“The Collaboration Curve – ‘World of Warcraft’ players improve their performance by leveraging a broad set of discussion forums, wikis, databases, and instructional videos that exist outside the game….The more players participate and interact with World of Warcraft’s knowledge economy, the more valuable its resources become, and the faster players increase their rate of performance improvement.  Said more generally, the more participants in number – and interactions among those participants – you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up….In nearly all of these group efforts, rapid leaps in performance improvement arise as participants get better faster by working with others.  This is called ‘the Network effect’ (see right for picture).  These leaps in performance describe the shape and power of the collaboration curve, a new force in our professional and personal lives”  (Hagel, Brown, Davison, “Introducing the Collaborative Curve,” Harvard Business Review, 2009).

CRM databases are of the highest quality when they are fertilized by a rich and continuous inflow of accurate, complete, and current information from everyone who has anything to do with customer relations.  Massive accumulation and aggregation of information from as wide and diverse a population as possible ensures that the CRM database can generate the patterns and trends that give all players solid understanding, strong analytical material, better decision making choices, and more trustworthy and proper action.  The knowledge rich and fertile CRM database available to and used by all is the reason the organization bought and implemented CRM in the first place.

But how do we enable and encourage this “Collaboration Curve,” this “Network Effect,” where we see “leaps of performance as participants get better faster by working with others”? 

The only way to get ideas, thinking, and learning moving within an organization is a voice-based CRM data entry system.  People have to be enabled to speak their minds, share their insights and experience, ask for information, challenge concepts and facts, ask for help in ‘playing the game’, and otherwise talk and ask and communicate with others in the organization.  A voice-based CRM data entry system is simple and direct, using voice and phone, two technologies that are profoundly simple and intuitive and robust today for all kinds of stationery and mobile applications.  Speech recognition software is too “closed” and limited to be the tool for this kind of collaborative/networking high-volume discussion and communicating.  Only a human transcriptionist-based system, one that joins human capabilities with the finest computer technologies of today is capable of enabling such a Collaborative/Networked environment.

Any company considering a CRM implementation and any company considering how to improve the user adoption or the value of an existing CRM system should take a few minutes to put the words “Voice-Based CRM“ into the web browser to access information that teaches the value of such systems.