Outsource Magazine Issue 27 - (Page 64)

feature CrM QUICK CHANGE? In a social CRM world, can business change as fast as the customer? Chris Bucholtz Chris Bucholtz is the Editor of SugarCRM’s CRM Outsiders Blog. Formerly the editor of Forecasting Clouds (www.forecastingclouds.com) and InsideCRM (www.insidecrm.com), he has covered a variety of technology topics over a 17-year career. S ocial media is often held up as the windsock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing; when Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people were willing to shift the channels they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new, technologically accelerated age. Since the spike in September when the doors to the site were thrown open to the general public, Google+ adoption has trailed off significantly, with traffic sinking to 70 per cent of its peak rates at times. Why has this happened? Investing effort to understand the new site had less of a payoff than relying on understood channels like Facebook and Twitter. The experience Google+ offers hasn’t yet become sufficiently compelling to dislodge larger numbers of people from their set routines – and set routines themselves have a measure of power that is hard to overcome. That very human phenomenon is also present in the CRM world. On the one hand, you have technology and CRM thinking racing ahead. Social CRM (SCRM) is barely a reality, appearing in a fully realised form in only a few businesses, and yet there’s already a clamouring from some for the next wave of thinking. But organisations move far slower than the speed of ideas; even if you have one person on staff who completely grasps the possibilities of changing the business, like SCRM, unless that person is high in the C-level, he or she will then have to work to evangelise other employees and management in order for those ideas to manifest themselves in ways that change the business. There’s a disconnect, then, between the speed of revolutionary thinking and the speed of the ability of the organisation to understand, internalise and reorganise around that thinking. We’re going through this right now as businesses struggle with the undeniable force that social media represents. The mismatched velocities of the thinkers and the people who need to turn that thinking into action within organisations is leading to what I call the slow revolution – a painful period in which we can see the possibilities clearly but are prevented from achieving them by issues of organisational entropy. There are two ways, in theory, to bridge the divide between the thinking and the doing: slowing down the thinkers, and speeding up the organisation’s ability to change. The former is seemingly impossible – and yet it’s not; in CRM we’ve seen the leading pundits focussed on SCRM for the last half-decade. The other way is to speed up the organisation’s ability to change. This is a management mantra, and yet it remains exceptionally hard to do. Humans working in teams are simply not that great at rewriting the rules on the fly; getting a set of processes in place is stressful, and executing those processes is even more so. Thus, the idea of defaulting to a condition of constant stress is not appealing. Can managers, especially in large organisations, change that attitude and create environments that make it easier to adapt to new customer behaviours and desires, new technologies, and new internal processes? That seems almost mandatory in the zeroto-25-million-user world we already live in. Humans have limits that technology does not – we’ll always be somewhat behind the eight-ball in that way. But the winners of the slow revolution will be the ones who realise that the most important variable in the equation is the rate at which their customers change. Only when you can understand what that change is and how rapidly it is progressing can you adjust your internal changes appropriately. EVEN MORE For more on CRM, check out our article ‘Connecting Service’ online at www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/ articles/item/4299-connecting-service “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” – Ellen Glasgow 64 www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk ● http://www.forecastingclouds.com http://www.insidecrm.com http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/articles/item/4299-connecting-service http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk/articles/item/4299-connecting-service http://www.outsourcemagazine.co.uk

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Outsource Magazine Issue 27

NEWS
PLANET ITO
NORM JUDAH MICROSOFT’S
IN THE KNOW
CALL BRITANNIA
DAVID EVELEIGH
CHAIN GAIN
CAN EVERYTHING BE OUTSOURCED?
NOA ROUND-UP
QUICK CHANGE?
TRANSFORMING FINANCE
CAROLINE STOCKMANN
GOOD REVIEWS
OUTSOURCING IS NOT MAKE VERSUS BUY: IT IS A CONTINUUM
PAYING ATTENTION
POWERING UP YOUR CUSTOMER SATISFACTION ENGINE
BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS
HEAD-TO-HEAD
TOP TEN
THE LEGAL VIEW
HFS RESEARCH
HEADLINES...
ONLINE ROUND-UP
INSIDE SOURCE
THE LAST WORD

Outsource Magazine Issue 27