A Breakthrough in Our Thinking!
From the outset of this whole operation, I’d been thinking about the similarities in what we were doing to those of Mint.com in the personal financial space. Okay, I’m slow. I’d consistently referred to us as customer experience company, but it just wasn’t triggering the “I get it” type of response I’d hoped for. And it was also being used by a bunch of CRM companies that were trying to break out from the pack. Still an inside-out context.
So one day, as I was doing some writing and included the words “…inverse of a CRM” – when it hit me; we are a service relationship management company. Just like my young GroupTable entrepreneurs we, Mint.com, PageOnce.com and a bunch of others were setting about turning the tables on those who provide services to us. Not in a bad way, but in an extremely empowering way for consumers. Make my life easier, more efficient, more livable. Help me get things done that I need to get done, but am confused by – like all those individual logins – in just one way…. my way… Whether my way means by phone, by email, by text message.
We started testing the grock factor by calling our friends, and analysts, and academics expert in the service field and grock, they did. In fact, Mary Jo Bitner, one of the resident experts at the CSL pointed me straight to a publication in the MIS Quarterly Executive (Volume 4, No. 2) 2005 titled Customer-Managed Interactions: A New Paradigm for Firm-Customer Relationships, where some very esteemed academic researchers foretold this inversion through technology. They called it Customer Managed Interaction at the time. Because technology and market dynamics have changed a bunch in the intervening years some of their predictions aren’t among those that might make sense for today, but the desire and applicability for consumers taking control of their world and how the companies they want to do business with interact with them is more relevant than ever before.