignore the glare of the social digital illusions to some extent and put their best think tanks on defining the future possibilities that don't exist today.