Internet of customers? We are not prospects; we are people
- Summary:
- Salesforce.com's new slogan celebrates the Internet of customers. But we are much more than that ...
To my surprise, I found the new slogan grated when it came in the keynote straight after 45 minutes filled with moving stories of people collaborating to bring help in adversity. I was suddenly not in the mood to have our society defined in terms of commercial transactions. So I tweeted:
#df13 internet of customers? What about the Internet of people? Surely we are individuals not merely prospects.
— Phil Wainewright (@philww) November 19, 2013
The rhetoric of the customer-centric company is fine in principle. As someone who came to adulthood in the 1970s at a time when the notion of customer service remained an alien concept to British businesses, I welcome the modern desire of vendors to delight me.
But at the same time, I retain a healthy skepticism whenever any executive fulsomely declares that their company is customer-centric. They would say that, wouldn't they? No one is going to boast that they aim to ignore and let down their clients.
What I realized as I sat in the keynote was that if you orient everything around customers then you are basing the entire relationship around the fulfilment of a commercial transaction. And that's a very limiting framework in today's digital economy. It's a mindset that leads you to interact with an assumption of buying interest, even at times when your contact is not in a buying mood.
The result is that companies are constantly trying to get my email address or twitter handle or onto my Facebook wall to make me offers. Inevitably, those interactions rapidly bore me or even annoy me. When I'm not in a buying mood, I want a different sort of relationship, one that engages my attention by respecting my interests and holds back from selling me stuff until the moment when I want to buy.
Today's digital tools now make it viable for companies to maintain such relationships — respecting people for what they are rather than kowtowing to them only because they're a customer.
Social connections
In the afternoon of the keynote, an Australian analyst asked Marc Benioff whether Saleforce.com's new platform wasn't really all about selling us more stuff. Benioff answered with unabashed enthusiasm:
"That's what we do. We jam stuff down people's throats ... Our job number one is to have the best sales force automation technology in the world and make those sales people as successful as they can be."
In the context of selling a sales and marketing platform, that of course is the right answer. Salesforce.com's core constituency is the sales team, whose job is selling. They want to know the vendor is 100 percent committed to helping them succeed in hitting their targets.
Perhaps too the vendor is over-compensating for its time in the social enterprise wilderness, when it tried to reach beyond customer-facing roles and activities and perhaps seemed to be neglecting that core constituency.
But it shouldn't throw away the baby with the social enterprise bathwater. We are not an Internet of customers, or of prospects. We are an Internet of people (yes of machines and of organizations too but none of these have any purpose without the people they answer to).
Connecting with our social existence is still a vital part of how companies build relationships with those they interact with. If you want to have more customers and to serve them well, then you must manage those interactions with respect for the person as an individual, not solely as a customer.
Disclosure: Salesforce.com is a diginomica premium partners. Saleforce.com paid most of the author's travel and expenses to attend Dreamforce this week.
Photo credit: @philww