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the Free CMSWire NewsletterCRM Evolution is generally a discussion focused on how companies aim to create, retain and manage customers. In a perfect world, at events like CRM Evolution, the timing for vendors and buyers would always be perfect. Vendors would know when to arrive with their product just baked fresh and ready for delivery.
The practitioners would know exactly why they need it, where the technology fits best, and how to use it.
The speakers would come with clearly defined philosophies, and no one on panels would disagree on those terms. Sort of like how the judges on Fox’s competitive cooking show, Masterchef, never disagree on food.
But this is not the case.
We live in a world that innovates faster than the blink of an eye.
Conferences always aim to do the best they can to build an event that caters to the senior-level practitioners they hope to attract, the vendors who need to sell their technology and the rest of the community involved (press, analysts, etc).
CRM Evolution is the place you learn about what’s on the cutting edge of the industry. But for many of us, a lot of the content is yesterday’s news. We sit here studying it, writing about it, and debating it over Twitter.
But the people who are busy fielding customer inquiries all day are generally not sitting on Twitter. They are still trying to get funding for better call-center equipment.
Most companies just aren’t there yet. Many companies today are still trying to clean up their call centers or their bad data.
There were many highlights of this event, but one was David Gergen, CNN Analyst, who focused his opening keynote speech from day one on the importance of leadership. While CRM work is quite tactical, it’s the people at the top steering the ship. Their decisionmaking affects many. Gergen talked about the importance of delegation, particularly with some of these new channels such as social CRM.
If most of our leaders have never set foot in the call center, why would we expect them to look for customers on Twitter and Facebook?
Most still see customer service as a cost center.
It is evident that we are still having the same conversations as we have had over the last few years. Companies today need to be taught how to restructure their management models before any of these tools will have widespread adoption. We aren’t quite talking about that. We are going to need to see the collapse of assembly-line management before we see a company successful in social CRM.
The culture and change management topics should preface the technology adoption questions. This is difficult because culture challenges are organization-specific. As Mitt Romney said last week in his address, “corporations are people.”
While that is a little tongue-in-cheek, every organization is made up of people, and while culture challenges are shared by many organizations — all are unique to a specific culture.
Thoughts on Session Styles
I also will objectively say I hope we eventually move away from the PowerPoint presentation style. The conversations we are having (hopefully more focusing on management issues for the next event) call for dressing down.
As I sat through the SAP luncheon on the first day, I looked around the room to wonder how many people were excited to swallow a PowerPoint presentation along with their lunch.
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