“Fezzik…jog his memory.” – from The Princess Bride
Was tipped off to the BlogPulse “Conversation Tracker” feature today, and yes indeed, it’s nifty. (hat tip: nevon, shel) This is a capability that shows how, where, and when a “conversation” is moving through the blogosphere, by tracking links and how they are disseminated over time. Very sharp.
But then, started thinking more about some of the things discussed here, and started doing some poking around…and tripped across a very interesting bit of research that came out of AT&T within the last couple of years (couldn’t find a pub date in the doc, but some of the cites were as late as 2001, so I’m guessing it was published around ’01 or ’02). Entitled “Managing long term communications: Conversation and Contact Management,” this piece focuses on the different challenges that arise when individuals attempt to have conversations over time, and the coping mechanisms that they employ in order to do so. (No, you’re not the only one who re-sets the “unread” flag on emails in an attempt to remember what to do next.) Fascinating stuff. The key pull-quotes right from the first ‘graph:
“Contact management and conversation management are linked. Many busy professionals discourage voice calls and messages, because email enables them to better manage their time, conversations, and contacts. People also spend large amounts of time transcribing voicemail, browsing email archives and writing todo lists – all of these activities are intended to help track the content and status of outstanding conversations.” (emphasis added)
and
“Key properties of technologically-mediated conversations identified were: (1) they are extended in time, which means (2) people typically engage in multiple concurrent conversations, and (3) conversations often involve multiple participants. These properties led to a significant memory load for our informants: they spoke of the difficulty of keeping tracking of conversational content and status, as well as the identity, contact information, and expertise of their conversational partners.“
Bam. That’s it. That’s the core of what’s wrong with so-called “Customer Relationship Management” or “Contact Management” systems today. It’s not a technology issue. (Well, duh. It rarely is.) It’s a mindset issue.
There needs to be a movement away from the “pipeline” mentality which, by definition, thinks about using a CRM system as solely the means to “manage” the relationship interaction between a customer and a representative as a closed-ended transaction (“the prospect gets to the end of the pipeline, and a discrete, one-time transaction, either a win or a loss, occurs”). Instead, we need to start thinking about these tools (CRM, Sales Force Automation, etc.) as ways to augment our capabilities in remembering where we are in the ongoing conversation with a particular customer.
Update: Conversation continues here.