An IT Conversations interview on Framing the Net. At eComm 2009.
On how free customers are more better than captive ones. At The Ideas Project. I spoke in closer to final draft than usual here. A transcript. Some samples:
- What we’ve had since companies won the Industrial Revolution is the belief that a captive customer is more valuable than a free one. We never knew what a free customer was. We never encountered one. The Internet makes that possible; the Internet sets customers free. Free customers are far more capable of providing intelligence to companies than captive ones are.
- …’free range’ customers are going to be coming at companies, telling them things that the old dairy-system cattle chutes never allowed customers to say before. That’s going to be good for companies; it’s going to be good for CRM systems…
- …it would be really great if we had our own terms of service. When you walk into a store, you have great terms of service. You look like a good customer; you’re wearing a blazer. It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing jeans; you might actually buy something. They don’t want your identity. They don’t want you to become a member, or anything else like that, in order to spend your money and be a loyal customer. In fact, you’re more likely to be a loyal customer if they don’t interrogate you and make things difficult for you. The way CRM systems tend to work, especially online; they want to scrape up as much data about you so they can spam you later with guesswork about what you might want. It’s almost always annoying, and give you surveys which are almost always a bad guess at what you want.
- VRM, which is vendor relationship management, (is) the reciprocal of customer relationship management. It’s where the customer controls their information. We become, as a customer, the integration point for our own data, our transaction histories, our credit histories, our preferences, and then the origination point for the way those are used.
- Advertising is fundamentally flawed. It’s flawed because it’s guesswork. It’s flawed because it’s monologue. It’s flawed because the systems in place are predicated on a whole bunch of assumptions that elevate guesswork to an art. In the meantime, the customers are out there with actual demand, money on the table, ready to buy, for something.
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