I don’t know about you, but I hate calling in for service from any of the companies that service me. I either have to select from some stupid menu or talk to a robot voice that is hard of hearing and pretty unintelligent. Unless you know the magic sequence of buttons or a secret code, you never get to talk to a real person. I have seen my sweet Sherry yelling at the phone terms like “operator”, “customer service rep”, “a human please” and/or curse in utter frustration.
Doesn’t it get your goat when you have to input an account number only to have to repeat it once you are lucky enough to get a human? If you get a human they talk to you in a dialect you can’t understand and tell you that their name is “Tuuum” (Tom in some dialect). You know they are lying. Once you get through the authorization process, they tell you that they are the wrong department and transfer you to the “dial tone” Now you get to do it over. Happy, happy: joy, joy NOT
![MPj03155510000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/08/windowslivewriterescapingthezombiezoowithbettercustomerfa-ae47mpj031555100001-2.jpg)
Well you say, “why not use the web”? That would be great, if you had an ID, but you have to do the calling thing in most cases to get started. Even if you don’t how many times have you gotten hung up in signing up processes? Let’s say that’s a one time cost, so it’s worth it and you happen to remember the ID and the password (of course the rules are different for all the passwords by company.
Let’s say you get by this because you have a great memory or a highly secured spreadsheet with all the numbers. What is your great reward? You get a website that has a search capability, because it is not intuitive to you what menu item to pick to get the exact process you want. Don’t get me wrong there are great websites like Amazon to work with, but they are few and far between.
Why can’t I have my own portal that understands me and all the companies I work with and the processes that I use on some frequency? I do like online banking and my bank’s website is somewhat intuitive. Paypal is not too bad either, but why can’t I create a menu of processes I want in stead of organizing favorites? This menu remembers me and all my passwords. I can give it instructions like calculate my net worth as of a certain date and it does it for me. I can tell it to pay certain bills that coordinate with my 15th of the month income check instead of having to rely on credit cards that expire and banks that you can’t control well.
I want a “Process of Me” where companies can allow me to customize my processes and interface. Now that I have had my electronic tantrum, I will go back to my research agenda. I feel better now knowing there are lots of processes to improve.
8 responses so far ↓
1 Jon Garfunkel // Aug 11, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Jim — this is the theme of Project VRM effort http://projectvrm.org/ , which is being driven by Doc Searls and others. From the introduction: “VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.”
(Funny, between CXP and VRM, there seems to be a lot of creative thinking based on ill experiences with customer service, be it airlines, phone company, etc.)
Jon
2 Jim Sinur // Aug 11, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Who else is involved with this? Which vendors are supporting this or is it a grass roots movement?
3 Doc Searls // Aug 12, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Thanks, Jon.
Jim, the answer to your question is both.
First, think of VRM as a better vendor-facing process for customers. And think of the VRM community as a group of developers working at solving problems from the customer side, rather than the vendor side, which is the way it’s usually done. And that some of the developers working on VRM are vendors.
The VRM community includes a number of development efforts, mostly in the U.S. and the U.K. It is grass-roots to the extent that the base efforts are open source and non-commercial (in order to provide the best possible foundation on which commercial solutions can be built). It is vendor-based to the degree that there are commercial interests building stuff out.
But it’s still early. For example, in respect to CRM, we need working code on the VRM side before CRM has something to recoprocate and enhance. Some developers in the VRM community are CRM veterans, and are addressing this need directly.
A few links that should help:
http://projectvrm.org
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2009/04/12/vrm-and-the-four-party-system/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2009/05/22/a-declaration-of-customer-independence/
http://blog.joeandrieu.com/2009/04/26/introducing-user-driven-services/
http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/vrm-one-pager/
Doc
4 Doc Searls Weblog · The Ultimate Alignment // Aug 12, 2009 at 1:56 pm
[...] for example, Jim Sinur posted Escaping the Zombie Zoo with Better Customer Facing Processes, in which he [...]
5 Iain Henderson // Aug 12, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Hi Jim,
I’m one of Doc’s cohort on Project VRM, and one of the converts from the CRM world. This post might help clarify how VRM and CRM could be expected to complement each other in different ways at different points of the buying/ selling/ relationship management process.
http://informationanswers.com/?p=386
Hope that helps.
Iain
6 Jim Sinur // Aug 12, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Thanks for the clarification. Is anyone in touch with our CRM folks at Gartner? If so, I will try and ping them to ascertain the progress
7 The Ultimate Alignment | dv8-designs // Aug 12, 2009 at 5:44 pm
[...] Jim Sinur posted Escaping the Zombie Zoo with Better Customer Facing Processes, in which he [...]
8 Iain Henderson // Aug 13, 2009 at 2:53 am
We’ve not had any dialogue with your CRM folks so far as i’m aware; to some extent it is a bit early/ that will work better when there are some live deployments to point to?
Iain
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