Capturing Feedback and Tracking Influencers in a CRM System

Although we were discussing the CRM 2.0 definition project, Pete over at Share Tactic raises some really good points about providing the appropriate level of customer interaction (PPM4):

I do like the notion of all my interactions with Company X being defined by me; does it follow then that Company X will need to query my personal preferences each time it thinks interaction might be warranted? What if the desired interaction is simply a transaction? And if the definition of those levels is up to me, the customer, how many do I get to create?

You can read Pete’s post, comments and my response here.

I really had to think about this one for a few minutes, but then it dawned on me that if you view Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as transactional, there will be no way to effectively model response mechanisms for every situation. CRM has to be thought of as a collaborative effort — both inside and outside the firewall. As such, CRM processes and systems need to be able to handle unstructured data as well as implicit and anonymous customer information. This, in turn, got me thinking about how you could model a feedback mechanism into an existing CRM system…

Today, CRM hinges on a known contact or account entity and things like opportunities, quotes/orders and cases are all linked to a specific customer or account. Perhaps we need a few new entity such as “feedback” to record anonymous or implicit customer information? An employee surfing around on the web see a blog posting slamming the customer’s products or services — she pops open the feedback entity screen and writes a brief description of the issues. Since the blogger is named “Rant112″, and she has no idea who this actually is, she creates a new “influencer” record with some basic information such as screen name, blog address and a brief description (influencer entity could be structured and would behave similarly to lead entity that currently exists in most CRM systems). The feedback ticket is then routed through work-flow to the appropriate person responsible for managing these types of issues (perhaps a product manager, perhaps a new role). This person could contact rant112 through their blog — these communications would be tracked in CRM in case the resolution involves multiple people and departments. If resolution stalls, escalation rules are applied and alerts are sent to senior management (perhaps the Chief Customer Officer?). This system can also be used for implicit information — that is, stuff that is derived from reports or anecdotal sources. For example, the web team is reviewing the web stats and it see a huge spike in traffic from Singapore — why? The sales team hears about aggressive discounting by a competitor. Why should product marketing respond? Pop open the feedback entity screen and let that information get routed to the appropriate department for resolution.

A couple comments on design, you could probably use a case entity in most CRM systems to accomplish this, or by making notes a main entity of the CRM system (would require a software re-write in some cases). However, I would recommend a new entity — because feedback is likely to touch multiple departments, you’d want set up access permissions differently and report on these issues separately. This functionality could also be exposed outside the firewall as well through web self service. This way, rather than a generic email box that no one checks, this functionality becomes an integral part of the CRM system.

The problem with this solution is that it is still transactional in nature. However, it would be a good interim step for companies trying to make the transition to becoming truly customer-centric. With regard to customer management, many organizations need to “crawl, walk” and then “run”. This step would at least get them to the walking stage. Down the road, I see the adoption of more natively collaborative technologies into the heart of customer operations.

Update: corrected minor typos in original post.