Iain

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

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

(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