Ting rings the opening bell

Here, according to the ProjectVRM wiki, are the ideal characteristics of VRM tools: VRM tools are personal. As with hammers, wallets, cars and mobile phones, people use them as individuals,. They are social only in secondary ways. VRM tools help customers express intent. These include preferences, policies, terms and means of engagement, authorizations, requests and [Read More →]

Complaining vs. Buying

Q: “What’s the difference between a tweeter and a customer?” A: “One complains, the other buys.” Just had to write that down. The Q and the A came in the midst of a VRM conference call that also touched on CRM, VRM+CRM, sCRM, trust frameworks, identity and other stuff. Not saying that’s a fair characterization, [Read More →]

Toward a new symbiosis between Demand and Supply

I’m listening and watching with fascination to Keith Scovell‘s Shopper Power videos. In these Keith describes progress being made in a VRM direction by retailers and their upstream suppliers, detailing efforts made by Starbucks, Hallmark, CVS, Tesco/Homeplus, Frito-Lay, Reese’s and other companies — all recognizing that customers’ range of control over interactions in retail environments [Read More →]

SOPA and Customer Commons

Imagine that Customer Commons had been created a year ago. To guide that imagining, here is the copy that matters from the placeholder page: Customer Commons is about us. We are a com­mu­nity of customers. We are funded only by customers. We serve the inter­ests and aspi­ra­tions of customers. We are the 100% Customer Commons [Read More →]

Customers are personal, cont’d

There are so many excellent comments and questions following my last post, Consumers are social, Customers are personal, that I decided it would make more sense to address them in a new post than in comments under that one. So here goes. Joshua Marsh, the CEO of Conversocial, writes, I’m interested in your comment that [Read More →]

Consumers are social, Customers are personal

Social media are a partial and temporary solution at best to a pair of linked problems that are essentially personal: dysfunctional customer relationship management on the vendor’s side; and minimal vendor relationship management on the customer’s side. In the absence of solutions to both problems, vendors still see customers as consumers, and that too is [Read More →]

Occupying the Internet

As he so often does, Dave Winer nails it, this time with The Un-Internet. Some pull-quotes: At issue is this: Control. For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be [Read More →]

Will 2012 be the Year of VRM?

Mark Sage of CustomerThink lists “You and your data” (and, notably, VRM) among “three key loyalty trends” he sees coming in 2012. Nice to see. The specifics: Consumers are also gaining more and more power with the UK government for example recently announcing that they plan to give consumers more control over their data by releasing it [Read More →]

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GoDaddy VRooMed?

GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman says “We listened to our customers. GoDaddy no longer supports SOPA.” (Here’s the GoDaddy blog post.) Lauren Weinstein says that’s not the same as opposing SOPA: “they’re the same ethically vacuous firm as always, with their public facade changing like a chameleon, blowing in the wind of Internet public opinion.” I still [Read More →]

Say howdy to Insidr and Glome

One is Insidr, which is “rewriting the Rules of customer support” by giving you a way to “connect directly to real people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t.” You post a question, offer a bounty for an answer, and get an answer from an [Read More →]