CRM @ C
Finally, Paul Greenberg’s new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light hit the streets last week and with it my description of him as our Walt Whitman remains in tact. To promote the continuing franchise the fourth edition’s cover has the same design as the third edition but with a different color scheme. But that’s about the only similarity between editions; everything between the covers of edition four is new.
This time, Greenberg’s sub-title tells us he’s focusing on “Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Technologies for Engaging Your Customers.” That’s a mouthful worthy of the more than 600 pages he dedicates to the task — and that doesn’t even count the chapters that are available only online.
Before we go on, let’s have a moment with the truth squad. Paul Greenberg is a friend and he graciously invited me to make a few very small contributions to the book, so my discussion here might look to some like self-promotion. If that’s how you think then you might want to go rearrange your sock drawer. If you read on just know that that there is a good deal of agreement between Paul and me as well as many of the analysts that follow the market. That’s not to say we all think so much alike that if you sent ninety-nine out of one hundred of us to a Maoist re-education camp it wouldn’t matter. It would.
CRM at the Speed of Light has always occupied an important niche in our world. It continues to be the source for authoritative definitions and explanations of what CRM is and where it is going. If you are within the CRM inner circle you might want to conclude that definitions and categorization are no longer needed. But if you talk to real people trying to make sense of the world through a CRM lens you quickly discover the great service this book provides.
The centrality of the customer and the importance of “relationship” over “management” — two criticisms from CRM’s past — are noted and form the motive force of this book. Greenberg’s gift to us is to take a four-dot-oh look at a two-dot-oh market and to help us see where it’s all going. Paul covers ideas like Social CRM and customer experience with equal ease. And while we might disagree on some of the specifics of how these things relate to the CRM market at large (see I can be independent) it all coheres.
One of the greatest assets of the book is Greenberg’s style, which is intelligent and conversational. In fact, conversational is a poor word choice because Paul’s natural chattiness comes through the page and into your mind so that at times you forget you are reading rather than listening to a smart and entertaining monologue.
CRM has become a big topic. It’s roughly a fourteen billion dollar market and the nuances in even what companies call it and how vendors address the market can be significant. Nonetheless, Paul does a good job of building categories and running down the differences until they make sense.
A good example is chapter nine on user communities. We think we know what communities are and in a folklorish way we do but Greenberg does a great job of teasing apart the differences as well as the pros and cons of managed and unmanaged communities, outcome-based social networks and a lot more. But even more importantly, he then dives in and advises us about managing communities and offers important do’s and don’t’s.
In trying to categorize this book I was left with the feeling that it most resembles a text from medical school that details the causes and cures of diseases one after another. Few people read those books straight through but use them as reference guides, for example, when a young doc might be trying to nail down a diagnosis. I expect that it will end up on the book shelves of many mid-level executives and even their bosses who want a good reference to enlighten them about the technologies that can help them run their businesses.
But CRM at the Speed of Light, fourth edition, is also a book that you’ll want to read every page of if you have an abiding interest in the subject.
Get a horse
Get a horse! That’s what snide carriage riders would say when passing one of those new fangled automobiles broken down by the side of the road. That was many years ago and despite the catcalls it was the buggy whip that was retired as the car became king.
The history of technology is littered with little failures as the technology matured. Edison and Westinghouse had a nasty battle over DC vs. AC current and railroad tycoons refused to standardize on track gauge while overbuilding capacity. Where such problems did not exist there were ruthless moguls and early monopolies like Standard Oil.
Whenever a new technology infrastructure is introduced opportunities for failure are widespread. There are so many moving parts that it’s hard to get everything right and until the little things are perfected you get glitches. My favorite story in this line is the evolution of Standard Time. We take time zones for granted but it took the railroads to standardize the way we measure time.
Until railroads became prominent every town set its clocks by the sun, which made it impossible to publish a schedule. A traveler on a train moving east or west would experience the same time distortion a coast-to-coast air traveler experiences even now. Today, my watch and cell phone reset themselves so the only thing I notice may be a bit of fatigue.
I think we had one of those get-a-horse/new infrastructure moments the other day when Salesforce.com went down for 38 minutes. The official reason given was a memory allocation error, whatever that means. For users it was an inconvenience—like being too early for a train because your watch was set to local time.
Let me go way out on a limb and say that this will not be the last time this system has an outage. I don’t care, really. Last time I looked even the phone system has an expected outage—something like 40 seconds per year but I haven’t looked for a while.
The most interesting question for me is what an outage means for the future of the technology. There was a lot of hysteria the other day about the significance of the outage and my friend Paul Greenberg did a good job of putting it into perspective.
To those who worry publicly about the viability of cloud computing and of Salesforce.com in particular I might ask if you’ve ever had a flight run late, lost some ice cream due to a brown out or dropped a cell phone call. I know the answer. It’s all part of both modern living and our reliance on infrastructures that are tremendously complex and maybe not that old, as in seasoned.
Through it all Salesforce’s customer site for tracking incidents www.trust.salesforce.com did a good job of not hiding the problem even if they weren’t phenomenally helpful in explaining it. And I think the point of the exercise is not what happened but how it was handled and rectified. Having procedures in place and a commitment to transparency are the most important things here. They train a customer to believe that, no matter what, a problem will be dealt with effectively. So if you are still hysterical about the outage, get over it. Or get a horse.
