By Jim Berkowitz, founder & CEO, CRM Mastery

Thursday, February 18, 2010

So I guess that it’s time for me to check in and comment about my experiences at the recent SCRM Summit put on by BPT Partners last week.  I won’t bore you with all the details surrounding my difficulties in getting back home, (it took me four days due to all of the airline cancellations from the winter storms in the mid-Atlantic and southern part of the country), I’ll focus on my most meaningful insight.

First of all I must say that this Summit was “chock full of heavenly” information; much of which was delivered by an energized Paul Greenberg, author of the CRM/SCRM Bible, CRM at the Speed of Light. I highly recommend this seminar and encourage any interested Social CRM professionals to attend their next session in Atlanta on May 24-25.

I’ve put together a Twitter List made up of the attendees (who have Twitter accounts) and “almost” attendees who weren’t able to make it to the event due to the weather (@Lager and @ekolsky). It’s available here for anyone interested.

There are already so many great posts about the Summit that it’s difficult to add much to the conversation at this point. CRM magazine has done a great job of pulling together all these posts here on its blog.

So, as a technology guy, what I’d like to talk about is the humanism of this event. [The full explanation appears after the jump...]

I had heard of and shared tweets as well as Facebook and blog posts with many of the attendees but had met very few in the flesh. I knew most of these people by the written word alone. Being in the “physical” presence of all of these great SCRM thinkers was unlike any business event I had ever attended. It drove home, for me, the difference between the experiences of social networking versus physical networking.

Using social networking allows me to meet and share thoughts with like-minded, interesting  people from all over the world.  It’s stimulating at the level of thought and accordingly, it’s a great way to learn things I wouldn’t otherwise know from people who, over time, I come to respect and trust.

But being in the presence of these #SCRMsummit people offered so much more.   There was not only respect and trust going on in the seminar room, at the hotel restaurant, or in the bar,  there was a deep inner feeling that was spiritually uplifting;  there was a warm, loving feeling for each other. It was the kind of feelings that you have when you get together with your best friends or family.

This is the kind of experience that we, as human beings, look forward to.  But let’s be honest,  you just can’t get this experience from the use of social networking technology alone.

OK, so maybe my message here isn’t very profound. But I think it just might be important to consider as we seek to utilize social networking and brand monitoring tools for getting, keeping and growing customers.

We human beings are much more then thinking/thought machines. We are spiritual beings, we have emotions (which are sometimes quite powerful) and we have experiences.  Businesses, on the other hand, have policies which are designed to control the behavior of their employees and of course affect the relationship they have with their customers.

Unfortunately, from my experience, many businesses implement policies to support their internal processes or technology capabilities without considering the affect they have on their customers (emotionally); (ex. Google security policies for Buzz). Policies also tend to revolve around recurring events and don’t cover exceptions. To make matters worse, most businesses don’t give their front-line customer service agents the authority to deal with exceptions.

Non-customer-centric policies can lead customers to frustration, anger, and a whole range of emotions that today find themselves being expressed using social networking on the Internet. Look at all of the energy (and attention) that the “Silent Bob” (Kevin Smith)/Southwest Airlines fiasco has caused.

Social networking tools are fast becoming the most popular channel for customers to voice their complaints on and for businesses to respond to these complaints.

So what’s the secret sauce for social networking success by businesses? Empathy. We all must remember that behind the avatar and the @ symbol there is a real live, feeling person.  A person who craves to be treated as family and loved.

Oh, and by the way? I, for one, love my SCRM Summit family. Thanks to everyone who made it a most memorable event for me.

[Editors' Note: This blogpost first appeared on Jim Berkowitz's own blog. The editors appreciate his generosity in allowing us to mirror it here. Berkowitz can be found on Twitter as @jberkowitz.]