Destination CRM: Next time YOU attend!

I just attended the Destination CRM conference in NYC. It was great - not just good, great. One thing about CRM professionals, most are very nice people, and generously share what they know. I think this is partly due to their "customer service" mindset and partly due to the "reputation points" mindset that Social CRM encourages. Whatever the cause, I found people happy to share their time and expertise, and it was fun. We all learned a lot.

I noticed three broad themes in this year's conference topics: Social CRM, integration of CRM data into the rest of the company's data stream, and metrics. (Of course, there were other interesting things happening that I missed - after the keynote speeches, there were three tracks going on at once and I had to pick and choose which sessions to attend.)

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Social CRM (loosely defined as Facebook, Twitter, external "enthusiast" forums, and company forums): Once cutting-edge, this facet of CRM has become relatively mainstream. Many "B to C" (Business to Consumer, also "B2C") companies already have extensive Social CRM operations, and others have similar projects in development. For those of you who aren't doing anything like this yet, the overhead of monitoring Twitter and Facebook plus running a simple discussion board is quite low, and the people who mention your company or log into your forum are likely to be more loyal as customers - if you treat them well.

The "B to B" (Business to Business, also "B2B") companies were asking "What about me? What can I do in the Social CRM arena?" I suggested they try to find out where their business customers talk to each other, then go further and find out where and how their business customers' consumers (end-users) discuss things publically, and monitor those. For instance, if you sell a component of Brand X to the manufacturer, you can monitor public social sites for mention of Brand X. Yes, you'll have more brands to monitor, but you don't have to do it in any great depth - just be aware of gossip and firestorms and such. Understanding your customer's business situation can only help with your own B to B sales.

People were also asking about Social CRM metrics. One attendee (I didn't get his name, sorry) said his company did some detailed studies and found that customers who are Facebook "Fans" and forum members are more loyal, more willing to recommend, and purchase more products. So his company was seeing a positive return from their Social CRM efforts from existing customers, before any online marketing efforts to bring in new ones.

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Integration: 20 years ago, integration of CRM data into the rest of the company's computer applications typically took 30 to 80% of an implementation budget. This hasn't changed. As the integration tools have gotten better, the apps have gotten more complex and the integration targets more numerous. The lesson I got was "NIM" - No Immediate Miracles. This is what has always made any implementation hard, and it's still hard. At the Keynote Panel discussion, I asked leaders from Oracle CRM, SAP, Microsoft CRM, and RightNow to work on this - they said they'd get back to me :-)

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Metrics: I've mentioned it in an earlier post, but the importance of Return on Investment (ROI) and other metrics in general was reinforced. Several separate speakers with successful rollouts said that they started by knowing what results they wanted, then built systems (or campaigns, or channels) to try to get those results. The less successful rollouts built systems and then tried to see what metrics were available.

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All in all it was a great show. Many thanks to the organizers, especially Paul Greenberg who was co-chair; in addition to helping many people (including me) with his sage advice, he did many of the tiny thankless tasks that made the event run smoothly.