Push and Pull Strategies

We know that almost every country on the globe has some flavour of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in place. These can be simple contact databases (mailing lists) to highly complex systems that track customer purchases, website user clicks, service desk calls and so on. The purpose of a CRM system is of course to improve a company's understanding of its customers. This leads to a deeper level of engagement.

However, C. Surdak posits that many company CRM systems have underperformed, despite the fact that whilst these systems may track a great deal of customer information, they are nevertheless constrained by the disparate types of customer information to which they have access. In other words, can a customers mere purchase provide purchase history that articulates a deep understanding of a particular customers wants, needs, and values? Can this information garnered help a vendor understand his/her customer's at an emotional level? Think of conspicuous consumption, or a real need.

Social media has in fact evolved from being a simple means of communicating into an actual lifestyle. It goes without saying that social media is in fact affecting every aspect of our lives, and has evolved into Socialfication that will define our lives in the next few decades as society goes through the evolution process. Socialfication involves the impact of massive real-time connectedness to the rest of the world. Think of Facebook and Twitter, that allow people to form and participate in digital "tribes". This sense of belonging implies personalization as the tribe gets to know me, my preferences and so on, so it is all about participation, as social media is by its very nature is a two-way street.

These trends of personalization and participation lead to engagement, which in turn leads to the power of validation. In our "new" hyperconnected world, we all know that an unhappy customer can now tweet about a bad experience to millions of other people. Think about the effect that posting on "Hello Peter" has regarding poor service, for example. The vendor is desperate to have the comment removed as it of course tarnishes the vendors corporate brand equity. Remember that bad news travels very fast and very far, somewhat like marketing "reach", in a socially connected world.

Socialfication substantially changes the relationship between companies/vendors and their customers, both current and potentially future. This relationship can be very vendor focused, as the vendor is trying to sell its products or services to its customers. This is a "push" strategy, where the message is sent out to the entire population of existing/potential customers, with the vendor hoping that some of this message is absorbed by those who receive it. Through Socialfication, vendors want to understand their customers needs and wants, and thus want to develop a deeper understanding of their customers, so that marketing messages motivate their customers to really want the vendor's products or services in a very personal way. Therefore, this approach creates customer "pull", and leads to a much more satisfying experience for the vendors customer. This naturally leads to greater profitability for the vendor, and a stronger bond between both parties.

If one examines a Socialfication maturity model, one will see that Socialfication demands the collection of, analysis of, and action upon enormous amounts of data. Big data, for example, is a combination of structured, semistructured and unstructured data that is collected by organizations that can be mined for information and used in machine learning projects, predictive modeling and other advanced analytics applications. This data must be aligned closely to real time, and this places tremendous demands on both IT and the organisations business processes. Lastly, all of this data collected must be stored and made readily accessible, so the organisation must recognize these challenges and that these have been closely aligned to the investment strategy of the organisation. So Socialfication will in fact be the chief determinant of customer loyalty (think of the adoption curve by Rogers), revenue generation and profitability and sustainability.

Prof Rory Dunn.