Service Relationship Management

Over recent years consumer relationships with the companies that serve them have evolved from simple telephone interactions to complex, multi-channel interactions which are carefully managed, measured by companies that want to get and keep those customers. A whole category of technology – Customer Relationship Management (CRM) grew up a decade ago to serve that need.

Customers today have dependencies on the internet and mobile devices as the modes for managing daily life from bill-paying to investing to instantaneous interactions with thousands of perfect strangers. These technologies have flipped a bit for every-day needs and expectations among consumers. The immediacy consumers have come to expect across the spectrum of their lives has caused companies they do business with to extend CRM interactions through multiple channels. Banks have turned on two-way transactional models for bill payment and credit card alerts using email or text messages and customer portals that allow users to define how they want to interact.

While consumers get what they want on the one hand – easier, faster ways to do business, they pay a price. They now have dozens of interactions from an array of service entities, each with a unique set of requirements for log on, setup, interaction options. The result is a dizzying array of user experiences across a broad range of media that can have the reverse effect of what was intended. The consumer’s life has become more confusing, more complicated, and more difficult to navigate.

Small bits of that problem have been solved in a number of areas. Online shopping and travel established  portals for unified display of information from various sources for price comparisons, and single sign-on has been adopted for things like instant messaging and beyond with OpenID, LiveID and others. In personal finance the notion of connecting to accounts through desktop software such as Quicken or Microsoft Money simplified relationships across a variety of service providers, but requires one to do all the work to establish a view of their financial world and be one the computer where the software is installed to interact with it.

Because information relative to customers is now housed and transacted to reasonable standards for most industries, a new set of technologies are emerging to turn the tables on the “inside-out” view of customer relationships and moves it off the desktop and into the Cloud. Start-ups like Mint.com have turned the personal financial management model on its ear by allowing the consumer to define her relationships and preferences once, then the technology does all the work of learning her spending patterns to provide intelligence, insights, and guidance she might otherwise spend hours determining on her own. Doubtless Mint will soon include two-way transactions with the consumer’s financial institutions removing any requirement for her to ever return to the sites of the places she does business cementing her reliance on Mint’s one set of rules and standards for all her personal financial relationships.

The result is what could be termed Service Relationship Management (SRM). A single, cloud-hosted, consumer-managed technology intermediary for defining and managing relationships across a continuum of interactions to take the friction out of everyday life and simplify the way an individual interacts with her world.