Mah Pony!: CRM and the happy customer.

Try to name one person that you know today that doesn't have a Facebook, Twitter or is a member of any other social community. You will find it almost impossible.

As the profile of the consumer is changing from only receiving or viewing a sales monologue, the customer of today wants to affect the market with its needs more than ever. If all of us are users of 2.0 social communities, and many of us happy to post information about ourselves over the web, wouldn't it be great for companies to be a part of that?

Well, that' actually just what's happening. The enterprise world needs to follow this new consumer profile, and get aligned with it. The subject we are touching here is Customer Relationship Management, also known as CRM. It can be divided into two parts: CRM 1.0 and CRM 2.0.

CRM 1.0 is the earlier version, primarily viewing customers as numbers, monitoring sales volume and profit in order to increase sales even more. The customer needs might be partly integrated, but there is a lack of interaction and 2 way communication between company and consumer. Even being so, it is crucial for companies to understand CRM 1.0 in order to implementate CRM 2.0.

CRM 2.0 is the later version of customer relationship management. It lets the consumers interact with information from the company, and gives the company the opportunity to analyze personal information about the consumer. Now, where does this information come from? The answer is right in front of you, on that second tab or window that you're checking up on every 5 minutes. And no, that cute guy didn't post anything on your wall yet, but there are zillions of enterprises out there just dying to get you to share that information with them.

With better information about their customers needs and interests, companies need to move focus from products to the actual value and asset of their services. With an enormous 24 h open market called internet, sophisticated consumers act fast and need something familiar to catch their attention, such as personalized and tailored messages and the possibility to give a response and later see results of impact of that response.

Middle hands like Salesforce.com helps companies to interact better with their customers and take part of consumer profiles by search engineers for twitter comments, facebook- and Linked In profiles etc. With the help of Salesforce, customer portfolios are created with links to all theses social community profiles. Furthermore, companies needs to analyze new trends within customer behavior and understand their customers as a ground pillar for the enterprise.