WRITTEN ON November 3rd, 2008 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, Transformational Government, What do we want?
Hurrah! Doc Searls is in town, spreading the love and wisdom about VRM. He offers the key insight that
“A free customer is more valuable than a captive one”
And he muses, in all innocence, whether this is a helpful insight for government.
Well, not half. It’s the mother of all Wibbies. It’s far easier to keep society safe and secure if everyone is willing to help. Populations’ willingness to keep themselves healthy is what public health is mostly about. We cant be bullied and coerced into playing a constructive role in society; we have to want it.
But so far in the online e-commerce/e-government world one side is trying to capture and enslave the other side. DirectGov is built on absurd talk of creating a “sticky site” to capture eyeballs.
We need to be independent of organsations, Doc says, yet better able to engage with them.
Doc reckons we’re two years into a five-year change here. The contempory Internet has already transformed conversations, and it’s in the process of transforming relationships with social networking. Very shortly it will transform transactions.
CRM promised much but has been a big disappointment. VRM (a term coined by Mark Lizar) holds a lot of promise and is now spoken of as “inevitable”. But to get Transformational Government 2 right we need to get our heads around GRM – managing our relationships with government. What will that look like, and how will it work?
This is about identity, respect, choice, engagement. It’s about sustainable security, DIY personal engagement. It’s an incredibly cost-effective notion, which creates new categories of value.
I’ll second your not half (does that make it not whole..?), but for a rather different reason.
A free customer is always on the brink of going somewhere else, so always needs good reasons to stay. For government and service providers (and lots of others too) to be forced to think about what would make their customers want to stay, or want to transact business in one way rather than another, is to be forced into thinking not just about different things, but in a very different way from the traditional man-in-Whitehall-knows-best mode.
CRM is a bit like the old saw about socialism – a good idea, just that it’s never been tried yet. I am not sure that randomly changing the first letter changes that. It’s about ten years since the Cluetrain Manifesto declared that markets are conversations, and the only necessary way of adapting that to fit this context is to say that everything is a conversation. So perhaps we should change all versions of xRM simply to conversation management as a way of underlining how effective communication and engagement happen.