VRM/CX + CRM/CX

I’ve been in conversations lately about VRM+CRM. Will they help each other out or crash into each other? It’s an open question. But I think we can find an answer in a current CRM vector: toward what the CRM folks have been calling CX, for Customer eXperience. I first read about it in this column by Mitch Lieberman in October 2010. That was when he met with RightNow, which was later acquired by Oracle. You can see and read the results in this list, which is roughly in chronological order:

• The Customer Experience Revolution is Here, by Anthony Lye, VP, CRM, Oracle (Anthony, by the way, sat in on one of our early VRM meetings on the West Coast, in an Oracle meeting space, in 2007, I think it was.)
• Oracle RightNow CX Breakdown
• My Take: Do your CX Practices Kill Empathy? by Gary Lemke in CRM Advocate
• My Take: The Magnetism of CX Disasters, by Gary Lemke in CRM Advocate

• Other Gary Lemke “takes”…

  05.31.12    Customer for Life 05.30.12    Another Wish for You 05.29.12    My Wish for You 05.24.12    Customers Want AHT 05.23.12    The Average of Averages 05.22.12    Abandoning AHT Practices 05.21.12    Abandon AHT? 05.17.12    At the Speed of the Customer

• Oracle Special Event: The Experience Revolution (25 June)

Experience is a personal thing. When two parties are engaging with each other, it’s something both create. That’s the challenge here.

How can we make the most of both serial and parallel activities and virtues in customer-vendor relationships? I invite our friends from the CRM/CX world to weigh in here.

And come to this:

It’s on 7-8 August in Minneapolis. I’ll be there. So will a bunch of VRM companies and projects, plus other parties interested in that subtitle there: new directions for personal data.

[This was the second half of Scaling business in parallel, but I decided to break it in two and move the second part here.]