Graham's Blog

Organisations should embrace VRM with open arms

To attract and retain customers in the future organisations will need to facilitate a 2way relationship with their customers. One in which the customer has access to information held about them so that they are confident that it is accurate and appropriate. With such trust the customer can provide their preferred suppliers with access to their data (e.g. contact details) so that, without any effort by the customer, all changes and updates are accessible - write once, use many.
VRM allows individuals to invite vendors to respond to their stated 'wants' rather than trying to predict from past buying patterns. Customers are increasingly frustrated by irrelevant spam and junk mail which uses this shotgun approach. VRM allows companies to move from the attention economy to the intention economy.
We were advocating this back in 2006 - see the article here.

VRM in the enterprise

VRM, Vendor Relationship Management, is delivering significant financial benefits now in the B2B space.

"For example, one large bank in Northern California saw savings of $350K in less than six months by using the ITM VRM solution to implement an IT vendor management program. Much of this savings was accomplished because they gained solid information needed to rationalize and consolidate vendors and contracts. Within the first two months, the bank finally had an integrated system for easily seeing all contract expiration schedules and were able to proactively evaluate each contract well ahead of due dates in order to maximize contract renewal decisions." See article here.

It is inevitable that this large bank has long been an entry on multiple CRM databases held by their IT Vendors. Think of the potential savings and other benefits for individuals when we flip B2C to C2B and put such VRM tools in the hands of the consumer.