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VRM + CRM
The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.
—Adam Smith1
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.
—William Shakespeare2
In a narrow sense, VRM is the customer-side counterpart of CRM (customer relationship management). Just as CRM is how one company relates to many customers, VRM is how one customer relates to many vendors.
In the past, CRM systems were containers within which all relating between customers and vendors took place. With VRM, however, both sides can hold up their own ends of the relationship burden, so relating can take place between the two rather than within the vendor’s system alone.
As I reviewed earlier (in chapter 20), agreements between parties form laws unto themselves. A relationship, however, is its own entity. Such is the case with a marriage, a treaty, a partnership, a corporation. (My own marriage is symbolized literally: “the couple decides” is inscribed inside our wedding rings.) CRM was developed in a time when customers had little to bring to a relationship other than complete submission to whatever system the vendor provided. While a relationship of sorts existed, it was within the vendor’s space. The customer was a manorial subject.
Now the customer is in a position to be self-reliant and fully engaging. What can he or she bring now to the market’s table, and how will it engage with CRM systems, both as they stand today and as they evolve through interaction with customers’ VRM tools and systems?
In chapter 5, we visited Iain Henderson’s three-column list (table 5-1) of what happens in a relationship between a customer and a vendor over time. It showed how guesswork and waste flanked thin and dysfunctional interactions that were relationships in name only. Iain’s approach to eliminating guesswork and waste is something he calls the customer-supplier engagement framework, or CSEF. It is based on many years of assessing CRM effectiveness using the CMAT model. (CMAT stands for customer management assessment tool and is defined—by many companies, all with the same wording—as “a range of tools and methodologies that provide a detailed, objective, benchmarked assessment of an organisation’s capability to effectively manage its customers.”3)
Explains Iain,
The CRM side is fully kitted up with the tools of their trade … data warehouses, web sites, CRM systems, and an army of people paid to do the work. The other (the buying side), has nothing more than some self-assembled, amateur tools … and their brains. They don’t get paid to do it, and they typically don’t have a lot of time set aside for the process … That imbalance between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots,’ as in any walk of life, leads the ‘haves’ to take advantage, and the ‘have nots’ to rebel against this in whatever way they can. Or (more often) they just don’t engage as they might in a more balanced and equitable relationship.4
Getting that balance, Iain believes, requires moving some current CRM functions over to VRM—and to the relationship space where both sides interact. All of the following, for example, could go over to VRM or to the relationship space:
- Address and other contact details
- Location descriptors
- Lifestyle and stage
- Behaviors
- Preferences
- Existing relationships with various companies
- Intentions
Now look at the list of all the things Rapleaf got wrong about me, back in chapter 7. If I were in control of all the things Iain lists, plus other interesting variables (for example, the sum of all my miles with all the airlines I use—and what I like and don’t like about each of those airlines), and if I shared that information in a trustable way, Rapleaf wouldn’t need to do so much guesswork. Nor would Rapleaf’s corporate customers.
Hope
Many people in the CRM world have come out to embrace VRM. CRM Magazine devoted its cover and much of its May 2010 issue to VRM, with a cover that read, in giant type, “I am not an eyeball.” Its lead essay begins, “The victory, of course, belongs to the customer—who has always ‘owned’ her relationship with you, no matter what the letters of CRM might imply.”5 A story inside by Lauren McKay is titled, “It’s Not Your Relationship to Manage,” with a subtitle that adds, “Just as you finally come to grips with CRM, the customers themselves have turned the tables—and now they’re managing you.”
That sounds threatening, and in some ways, it has to be. CRM relationships today are defined and controlled by a single party, and cannot be extended to the customer side without vendors giving up some of that control, for the good of both parties.
UI
VRM tools will not be used only in connection with CRM systems, but the reciprocities of VRM + CRM require discussion of UI: user interfaces. Especially for individuals on the VRM side.
UI is everything, of course. It’s what makes something not only useful and usable, but actually used. There isn’t a graveyard big enough for all the great ideas and great products that failed to invite use, simply because they lacked a good UI.
The closest we have so far is a simple symbol: the r-button. It’s actually a pair of buttons, one for you (VRM) and one for the other party (CRM). They look like two little magnets, facing each other: ⊂ ⊃. They can be a solid color or gray, indicating active or passive states, or the presence or absence of possible actions if you click on one. The first ones we worked with in the VRM development community were red, because that was the color of the marker I used when I first drew a pair of r-buttons on a whiteboard. I wasn’t meaning to create a symbol or a UI element at the time, but the way it happened suggests there might be more to it than just serving as a place holder.
I was standing there talking to developers at PRX when I drew a racetrack-shaped oval on a whiteboard, dragged my finger down the middle to divide it in two, and said, “So this is the customer on the left, and the vendor on the right.” One of the PRX guys said, “That’s a good UI symbol,” and it took off from there. We use the left (user-side) r-button for ListenLog on PRX’s Public Radio Player. We used both in an EmanciPay prototype developed as an open source project with students at MIT and King’s College London. And it’s been a handy way to symbolize customer and vendor, supply and demand, and other reciprocities. But that doesn’t mean we should stick with it.
It does mean we have a long way to go before VRM tools have UIs that demand use. This I believe will be the most important challenge for VRM development, once tools become sufficiently mature and usable.
Many VRM tools will be purely infrastructural and won’t need an attractive UI. But for uses that involve conscious expressions of intent, good UIs are essential.