CRM (customer relationship management ) are systems that companies use to track their customers.  The hope for most companies that invest in CRM is that their  investment will produce happier customers, that loyal customers will produce more profits.

To some extent CRM investment has worked for companies that have made long term investments in CRM processes, despite the flaws with these systems.     Apple is a decent example, they invest in very high end  CRM systems – but no amount of money they spent on customer service is too much, they are wildly profitable, and probably just want to spend more to make customers happier.   But many customers  feel that the investment hasn’t worked, they aren’t happy, or often outraged and appalled by terrible service and awful ads  and marketing.  Here is a recent one about United Airlines - one of the few cases where terrible customer service is almost life threatening. Usually it’s not that bad, but as customers we have the right to express ourselves if we don’t like our vendor, either by taking our business elsewhere or complaining – or both.

There are a number of problems with  CRM promise:

1. CRM doesn’t work.  CRM doesn’t “manage” relationships with customers. Oops.  They are databases that track a few data points and transactions – at best. Often they fail to do that too. Oops again.

2. They are inefficient - they can cost an enormous amount of money, smaller businesses generally don’t use them at all.  The cloud/saas has reduced some of the costs, but many costs are organizational and haven’t fallen that far.

That isn’t stoping the CRM industry, many players are growing as fast as ever. Who doesn’t want happier customers?  But there is a shift going on in CRM  - powered by the proveribal social media firehose.  Although there is a lot of hype, it’s true, things have changed, both in marketing side and service side of CRM. Customers now have systems of their own and public voices. For every corporate dashboard showing stack ranking of satisfied customers, there is likely to be an outraged blog post, or tweets or facebook messages about the company for all the world to see.  The fact that each person is a publisher has changed the way many companies see their customers.  They are a bit scared, and excited by the opportunity, the changes in what’s going on with social media.

Companies are excited about social media because it may produce new revenue channels, and they are scared because customers can say anything they want about any company, with better reach than most marketing campaigns.   And indeed, the fastest growing segment of CRM is those parts that deal with social media. Systems that publish tweets, that monitor sentiment, scanning twitter and responding – these systems are flying off the shelf.

CRM systems have always been fancy databases. Databases of first name, last name, middle name, multiple addresses.  Companies fill that information out themselves,  and hundreds of different companies track the same people, often inaccurately across multiple systems they spend billions on.  And that doesn’t tend to make  happier customers.

The problem with the Social Media investments in CRM is companies are making investments in the same the traditional database CRM model – companies owning the data. They scan social networks and import the data into their CRM system, and believe they know customers better.

Proposal.  Here is where CRM needs to go: Customers need to track companies, and use their own systems to do it.  A model that is the reverse of the current system, companies tracking and marketing to their own customers.  A system that the fundamental data model radiates from the individual, each customer tracking multiple companies.

It’s not how CRM systems are built now. It should be.

Each customer should have records of companies and products they deal with, what they think about them, what issues they have, what they recommend.  That is already happening to some extent – how many of your friends have complained about companies on facebook, how many times do you turn to Yelp for a review instead of the yellow pages? This trend isn’t stopping there needs to be more tools that support customers more efficiently, so each customer will have evolving tools that hopefully work more like Facebook than Oracle.

The VRM project describes such systems, but also many other things, as #VRM is a large topic.  ”Reverse CRM” is a less catchy term than VRM describing a social software CRM – here is a video: