CRM Needs To Be Turned On Its Head

"What's been broken with so-called 'Customer Relationship Management' systems so far is that, well, they don't really focus that much on the customer, do they? Under the rubric of 'CRM,' there have been three primary classes of systems: sales force automation, customer service and call center automation, and marketing automation. All of these look at the world from the seller's point of view. And all of them focus on how the vendor can crank more customers through a particular process in a given unit of time. They don't necessarily help to truly build relationships between individuals. In fact, they are more likely to commodify it. There has been a considerable amount of research done in this area, and there in an increasing body of data that suggests that building this kind of 'enterprise social network' has measurable benefit for both customers and vendors alike. Perhaps the cornerstone of recent work in this area was done by Lichtenthal and Tellefsen, and is called 'Toward a Theory of Buyer-Seller Similarity.' L&T write: "These findings suggest that internal similarity [perceptions, attitudes, and values] can increase a business buyer's willingness to trust a salesperson and follow the salesperson's guidance, and therefore, increase the industrial salesperson's effectiveness. In contrast, the literature also indicates that, under most circumstances, observable similarity [physical attributes and behavior] will exert a negligible influence on a business buyer's perceptions or a salesperson's effectiveness. Thus, the key finding is that it is more important for buyers and sellers to 'think alike' than 'look alike'." To date, there just haven't been tools like this aimed at the enterprise, that take this idea of creating real relationships between individuals and providing a means for customers to explicitly state their case, and determine with whom they want to do business at a real, interpersonal, non-synthetic level. So, we built one."