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Feb
27
Here is a brief summary, a taster of what VRM means to me:
Imagine being able to take charge of your information and data, notes and records about past transactions, your purchase history, future plans and ideas, preferences and knowledge about areas of your life. At the moment you are the last person to be able to benefit from all this accessible only via various platforms. Your ‘digital detritus’ is not yours, it is information that others harvest and use for their own purposes. Imagine to be able to do that with the same ease as checking email, posting to a blog, adding a bookmark to del.icio.us, searching Google, commenting on an article, uploading a photo to Flickr, managing your google or ical calendar, leaving a review on Amazon, adding an application on Facebook. All this whilst protecting your privacy to the degree you find comfortable, sharing your activity or data as you wish, not as mandated by the platform providing some functionality in exchange for your data (Facebook, Amazon etc).
Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. At the moment, you are dependent on market research, which is like looking through a keyhole at the rich ‘user-generated’ world. Imagine being able to relate to your customers, consistently and persistently, where they contribute directly to your supply chain where it makes sense - whether it is R&D, product design, distribution and marketing. Interaction with them is modular, intuitive and user-driven freeing much of your resources spent on marketing and transaction cost.
The above is part of the vision of the Project VRM. The name stands for Vendor Relationship Management and it originates from ‘flipping’ CRM - customer relationship management. Project VRM is a community-driven effort to support the creation and building of VRM tools. The project is headquartered at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and headed by Doc Searls, a fellow with the center. The project is building a framework that sets standards and protocols for a category of tools that enable individuals and organizations to relate and transact on more equivalent terms. By minimizing the leverage and control one party has over another in a (typically commercial) relationship, individuals and organizations can instead focus on creating and sharing value. The VRM opportunity is not rooted in us vs. them emotionally-driven arguments but in creating a more efficient and balance relationship between business and their customers, markets and companies, demand and supply.
What’s in it for the individual?
The ability to manage and analyze your data will give you better knowledge about yourself, the kind of knowledge that is the holy grail of most companies’ customer data management. The awareness of your preferences, understanding of your needs will help you to articulate them easier and strengthen your position with vendors.
What’s in it for businesses?
We live in an increasingly decentralized world with more customer choice, yet vendors continue to fiercely collect and control customer data and exploit the opportunities therein. The ultimate goal of VRM is better relationships between customers and vendors, by considering and constructing tools that put the customer in control of their data and ultimately their relationships with other individuals, companies and institutions.
Benefits of ‘letting go’ of customer data:
- Customers share the burden of storing and protecting the data - eases compliance, privacy & security concerns
- Increased access to information about customers - direct benefits to the customer to share more data rather than less.
- New services from previously unavailable access to customer data
For those based in London, who want to learn more and meet people with similar interests there are regular monthly VRM Hub meetings.
Comments
10 Responses to “VRM one-pager”
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London VRM meetings
Hi Adriana,
I work with Gam and have heard a lot of good things about you. Your well-written post above is what has been going through my head for many years now and I believe Xpollen is about to start making this world a reality! I look forward to meeting you in person some day.
All the best,
–Mike
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Thanks for this succinct summary of VRM, Adriana. I now have a place to send people who want the “elevator pitch” for why this work is so exciting to me.
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[…] zunächst sehr bedrohlich. Tatsächlich aber eröffnet VRM neue Chancen. Dazu ein Zitat aus einem empfehlenswerten Blog-Posting von Adriana Lukas: Imagine having your customers share with you what they like, want and think of you. At the moment, […]
Adriana,
I find your blog via Twine.com. I must confess that I had no idea what “VRM” stood for. In fact, it took awhile to read down your article to find the full phrase.
I’m actually a mining engineer in a past life and VRM has a very different meaning there: Vertical Retreat Mining.
When writing, I always follow the golden rule of not making any assumptions about what my audience may or may not know. And so whenever I use an acronym, I always spell it out in full the first time.
Food for thought!
Robert, thank you for your comment. I also know the audience of my blog and the audience I am writing for - and I have been writing about VRM for many months here. The name doesn’t matter, it is the concepts that I am trying to communicate - and a rose by any other name would smell as sweet…
So whether I call it VRM or not and explain the acronym is an issue whose importance is reflected by its place in the post.