Putting that R back in practice - 'MeRM'?

A hypotheses on my customer agents building relationships with organisation agents

So, in part one of this short series I looked at the history of CRM, and the loss of the original premise of improved relationships between individuals and the organisations they engage with.

My belief is that should we carry on building capabilities only on the organisation side then we will get what we deserve - the continued downward trajectory flagged above. A race to the bottom, in which the only winners are the big data brokers and surveillance based intermediaries.

Thankfully, there is another path we can now take.

The dominant assumption that has been in place since 2000 or so has been ‘people don’t have the tools to manage relationships, or the data they generate’; so organisations need to run the relationship management tooling for both sides.

This post un-packs what happens when we challenge that assumption?

And why not challenge it? After all, we all now carry the fabulously sophisticated tools that are our smartphones more or less full time. Even a basic smart phone these days carries more than enough identity management, computing and data management tooling to run a vast array of processes and relationships.

My contention is that if we now project forward what is perfectly feasible from the technical perspective, we find a world that is more balanced, with less friction, and with an improved relationship between the demand and supply sides of our economies.

We move from a world in which ‘protection’ is the norm and very much required, to one in which empowerment is the dominant paradigm. The need for protection does not go away; it’s table stakes (and much easier when more advanced tools are in place). That empowerment is what turns the current ‘race to the bottom’ mode around, and ultimately delivers a win-win-win in which people, organisations and society benefit from the more solid relationships within it.

So how do we get there? Thankfully the Marc Benioff and Salesforce just made that path a lot easier with last week’s announcement of their ‘hard pivot’ introduction of Agentforce. Simply put, Agentforce is about the use of AI powered agents representing organisations in many and varied aspects of customer relationship management. That will be an improvement within the current paradigm; a step towards putting the R back in the sense that the use cases Benioff puts forward are upbat and relationship enhancing. (there will be others that will inevitably be around ‘efficiency’).

But do I, or any other customer/ citizen/ patient/ user/ employee/ student/ actually want to have a relationship with an organisation’s software agent? Probably not I would contend. I’m okay to have it deal with the issue i’m raising; but beyond that task completion there is no relationship as one would normally understand it.

As I see it, the individual just wants those Jobs to be Done with minimum friction and to the optimum outcome possible - across all aspects of life, all things I have, all things I want and the related organisations.

Here’s how we currently protype this in the DataPal environment. ‘Otto’ as in ‘OttoMate’ is our interim name for the action agent suite. As you will see, the primary lens is ‘jobs to be done’, which mainly bubble up from the underlying data.

As regards what types of things might customer agents do? I think there will be hundreds of them over time doing many and varied things. We have mapped out 33 so far; some are built around relationship stages such as those below. The infinite loop (below) is a concept that dates back to the early days of CRM and essentially says that people (and organisations) go through a series of broadly identifiable steps as they go through ‘buying’ processes and then ‘having’ process. That said, increasingly these days people will be ‘subscribing and using’ rather than buying outright.

So what we are see-ing, and showing below, is the concept of software agent supported processes, powered by AI and customer-side data operating in specific roles to perform pre-defined actions within established guardrails. That is all happening ‘customer side’. But each customer side agent/ process has an inverse happening on the organisation side. That clearly leads to ‘i’ll have my agent talk to your agent’. Now that’s a model that can and will scale.

In the case of the DataPal team, we have been designing, implementing, running and fixing large scale CRM and wider customer management systems for many years. So we know what they can do, and cannot do. We know what should work in theory, but often does not because the customer does not have the time, capability or incentive to engage and ‘relate’ as the organisation might wish them to.

We see the customer agents filling that gap, and generating positive outcome seeling relationship management tools on the customer side. My working name for this category of tools is ‘MeRM’ in that they are about building digitally supported relationships between ‘me’ and organisations. That’s a variant on both CRM, and VRM - neither of which work particularly well when looking from the person perspective.

In part three of this mini-series i’ll get into what sorts of things might emerge from that ‘my agent talking to your agent’ scenario.