Update: Here’s the revised version of the graphic.

Our latest infographic, The Evolution of CRM, has caused a lot of debate in the past few weeks. Our infographic series is an attempt to illustrate significant shifts in how companies are using the voice of the customer and changing demographic behaviors in their business strategy. Some are fun while others are bit more serious, as this one was, and we hoped that they would stimulate conversation. This one clearly has.

Our goal was to illustrate how the voice of the customer is increasingly driving sales, service and support, and marketing strategy, with PR as a conduit for customer conversation. Why is PR involved? Because in our experience the business unit that PR rolls up to is funding social media strategies within enterprise companies and a generalized marketing team in SMB markets.

A number of people have pointed out that it isn’t PR initiating the customer conversation and they are right. PR, in a best case, is managing the listening process that captures the customer conversation and enables a response process to kick into gear.

However that isn’t enough of an explanation since we actually agree with our critics. PR isn’t a dominant voice because in many companies, at least the ones that we work with, Customer Relations is actually managing this outreach and while it is often housed in the same business group as PR it is still separate and distinct. They are often the teams that come to us wanting to experiment with customer communities.

So what would we do differently? Two things for sure, the first would have made the PR “bubble” the same size as the other groups so as to not suggest that PR has a larger role. Secondly, we would not have used PR for the label, instead calling this out as the CR function.

Thanks everybody for sharing the infographic – and joining the debate!

Further reading: Scott Wilder did a great breakdown on the challenges of PR departments as social technologies extend deeper into customer relationships.