So, today I happened to make mention of a peeve of mine – businesses that use Twitter not to engage or be personal with the masses, but who use it as a way to throw out the latest sale, offering, or blank “Come visit us ’cause we’re awesome” tweet. Of course, after quickly typing it, is it really their fault? Or has the current environment for business locked them into such a practice? What do I mean? Well, I will use CRM to explain my thoughts…
It’s a known fact that CRM implementations have a failure rate of around 50% for the past decade. It’s also a common belief that a CRM system requires three main components for both use and success; people, process and technology. What are these elements required in detail?
- People: These are the users, the you and me of the system, right from data entry people to CEO’s…from implementation project managers to the day to day implementation managers. And over the years, the people model has changed quite a bit. Sure, we are all still human (mostly…), with a brain and a heart and such. But the baseline of employees has changed substantially in the past decades. How so? Well, just watch an episode of Mad Men to see the difference. Employees aren’t mindless drones doing whatever the ‘man’ asks….well, at least at the successful companies. The employee, and their thoughts, desires and needs are an integral part of the model now. But, more importantly, the people are much more saavy and understanding now as well. I truly believe that most people understand (even if they don’t feel respected or appreciated) how their piece fits into the corporate puzzle, and how it makes a difference.
- Technology: This is, of course, the application used with CRM. Has technology changed over the past few decades? Let me think on that question while I write this on my iPad from a Starbucks while streaming music from a station I like in Oslo and reading tweets letting me know what is happening in San Francisco, Budapest or Syria. Uh – yeah, the technology changes so quickly that you’re old hat after three tweets and a like on Facebook.
- Process: Ah the business process. Wikipedia defines business process as a “is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers.” And we all know that the millions of business books available at Amazon or Indigo every single year tell us how much business has changed in the past one, two or three hundred years, right? WRONG! Those best practices and processes and philosophies we have that run our enterprises have not changed since Adam Smith wrote Capitalism. We can spin doctor it, or have Malcolm Gladwell et al write a new face or point of view on our capitalistic foundation, but it is still the same old foundation.
And here is where the issue is. We, as a collective race of humans have changed, and continue to change each and every moment of every single day. And technology is evolving at an astronomical pace. Yet, we still base our companies around functional practices that have been used since the industrial revolution, measure the success of a company (and many have stocks and RSP’s that measure their personal financial success) around their stock price, and still monitor and regulate our enterprise with laws either written in the era of our great-grandfathers or through people who are seemingly as old as our great-grandfathers. We have locked ourselves to mold our lives and our processes and our self around an economic theory that is centuries old and currently faltering.
So, can I blame companies who use Twitter to send out a blank advert like they’ve hit the marketing lottery for free advertising? Not when the foundation of the economic system we try and work with is stuck in that era. Does something have to give? Good lord, yes – but how we do it without deconstructing the very essence of our lives is yet unknown.