When we think “CRM,” we think software like Seibel and Salesforce.com. These packages help corporations manage sales relationships. This traditional CRM operates behind the walls of the company without customer knowledge.

Another kind of CRM that we don’t normally categorize as such is the public discussion forum where companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Quicken enable customers to discuss and get help for their products. Forums also serve as a channel for developers to receive feedback. (Yet another channel for feedback is through user and developer blogs.)

Feedback2.0, of France, seeks to carve out the feedback function by recasting it with a digg-like presentation and voting (and a statistical dashboard and relationship management on the backend). Feedback 20 launched a beta back in June 2006. Now it has two showcase pilot customers using the CRM platform live: the european search engine Exalead and the employment service JobMeeters. A related product positioned for internal use -- within the company or between defined stakeholders -- is Project.

If you’re accustomed to digg, the feature set doesn’t seem that revolutionary. The novelty here is packaging those ideas for the corporate domain. JotSpot lassoed the wiki for corporate use (and got bought by Google recently). The main sales hurdle facing Feedback2.0 is getting corporate customers to sign on to the notion of dealing with their customer feedback in public. Most are happy to answer emails or 800 phone calls. Hanging the laundry in public is a new proposition. Technology vendors have always been on board with their semi-public forums because personal technical support is expensive and the forums leverage community to offload the effort. They are also in competitive markets that make them necessarily receptive to feedback. Also negative feedback doesn’t seem so bad when it’s buried in the sea of genuine support issues.

Will corporations want to carve out feedback and make it a public focal point of potential negative criticism? My guess is that the same usual suspects, unconventional businesses and technology vendors, will be the easiest to sell. The typical big company that carefully grooms its image - and sells slower changing products or services - will be a hard sell.

The other issue is getting companies to sincerely buy into the program. Technology is only half the battle. ERP veterans should know the importance of melding the culture to the software. On the Exalead feedback page, someone named “Administrator” asked about the availability of an API back on August 23rd to silence from the company. Eleven other people voted on the feedback but the company never bothered to respond. That certainly looks bad.

The Project application faces similar issues and offers perhaps more reward. The French employment agency Ethique & Recrutement shows how Project can be used to hold an open dialogue with stakeholders. The result looks like a brainstorming session. I think where people stakeholders haven’t been normally solicited for input, such a system could be welcome. The hardsell is situations where information is politicized and hoarded. That’s the same problem faced by enterprise knowledgement management in general.