Social CRM and the Brain (I want brains! Brains!)

Why does this stuff work? Social CRM, I mean. We can talk about engaging the customer. Paul Greenberg, Bruce Culbert, Jeff Pedowitz, and Jeff Tanner spoke engagingly about engagement at the Social CRM Strategies for Business Conference in Atlanta on May 24th and 25th. If you listen to those guys, you will know how to build and carry out a Social CRM strategy that will work. But that doesn't answer the question: why does it work?

Two seemingly minor ideas from the conference may help to find the answer. First, we are never satisfied. Second, keep the ordinary, ordinary. If you view the brain as an information processing system that constantly makes choices, and chooses among algorithms to make choices, and chooses among algorithms that choose algorithms that make choices, you begin to get the idea. The algorithms work off of one basic idea: hey, that was better than I expected!

Our brains were designed to stay never quite satisfied. If your product or service delights me this time, you did better than I expected, and, at the neural level, I get a hit of dopamine, a little burst of pleasure. If you do the same next time, I may still get that hit. But after a while, if you keep doing the same thing, my brain has revised its algorithms. You give me the same thing, I get no hit, no jolt. Your wonderful product has become ordinary, expected. So if somebody else gives me a hit, or even looks like they might give me one--our brains do speculate--my loyalty is now in question. I will stray from the beaten path. (See G.S. Berns, Satisfaction, New York: Holt, 2005 for more on satisfaction.)

So what used to be extraordinary, and a delight, becomes ordinary. But didn't Paul say keep the ordinary, ordinary? Yes, and our brains want to do that, too. In Paul's honor, let's use a baseball swing as an example. If a major league player steps into the batter's box thinking about the mechanics of his swing, the result is likely to be poor. Over years, probably close to his entire lifetime, he has worked on his swing. It should be automatic, push button.

And when you try to break open the shell of this automated system, seated in the brain, you scatter it all over the place. So the swing is no longer ordinary. The brain responds a fraction more slowly and the ball is in the catcher's mitt, not sailing over the center field fence. It works the same way with golf swings on the PGA Tour or the serve in professional tennis; if they think about the swing while they are playing, the results will be poor.

Our brains want the same thing. The automatic is more efficient; complex as they are, our brains are extraordinarily efficient, unlike our computers. This is why the computer processor is hot and our foreheads are not. We're slow, noisy, and imprecise, but that's what makes us flexible and incredibly efficient.

These two things seems to contradict each other at the brain level. Delight me, satisfy me, but be automatic about it. Of course, we're usually talking about different categories of activity. If I want your customer service phone number, it should be easy for me to find it on your website. That's not the same thing as selling me a project management software program that's inexpensive, but easy to use and just sophisticated enough to meet my needs, or the best restaurant lamb chop in town. Paul said many things much like this at the conference.

But the brain offers way of resolving these conflicts anyway, and the way it resolves them helps answer the basic question. For most mammals, the primary driving forces are sex and food. We're no different on that score. Food serves our immediate need for survival, sex the ultimate need for the survival of the species. But we differ from other mammals on a key point: we can override our drive to meet those needs. We can override them with an idea.

That simple notion helps to explain brand loyalty, suicide bombers, right-wing nut cases, left-wing nut cases, and the effectiveness of MVP programs and badges on social networks. And the effectiveness of Social CRM, assuming you do it right.

Read Montague (Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect, Plume, 2007), put it this way: link an image to status and the image acquires value. In Social CRM, we recognize value in the context of the community: you are an MVP or a major player in this community. We don't necessarily attach money to the title; just status, recognition in the context of the community.

Our brain lets us do the same thing. People who drink Coca Cola actually get a bigger hit of dopamine because of the brand; their brain says, oh, hey, Coca Cola coming our way, break out the dopamine; then the caffeine clogs the vacuum pumps that usually clear away the dopamine. More dopamine, more satisfaction from the product because of the brand.

The brand is an idea, just as belonging to a community is an idea. In the brain, ideas can play the role of both goal and reward for reaching the goal. It helps explain why the Tea Party protester goes along with ideas that, when he is asked about them specifically, make no sense to him. But the idea of belonging to a group that wants to 'get the government off our backs' overrides other considerations. He may be on Social Security and Medicare, but he's ready to protest big government. It's not rational, but we aren't programmed to be rational. Rationality is a tool, one that we apply selectively.

Which brings us back to Social CRM. You want customers who feel about your company the way the protesters feel about the Tea Party: passionate, engaged. That doesn't mean you succeed by simply chanting "SCRM,SCRM." But if you do it right, you become the idea--the idea with the authentic voice, the one that customers listen to, the one they tell their friends about. And if you do it right, you'll fit right in with the workings of the the human brain. You become the addiction.

What key messages come out of this for practical purposes:

1. If you mess up, 'fess up, and fix it. That's part of authenticity. If you want the brains on your side, give them more than they expected. Make them trust you. Don't make them regret doing business with you. (Listen to Paul. Listen to Jeff Tanner.)

2. Start with Social CRM, but don't start too soon. Follow the steps outlined in Jeff Pedowitz's Process Journey--testing, improving, and optimize along the way.

3. Don't lose sight of the Social Customer--meaning, the human being with one of those human brains. You can see what they do and hear what they say, and you can respond. (So, once again, listen to Paul Greenberg.)

So why does this stuff work? Because it fits our brains at the neural level. If you do it right, that is.

Final note: you may find Read Montague's book, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How Make Decisions, an interesting wing man for Paul Greenberg's book, CRM 2.0 at the Speed of Light.