Today’s interview is with Geraldine McBride, CEO of MyWave, a next generation CRM solution that puts the customer in charge of their data and their experience.

Geraldine joins me today to talk about MyWave, the emerging Personal Information Management (PIM)/Customer Managed Relationship (CMR) space and how we are moving from the era of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to the era of CMR (Customer Managed Relationships), where the customer is now in the driving seat.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Five key trends that will define the future of customer service – Interview with David Mattin of trendwatching.com – and is number 121 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate, become more social and deliver better service.

Highlights of my interview with Geraldine:

• Geraldine has set up MyWave as she saw that the ‘last mile of railroad track’ had never been laid: that is what connects enterprise brands and consumers together.
• The technology has not been available to put the consumer in control of managing their relationship with brands and how they signal their needs.
• The impetus for the interview came from an article by Dr Graham Hill on Paul Greenberg’s blog: How Marketing-as-a-Service Builds Trust and Engagement.
• MyWave is a platform that flips the model and now puts the consumer in charge of their data and the relationships that they have with brands.
• It’s a mobile personal social cloud platform that acts like a personal assistant in your pocket all the time.MyWave knows who you, the customer, are, what you like, your life goals and you own this data securely. It also connects you to the brands you want, enabling you to get personalised products and services treating you like the individual you are vs one of the masses.
• If you are in business, MyWave helps to enable the Demand Chain and helps close the gap between the customer and your Brand. Because MyWave directly signalspeoples preferences and intentions it allows for personalisation and enables new and more profitable business models and better experiences for customers.
• MyWave follows similar principles to some of the concepts and work that Doc Searls has been doing with his Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) project.
• Rather than go through all of the details of what MyWave does you can listen to the podcast (obviously) but MyWave have also produced a video that does a great job of explaining what they do too.
• Check out the video below:

• The aim of their platform is to remove friction from the value chain.
• The problem with current CRM systems is that as soon as data goes into a system it is often out of date.
• The problem with big data is that it is not ‘my’ data and is all inferred about me and it lacks context and what I may or may not want to do next.
• This situation is well written up in Doc Searls book: The Intention Economy.
• Banks and loyalty companies, say, could become ’trusted’ parties in helping connect customers to brands and offers that they want and help set up their CMR ecosystems.
• The average lifespan of a company these days is 14 years and that is declining.
• 60% of all customer decisions are being made about companies when customers are not on their website.
• However, that does not mean that CRM is dead or dying and there is a role for CRM behind the firewall.
• If companies shared the data with data they had on their customers, gave it to them and asked them to update it in their own personal cloud that would allows brands to have real and personalised conversations with their customers about they really want and what they care about.
• This would have two benefits: 1. Better and closer customer relationships; and 2, A lower cost to serve because they are not having to maintain that data.
• This all requires that the customer opts in to this type of relationship.
• Companies are still besotted with their own products/services and many are still not thinking about the world through the eyes of their customer.
• “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”-Theodore Levitt.
• A recent report by Ctrl Shift, which mentioned MyWave, valued the amount of value that could be freed up through the use of applications like MyWave could be as much as £16bn in the UK.
• Watch this space for MyWave coming to a market near you soon.

About Geraldine (adapted from her MyWave bio)

Geraldine is CEO and founder of MyWave. New Zealander Geraldine McBride is best known for her high profile career at business software giant SAP, which culminated in 2012 with her role as President of SAP’s North American region, responsible for around one third of the company’s global revenues of $US14 billion.

In 2013, Geraldine moved back to New Zealand to focus on co-founding a global next-generation technology company called MyWave – a first mover business leading a paradigm shift in the way enterprises do business with their customers. In addition to carrying out numerous speaking engagements, she serves as a board director for listed public companies including Sky Television and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare.

You can find out more about MyWave via their website, whilst prospective customers, partners and investors can email Geraldine at geraldine@mywave.me, connect with her on LinkedIn here and do say Hi to them on Twitter @mywaveme.

Photo Credit: Michał Sacharewicz via Compfight cc