More notes from attending VRM+CRM 2010.. I also wrote about VRM Business Models and VRM Language.

Day 1

• Most VRM related development activity seems to be around London, Boston, Utah and California at the moment.. and Cape Town.
• There are a number of markets which are ready for VRM, they all have silos for customer data now: hospitality, medical, property.. etc. anything with a contact centre.

• “A free customer is more valuable than a captive one.”

• There seems to be agreement that we need human and machine readable contracts/terms/licenses for VRM. We heard about R-button RDFa terms, link contracts and personal information sharing licenses.. think Creative Commons license builder.
• Digital contracts and terms of use seem broken. Who reads them anyway? They should be short, simple and machine readable.

• “There are about 60 million people in the UK, but about 24 billion customer records.”

• A good place for VRM adoption could be change events: birth of a child, change of address, change of a surname, crime report.
• There seems to be a few people who are focusing on VRM standards. Standards are good and they should evolve in parallel with VRM tools but I suspect it’s a bad idea to wait for the standards and letting the standards shape the development.

• “We are the people we have been waiting for.”

• Customer: “Do you want to be a part of my vendor network?” ..then support VRM.

• VRM creates a shift from vendor driven relationships to a balance between vendor and customer driven relationships. There was some concern that people don’t care enough to balance their cheque books.. why would they manage their vendor relationships?
• A few people commented that they don’t really want “relationships” for once-off transactions. They don’t want a “relationship” with the supermarket. I want relationships with every vendor (assuming it’s easy to set up).. that’s the idea with VRM software, it allows you to have N relationships. It scales. What you share with each vendor is up to you. I would like a way to remember where I got my last pair of running shoes.. or even every pair of running shoes I’ve ever had.
• Relationship quality vs efficiency: There was a graph about how in the old days a vendor had very few relationships but they knew everything about the customer (close relationship).. think shoe maker in a small village. After the industrial revolution we needed to scale the number of relationships a business could have (enter CRM).. but the quality dipped. VRM needs to up the quality but keep the scale.
  

  A quick Inkscape hack

• Interesting how the same ideas and examples pop up. Some of the examples we have imagined were mentioned.
• A few people suggested it’s a good idea to talk to governments about VRM.
• Social vs. Personal: VRM is more personal than social.
• We have to manage complexity. VRM technologies can be complex, but the end user experience needs to be simple and intuitive.

Day 2

• VRM is a methodology, not a specific solution/technology.

• “VRM puts the R in CRM.”

• “Too many silos.”

• Doc ended the conference saying something like.. this movement is inevitable, customers will get more power, how it happens we still have to see.

I think people are dreaming the same dream now. I think most people have agreed on how the architecture must look. There are a number of VRM platforms now (..at least 5). For a start-up like TrustFabric it means that our focus should probably shift from designing cool tech to solving the adoption challenge and building useful applications… read: the idea fits, now execution is key.

If you attended VRM+CRM 2010, or you are interested in VRM, please get in touch so we can send you a TrustFabric invite and hear your comments and feedback.