We recently set up some Twitter feeds as an experiment - to help promote communication amongst our development communities, our partners and also a means to do some marketing. (search for CRM on twitter...). We didn't publicise or discuss this with anyone (it was an experiment after all) - but we were amazed to discover, after a few days, that we had 20 requests from people to follow our feeds... [that's not the point of this posting - but I thought I would mention it anyway]
As an experiment, I also set up a CRM instance to publish events to a Twitter feed - without coding or configuration. (The write up is posted here http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Publish+events+from+CRM+OnDemand+to+Twitter+in+3+easy+steps if you want to follow along. ).
Now you are probably thinking "What's the point?". Well - ask yourself this: wouldn't you just like to know, be more aware, of the things going on around you? Wouldn't you like to know what has been going on at an account that you may have worked at (whether you're in sales or worked on solving a problem or rolled out a project)?
Let me explain with a simple example. I am going to refer to a fictitious product called Chirp - which you can just imagine is a secure Twitter for the Enterprise
Susan, sold software at Parkers, 6 months ago. She has since moved onto working with a new set of customers. The account team, working with the customer implementation team have just released phase one of the CRM application. It has been a successful launch. The project lead posts a message on the Chirp channel provisioned automatically for that account (or it could be a semi-public channel for the company). The project lead also posts that the CRM champion has just been promoted.
Susan picks up the message on Chirp (she gets any feeds regarding Parkers). She sees that the project has gone live and her contact at the account has been promoted and is no longer a part of the CRM team. This is both good news and bad. The good news is obvious - but the bad news is that she will need to establish a working relationship with her contact's replacement if she wants to sell more to the customer. Chirp helps her stay aware of events that would normally go unnoticed in the CRM system.
In this simple example the Twitter-like tool can amplify the message to those who are interested in a specific topic, in this case, life events that could affect future business. The project team did not know the sales team. The message went out to anyone within the business that had subscribed to that channel - meaning that they were interested. Using Email to that would have been either a) too much effort for the project lead to figure out who to send the email to or b) would be as welcome as SPAM if sent to all....
As we begin to understand that CRM 2.0 is about the customer engagement and less about managing the relationship - we also need to understand that these social media tools have a big part to play in improving that engagement. These social media tools have been built in the open domain and as a result often need to respect the security and constraints of business. Today we're looking at how existing mechanisms (such as being on the sales team) can be used to provision channels for the user auto-magically - and give the user a choice of feeds to subscribe to - tailor made for the individual.
