Category: C2B

  • Putting the R back in CRM

    Every customer is familiar with Customer Relationship Management (aka CRM). They meet it when they get personal offers, when they call customer service, or any time they deal with companies that seem to know who they are. Doing this is a  huge business, passing $40 billion worldwide in 2018, and expected to be twice that…

  • The business problems only customers can solve

    Customer Commons was created because there are many business and market problems that can only be solved from the customers’ side, under the customer’s control, and at scale, with #customertech. In the absence of solutions that customers control, both customers and businesses are forced to use business-side-only solutions that limit customer power to what can…

  • Change of Address (√)

    Way back in 2006 or so, in the first Project VRM meetings, our canonical use case was ‘change of address’; that is to say, we wanted individuals to have the ability to update their address in one place and have that flow to multiple suppliers. That seemed easy enough, so we thought at the time;…

  • How customers help companies comply with the GDPR

    That’s what we’re starting this Thursday (26 April) at GDPR Hack Day at MIT. The GDPR‘s “sunrise day” — when the EU can start laying fines on companies for violations of it — is May 25th. We want to be ready for that: with a cookie of our own baking that will get us past the “gauntlet…

  • New Rules for Privacy Regulations

    The Wall Street Journal has an informative conversation with Lawrence Lessig: Technology Will Create New Models for Privacy Regulation. What underlies a change toward new models are two points: the servers holding vast user databases are increasingly (and very cheaply) breached, and the value of the information in those databases is being transferred to something…

  • The Personal Data Eco-system

    Post from 2009 reposted here to facilitate further discussion. At the VRM workshop, we discussed the need for the concept of the Personal Data Store, what it would do in practice, and what that will ultimately enable. Why we need such things – because individuals have a complex need to manage personal information over a…

  • Omie Update (version 0.2)

    We’re overdue an update on the Omie Project…., so here goes. To re-cap: We at Customer Commons believe there is room/ need for a device that sits firmly on the side of the individual when it comes to their role as a customer or potential customer. That can and will mean many things and iterations…

  • Why CRM needs to turn around

    This guest post is by Charles Oppenheimer, creator of Prizzm and Mightbuy.it CRM (customer relationship management ) are systems that companies use to track their customers.  The hope for most companies that invest in CRM is that their  investment will produce happier customers, that loyal customers will produce more profits. To some extent CRM investment has…

  • Let’s help NBC prep for the 2014 Winter Olympics

    The 2012 Summer Olympics are almost over, but not the challenge of a world where more and more customers are looking to watch coverage — especially of the live kind — on devices other than TVs, and through connections other than cable and satellite. This has proved hard for many cable and satellite TV customers…

  • The Promise of the Personal Cloud

    The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings.  For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds.  For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they…