Intel Interview with Chris Thomas: The Future of CRM and the Inflections Points that Will Drive New Innovation

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Intel Corporation

The nature of mobility is going to force a revolution in innovation ... Why I call it an inflection point is because, not only is this a wonderful idea and opportunity; it compels an industry to get moving.

Barry Jacobs: I want to start off asking you about some key learning from customer relationship implementations — you’ve been very visible advocating that area, what does that mean exactly?

Chris Thomas: Intel has been involved with building out our customer facing systems, whether that's ordering online, providing information about orders, or information about our products. There are a couple of interesting showstoppers when trying to scale an online CRM environment. I’ve actually got this down to two major statements:

First, people are not reliable applications. Most of CRM applications are targeted at human beings using browsers,  or logging on to look at something, or voice portals ... If you think about it, people go home, people get sick, people forget, people get frustrated and turn off their machines or don't log back in. Human beings, as an application, are guaranteed to be less reliable than application-to-application relationships.

Secondly, what we learned from e-business implementation is: trusted relationships don't log-on. That's a very important factor in understanding how to design the next generation of CRM solutions. Trusted relationships don't log-on doesn't mean they aren't connected. It means delivering information to systems and applications, not requiring customers to log in and ask for it. A customer relationship is not about customers asking vendors what's going on — it's about vendors servicing customers. When we opened up our portal, our customers asked, ‘Why does my company have to log onto your company to understand what's going on? Why can't my system and my people be notified and have the information integrated into our systems?’ Responding to these questions resulted in a number of activities at Intel. One is deploying RosettaNet solutions. We are creating business process relationships both on the supply chain and on customer chain side of things. Automating the business relationships and processes in XML standard formats instead of requiring customers to log-on from their browsers. We’re also understanding how notification, the ability to deliver information to a customer in a ‘just in time’ fashion, is making for a faster and more satisfied customer relationship.

BJ: Where is CRM headed?

CT: The CRM industry has been focused on understanding the customer in order to optimize our businesses. Instead of predicting what's going on with the customer and trying to learn from their ordering behaviors, we are actually going to a tethered customer relationship.

Let me give you an example. When ordering groceries through a browser today, many vendors will send an email confirmation and thank you. Front running solutions are also sending an order form in that email, as opposed to requiring the customer to log-on again to the store's retail portal. This has some very interesting connotations. Whether it's email or a Web service, they’ve eliminated the disintermediation threat of competitive grocery stores. I’m not going online and seeing banner ads being re-routed. The grocery store gets a direct information flow in a trusted relationship. Interestingly, the customer gets seamlessly moved to a mobile model, and gets improved service. I do my email often, but I am not logging on. I probably browse about 1 percent to 3 percent of the time, personally. Why? I am not connected. I’m in cars, I’m on planes, I am moving around, I am not physically connected. So that mobile mentality means that this wonderful world of email or eventually Web services will allow us to be mobile. It allows me to work offline, it allows me to work the way I want to work. And I can order through my handheld device, laptop, or PC. I can order my groceries without actually disrupting my work. And guess what? I’ll happily never log in again. Just respond to an email or a form. Also, I could have started the relationship by physically purchasing at the retail store without ever logging in or browsing the portal. Now I have a repeatable reliable relationship between my grocer and me. And they created a mobility solution to boot. They used the existing standards and the infrastructure of off the shelf products to do it in what is called an asynchronous environment. The wonders of Web services moving forward is that as we get into the loosely coupled asynchronous environment required to make mobility work in a reliable fashion, we actually have the opportunity to change the nature of our applications to work better for our customers and ourselves, and keep ourselves in that trusted relationship space.

BJ: What inflection points will drive new innovation?

CT: I see one specific inflection point and that is the mobility inflection point.

Why? How do you get developers interested in making changes or building new solutions? There are a lot of software developers and a lot of independent software vendors but they have a limited amount of labor that is going to be applied to building new applications.

The mobility inflection point is the change going on around us as more users purchase mobile computer devices like laptops, hand-held devices, and cell phones and expect ubiquitous and seamless communications capabilities. Customers expecting work mobilely are starting to stress or break just about every connection-oriented application we’ve built in the computing environment today. Imagine someone going from Starbucks to Barnes & Noble switching 802.11 hot spots as they travel through the mall. What happens to their connection? They are going through different routers, different networks, and start getting error messages like ‘server not found.’ All of a sudden things are breaking. The nature of mobility is going to force a revolution in innovation to create reliable mobile capabilities. That is going to create a need for developers to change applications, which also means that there is an opportunity for businesses and software vendors to improve or enhance their applications. Why I call it an inflection point is because, not only is this is a wonderful idea and opportunity; it compels an industry to get moving. Our call centers, whether they are the corporate support center or the customer support center, are going to get overloaded because the electronic interfaces we’ve built today don't work well for mobile users. The answer is most likely not to just try to band-aid the existing solutions to work better. The change turns into: I need an asynchronous message-passing architecture that allows me to have reliability and to work mobilely, work offline, continue working when there is not a connection, re-sync without actually having to reboot, and, voila, there's an infrastructure for these new types of applications.

So, that inflection point is incredibly important to the nature of CRM. The move to support the mobile customer is an opportunity. Opportunity to improve the capabilities and relationships that we are deriving from our software today. Web services, I believe are part of the mobile inflection point in the sense that Web services are, by design, asynchronous and loosely coupled. Meaning, they’re working and expecting on both sides of the equation. Asyn-chronous messaging implementations work as connections are going offline and back online. Even a request/response capability, can, if done right, be automated to find the right new route. And their loosely coupled nature is saying that they don't have to care about what type of device the customer is using. The vendor providing information isn't developing the application for the user receiving it. So we get more innovation with this loosely coupled model. The developer on the client can create wonderful new applications and the vendor that is providing the service interface to their customer is providing a proactive notification.

So I think I’ll answer: the inflection point is mobility with the catalyst of moving to Web services in this loosely coupled asynchronous environment to make it all possible, reliable, and seamless.