Notes from VRM Day, just ahead of IIW XX (10th year, 20th meeting, April 2015).
Quick round of introductions of people who hail from all parts of the world: Australia and Japan, all over Europe and the United States. Glad to see the long-timers, happy to meet new colleagues. I’m personally thrilled to see Doc and Joyce, Adrian Gropper, Don Marti, Sean Bohan, Markus Sabadello, Drummond Reed, and several others. Interests represented here span the spectrum from real estate to healthcare, from enterprise-side to customer empowerment, and from deep code to user interface stuff.
Nitin, who works at Oracle, is first up with VRM Marketplace Framework and Customer Commons. Some terminology: CE, customer engagement, is nearly the same as VRM but CRM folks don’t realize this, also missing customer privacy. Nitin’s agenda: explainer slides, marketplace participants, technology, maturity, role of Customer Commons. Three concepts: story, players, how they’re enabled.
“By 2020, the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human.” -Gartner
The challenge is how to empower both sides: customers and enterprises. Businesses have CRM for several reasons. Customers need VRM to help assert own terms, make voice heard. There are many matches between the needs of both sides, but the language of each side often keeps them from seeing their common points. “Brands are what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” A company’s brand, while the company thinks they control it, actually lives on the customer side. The public story line, Nitin points out, needs a little work (as discussion in the room illustrated).
The Participants – VRM Marketplace
Five groups: developers, vendors, customers (at the center), market makers (e.g., eBay, PriceLine), policy makers (orgs and govs that set standards for VRM operations, certifications, verifications, etc.). Customers need: privacy, control of data, ability to scale, assert terms, access to support, portability, rules of engagement, autonomy. Developers need a semantic framework, legal framework, open standards, crypto, etc. (slides will be available.)
Technology Stack
The framework helps enterprise interests understand and find the market opportunity in VRM, develop ways to interact… Infrastructure enables capabilities, which enable processes, which empower end-users. End-user feature set needs to include portability, compliance, accessibilty… Infrastructure includes storage, hardware and cloud services, standards, partners.
Maturity Model
VRM Maturity model focus is on features, using Harvey Balls as 1-5 scale + N/A + “not VRM.” Looking for further discussions over next few days on each of these topics to help flesh out the shared understanding, develop guidelines. Katryna suggested that Customer Commons might do evaluations of existing industries–very powerful idea. Who’s doing what right?
We see and understand that there are very clear human needs, but path to providing them are unclear. Pain points are missing; why would anyone—person or company—care?
Lunch break
Customer Features
Discussion notes captured in slides. Discussion about Customer Values. How does this assist me? What’s known about me? Can I trust you, and what can I do about it when I don’t?
Infrastructure -> capabilities -> processes -> customers
Infrastructure capabilities might include identity systems, payment, security & key exchange, naming system, discovery system, federation, non-repudiation, reputation system, Transfer of TOS along data path. These are many pieces of an ecosystem, payment system may or may not be required. This is kind of related to the transport layers.
Capabilities: capturing intent, pseudonymous publishing, identify when a trusted relationship has been established, credential storage, Fair Info Practices.
Pain Points: Customer’s – identity management like multiple email addresses and accounts and apps, passwords, what each vendors know about me? User doesn’t have ability to signal intent, raise voice or speak to enterprise. Privacy policies are needed. Accountability, autonomy. Wearables, surveillance, choices. Using voice as personal agent.
False VRM: a call-center’s “breakage” (getting rid of you) and knowledge of how to escalate. How to enterprise externalities impact communications flow? Lots of work being done in analytics and AI, voice; but how to get to point to map signals from individuals appropriately? When a customer shares opinions about a product, they are providing critical feedback to enterprise re: product improvement. Need customer segments to help define what pain they’re feeling. Unfair negotiation. Companies reveal in their investor packets what “new feature” they have to collect data about their customers. Data brokers: entities that I don’t have a relationship with but has personal info about me. Make assumptions about data collections more transparent.
Working Code
Seastar – futures, promises, continuations: open source framework
Leola Group – tools for large enterprises to connect to customers
Qredo – software application platform, cloud storage, privacy-promising credentials, low value payment
Fuse – connected car platform that respects data and ownership, based on persistent compute objects (PICOS)
Meeco – life management platform designed to help you get things done
Heart – Health Relationship Trust, MITREidConnect with UMA Extensions. Need lightweight personal version based on open standards, ability to run as a personal version. Working group
MyWave – personal assistant Frank, natural language agent for many services. SAAS, API-driven, 3rd party extensions. Cloud, mobile, etc.
Lumenous – currently, SMBs take charge of credit data and share it on their terms. This is a new VRM data sharing platform.
NewGov – has mapped lots of districts, schools, big social networks to make platform as a service. Also see snapvote14 to put hashtags on political maps.
MyClient – life management system in stealth mode.
Emmett – non-profit web pals, intended to protect kids: personal data store, tracking, identity, security; combined solutions.
Project Danube – XDI server, libraries, tools, browser plugins; also FreedomBox software, connected with link contracts. Here are demos and videos.
Open Notice Consent Receipts – consent agreements, common format, storage