It was bound to happen...and then finally it did!  I was sitting in a meeting and then a prospective customer starting asking me about CRM 2.0.  After a decade submersed in the world of CRM I kind of chuckled to myself that an organization that had not even begun to grasp the real impact of a CRM initiative that this person was already down a path that most of the colleagues that I trust in the industry have not even fully agreed upon.  If you want to get some insight on the discussion you may want to visit the CRM 2.0 Wiki.

I have pretty much stayed out of the fray up to now because every time I get involved in this discussion it seems like I am trying to figure out how to fly to the Sun using a Mountain Dew powered rocket ship.  If that last reference meant nothing to you then you completely get my point.  It really does not mean anything to me either. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't care about CRM 2.0 or Social CRM or my coined phrase, "2nd Generation CRM".  It is such a big topic that I don't really know how to encapsulate the discussion into silos that will provide my clients a relevant and actionable method of resolving what it should mean to them.

So, rather than talking in circles, I guess this will be my initial jaunt into this discussion on what I know and what I don't know about CRM 2.0.  I do have a head start because I also started to discuss this concept in a blog article from earlier this year Integrating CRM to Social Networking Not a Reality Just Yet.  That particular blog posting had to do with a panel that I was a part of at the Small Business Summit 2009.  There were so many questions related to how to engage Social Media into business development efforts and it was clear to me that this concept is going to start heating up sooner rather than later.

First, let me start my comments by explaining that in the past 10 years I have seen so many inefficient internal sales and service operations that I think I will show some bias with regards to what I think the immediate opportunity is for CRM 2.0 for most organizations.  Time after time I continue to get engaged in projects with management teams that are trying to consider CRM as a functional step primarily in the context of sales and service teams and not inclusive of the interoperability of those teams within the organization as a whole.

There is a paradox here that I want to make sure I don't confuse. I do believe that initial CRM initiatives should be focused on a few critical deliverable elements and expanded over time.  However, there should be a blue print on the master plan for organizational operational excellence before diving into the CRM project itself.  How does this relate to the concept of CRM 2.0?  I guess the initial challenge that I have with most CRM 2.0 discussions is that the focus is external and most organizations haven't conquered their internal challenges yet.

I believe that CRM 2.0 is the essence of merging how customers live and work and bridging those tools into a common customer experience that our internal teams see and understand in order to be able to sell more products and keep those customers for life.  I discuss the customer experience in many of my seminars and I try to impress on my audience that people want to have the same experience no matter how they engage with our organization.  Knowing as much about your customer and messaging to them in a meaningful way is a key part of executing this vision.

The one thing that I don't know how to encapsulate into the CRM 2.0 discussion is how we take the day to day tools and transactions in our corporate environments and mold them into this panacea where we are at one with our customer.  Moreover, the one thing that I don't see involved in this Social CRM discussion is what I currently think is the real opportunity in the next generation of CRM. 

I guess a better way to explain this is that I think we need certain building blocks (of which many of the elements of CRM 1.0 are just flat out essential).  I do see the path to CRM 2.0 but I think that you need to get the foundation set and then concentrate on my vision of CRM 2.0.  The next generation of CRM for my customers that have gotten the foundation in place is all about workflow and business automation combined with the right level of business analytics and key performance indicators. 

At the end of the day if these initiatives I just explained as my concept of CRM 2.0 are not incorporated into the existing definition I think that trying to make the next steps of the evolving customer experience will not provide us with what we would all expect this next wave of CRM to be all about.