September 03, 2006: The Other Side of Another Coin

This morning I realized that yesterday's "CRM Society" article was unbalanced in (at least) one significant way: While I concentrated on the ways in which CRM technology was contributing to the objectification of customers, I neglected to give "equal time" to the fact that the technology also objectifies the vendor's work force, particularly those workers using the technology. Service is probably the best case in point. A call center operator who may sincerely want to engage with a customer is so constrained by a script that has to be used that psychological well-being all but demands blocking out event the slightest thought of a personalized interaction. Thus, a customer who is reduced to a feeling of mindless insignificance through an inadequate piece of technology arrives at that frame of mind through the activities of a worker who is also being reduced to a feeling of mindless insignificance through the obligation to use a tool whose inadequacies are blatantly obvious. Needless to say, users of other components of a CRM suite fare no better, nor do their customers much (most?) of the time.

Barbara Garson saw all of this coming almost twenty years ago. The subtitle of her book said it all: How Computers are Transforming the Office of the Future into the Factory of the Past. The factory of the past was operated according to Frederick Taylor's principles of "scientific management." Taylor was definitely not the first to treat workers as objects (as yesterday's reference to the slave trade makes clear); but he was the pioneer of turning that world-view into an approach to management that was as dehumanizing as slavery and then having the outlandish gall to label that approach "scientific!" Garson's thesis is that information technology had become the most powerful enabling instrument for Taylor's approach, and the technology was barely out of its infancy when she wrote her book! One can only wonder what she things about current conditions, particularly where CRM is involved. (For that matter I have to wonder how it is that Wikipedia has decided that she is best known for her scathing political satire, MACBIRD, mentioning her four books about the nature of work almost as an afterthought!)

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!

July 22, 2006: The Classroom of the Future

Things have been quiet here because this past week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop being conducted for the benefit of about half a dozen principals from the California public education system. The purpose of the workshop was basically to let them know what was out there on the "bleeding edge" of new technologies, particularly information technologies, as a way of getting them to offer their own visions of the classroom of the future. Listening to their presentations on the final day, I was struck by a distinction that I first raised in discussing the opposition of lexis and praxis: While most technical presentations I attend are heavily noun-based (usually concentrating on features and their attributes), the grammatical foundations of all the presentations the principals gave were heavily (and refreshingly) rooted in verbs. Given my preoccupation with this need to give "equal time" to both nouns and verbs, I was very glad to see that attention reflected in the way in which these representatives of the educational community expressed themselves.

However, following the presentations, the discussion took a twist that was also very interesting. Whenever the conversation turns to any form of change management in an educational system, whether or not it involves new technology, the question that always arises involves what it will take to make the change happen in a setting that is painfully strapped for resources and always seems to be the victim of prevailing political trends. One suggestion that was raised was that we could not count on change management coming from the government; so it would have to come from the commercial sector, which, after all had the most to gain (or lose) from the quality (or lack thereof) of public education. At this point I realized that one of the principals had invoked the language of scientific management on one of his slides, although, to his benefit, he realized that one had to think beyond questions of "productivity" to questions of "customer satisfaction." Nevertheless, it made me think about the cultural context in which we think of the stakeholders in our educational system as "customers."

This then reminded me of a book that I read with great relish at the beginning of this year: Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education. Callahan recognized that the overall goal of scientific management is efficiency of production and that this goal is, at the very least, at cross-purposes (if not fundamentally opposed) to goals of education, which, to invoke terminology I raised on June 13, have more to do with effectiveness than efficiency. Then I realized that, for all the lip service that has been paid to getting beyond the narrow view of scientific management in the enterprise, whether it involves "total quality," "knowledge management," or rhetoric about "customer relationships," most enterprises are still locked into that goal of efficiency of production, even if, in the Brave New World of services and globalization, they do not always have a clear idea of what it is they actually produce! Consequently, it may be a vain hope to expect that change in the educational establishment will come from a private sector that may be willing to talk about the value of effectiveness "in theory" but, when it comes to practice, it still locked into thinking about efficiency of production.

June 14, 2006: CRM and the End of Civil Society as we Know it?

Yesterday, E-Commerce Times ran a story from the Sacramento Bee by Anita Creamer about the "user-hostile" customer service she received in conjunction with an airline reservation she had made. I decided to provide a talkback comment that built on yesterday's theme of the loss of effectiveness in the name of efficiency. My bottom line was that a call center based on CRM software may be more to blame than the airline industry, since that software is really not designed to support engagement with the customer. Nevertheless, the software may be a symptom of the general decline of civil discourse in society today, not just in the workplace but also in leisure activities.