Today’s thought influencers can show us how to make the most of social CRM

Who can tell us how to make the most of Social CRM (SCRM)? It seems the industry is looking for new thought leadership to guide customer management in another direction- one led by the power of social media and all its mystery and potential. Some pundits believe there are plenty of CRM experts out there but no visionary innovators to help us tackle the new challenges of SCRM. It’s time to replace the old crop of thinkers with another generation of “how to” leaders.
But is this call for fresh influencers necessary?

After all SCRM is not a completely new entity. It’s built on the foundation of CRM, which took nearly two decades to turn into what it is today – a reliable and in many cases undeniable necessity for maximising the productivity of the sales, marketing and customer support force. SCRM takes advantage of the social media revolution and provides a new series of channels of communication between the business and the customer – but data still has to go somewhere to be stored, sorted and distributed, and that somewhere is the CRM system. Suggesting that you can have SCRM without the CRM foundation is like saying you’re going to have a hybrid car without the drive train and chassis – in both cases, you aren’t going to get far. To bridge the CRM-to-SCRM chasm, you’d better know CRM.

SCRM is a massive jump for businesses – especially those whose CRM operations were lagging before the social media revolution was upon them. The percentage of actual customers using CRM as a share of the number of potential users is amazing – only about 15 percent worldwide – meaning that there are a lot of people who need to learn a lot, starting with the basics. “The basics” have changed with social media’s arrival, but there are still basics that need to be learned.

What we face is a phenomena I call “the slow revolution.” That’s a situation where social media is causing thinking to race ahead, and technology is almost keeping pace – but the organisational ability to absorb, understand and react to these changes is significantly slower. Thus, when there are revolutionary breakthroughs in thinking, the pundit class can sprint ahead, but the people charged with implementing these new ideas trudge through the task at a much slower speed simply because it takes longer to “do” change than it does to talk about it.

Some want more “how to” from the CRM influencer and less “what to do” – but we’re never going to get that. The people who are figuring out how to do things in SCRM are not pundits but business people. They are figuring out very specific things about their businesses and how SCRM fits into their unique customer audiences and internal practices. These are real and genuine competitive advantages, and as you’d expect, many people who are succeeding with SCRM are not eager to share that with their competitors.
Businesses that are choosing to be “doers” in SCRM have a lot of work ahead of them. So do the latecomers to “traditional” CRM – and the distance between the beginners and the cutting-edge practitioners gets greater every day. That’s why I have no problem with influencers looking perhaps not five years out for the next revolution but maybe one year out to see how the revolution we’re in plays out, or even looking over their shoulders to help slower businesses catch up.

Suggesting the current crop of thinkers should step aside for a new generation of thinkers assumes that there’s a new generation ready to take over. A new generation will assert itself – individually, over time, and as business, customers and technology evolve. In the meantime, pay attention to the people whose advice has gotten you this far, and realise that putting ideas into action takes much longer and demands more patience than explaining those ideas in the first place.

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