CRM

Social CRM: Walk Before You Run

(CRM BUYER) - Had a meteor hit the Dulles Westin outside of Washington, D.C., two weeks ago, it would have set social CRM back 10 years. That meteor, in addition to melting a lot of snow, would have vaporized in a trice the vast majority of the world’s serious thinkers on the topic of social CRM, gathered there for the BPT Partners’ Social CRM Strategies for Business Seminar.

The journalists, consultants and business leaders there shared their ideas about the impact social CRM will have in the next few years, how it will transform businesses, and how it will propel smart organizations toward truly becoming customer-centric.

As forward-looking as the discussions at the event were, one thing was inescapable: None of these discussions would have made the first bit of sense had the participants not had an in-depth knowledge of the essentials of CRM — not social CRM, but the original three-letter acronym and all it stands for.

Blazing a Path to Failure

None of those at the seminar characterized social CRM as a panacea, but there are others out there who are keen to position it the way CRM was initially positioned in the late 1980s: as an easy technology-based fix to some terribly complicated business issues.That sales pitch gave CRM a black eye back then — and in an era of tightening marketing budgets and reduced sales assets, it threatens to strangle social CRM in its crib.

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