Can an AMS Do Social CRM? Should It?
———Comment posted on AssociationTech ————————————————————————–
I don’t think that the social CRM is coming to the association world in a format that we expect for a few key reasons. Unlike the enterprise CRM world, there is not a staggering amount of pressure on AMS companies to open up and really offer a meaningful set of APIs or a full SDK. The CRM world has an entire cottage industry of add-on and complementary apps that surrounds the CRM and therefore, was wise enough to make it easy for organizations to partner and to round out their offerings. The AMS providers, on the other hand, have largely come from the philosophy that they can, should and must build everything themselves.The smart AMS companies are realizing that there is just too too much to build nowadays and there’s no way that a firm can specialize in everything; the smart ones are moving towards doing exactly what the enterprise space did: getting open and building out application partner channels.
This is the overall trend, but to the question–where does social CRM fit in? When does CRM get social? I think the right answer is that the CRM (or, in our discussion, the AMS) needs to move towards being exceptional at data integrity and being the master control mechanism for data flow. As more and more systems rise up that are exceptional in their one particular niche (e.g. my company specializes in an entire system just for event management), the pressure on the AMS to provide deep functionality in any one area diminishes.
Instead, the AMS is freed up to take its position as that of an operator and can be the one place where all of the various systems plug into so that the unique identity of each person, product, transaction, etc is maintained and sorted in such a way as to be ready for analysis. Think of the role of the future AMS as that of the operator within an electric grid—there are many, many inputs and pathways for electricty to travel: some of it blends together, some doesn’t, some goes into very small discrete wires to service a few houses, some stays in big trunk lines to power heavy loads. None of it works right unless there is a central operator that can coordinate all the flows. I think of the electric grid and then I replace “data” with “electricity”; all those data packets can now be connected together and moving to and fro–someone needs to organize it and get it to the right place! I see this as the future role of the AMS–it’s ability to oversee at a macro level the comings and goings and procedures of data transport.
Where does that leave us with the social part of CRM? I think the even bigger topic that is not discussed is not so much that the social CRM is coming, but that social intelligence is coming. This means we are FINALLY about ready for real business intelligence to come to the forefront and work for our associations. What we’re all gearing up towards is more finite data that covers both behavioral and transacational data and can be tied back to a specific individual, if needed, or aggregated to look at the group or population level.
What we haven’t had yet is a system that makes it easy to pull it all together and combine the data so that we can look at it on both the individual and aggregate levels. This ability—to provide an association with both trend analysis, group dynamics and real correlations between various events is what is going to allow associations to be able to understand change and proactively plan.
For AMS to now take on the financial and time burden of developing in depth across so many association business areas is just not something that any of the companies can hope to compete in or aim to do well. Instead, we’re going back to niche. AMS would be wise to focus not on the social aspects–so many companies have this piece nailed already and are building rapidly on it– but to build on the fact that they are the core operations engine of the modern association membership business. Let’s not all try to do the same thing–let’s move forward by specializing in our areas of expertise and putting together systems that can talk together and provide us with the most detailed data possible so that our investments carry the lowest risk and greatest probability of return.
