aheadCRM

My first reaction? Wow, that will stir up the industry, well, at least Microsoft …  Second one? Who will follow? Jujhar Singh! Jujhar will step into a pair of pretty big shoes (no pun intended), but then he was coached by Bob for more than a decade and held a number of increasingly important positions at Siebel, SAP, MS. It is probably about time to step out of Bobs shadow and take centre stage. Congratulations to him! But what lies beyond is really interesting. Bob is a CRM guy – or rather one of THE CRM guys. He  contributed significantly to shaping what CRM is now and has a reputation for getting organisations that have a problem on track – or to lay those tracks. There is no meaningful CRM, no CEM (Customer Engagement Management), neither CXM (Customer Experience Management) without data, lots of data, coming from various different sources covering every customer interaction, customer experience at every touch point. Think mobile, internet of things, sensor network, etc., etc

CxM and PoS, these are two protagonists of an ever continuing story. It comes in many different flavours but it essentially is about change vs. stability. On one hand we have the PoS, the contender, a long time best hated friend of the retailer, an infrastructure that they cannot do without. They can’t! Simple as. The PoS is the infrastructure that all in-store sales are executed on, the infrastructure that is crucial to gain and keep an overview about in-store (and overall) inventory, an infrastructure that also tries hard to gain additional knowledge about the customer. But then the core entities that the PoS works with is not the customer, but are the product and the sales, the transaction. Without the transaction the retailer is dead. On the other hand we have the new kids on the block: CxM, Customer Experience Management, CXM, and Customer Engagement Management, CEM. New, although they, too, are around for quite some while already. Going on I will mainly stick to CxM

CRM Evolution 2015 was a very vibrant conference with lots of discussion that included a number of high profile industry influencers. For me as a first time attendee it was amazing how approachable many of these people are. But then this might come with the territory. To understand these takeaways it is important to know that my reason for attending was getting into closer touch with what is going on in the CRM world outside SAP - and New Zealand. So, these are purely notes and thoughts that result from sessions, discussions with influencers, speakers and other conference attendees, and not learnings from vendor briefings. Also, this event was split into three separate conferences: CRM Evolution Customer Service Experience Speechtek I nearly exclusively concentrated on CRMEvolution and one session from the Customer Service Experience. First things first: Was it worthwhile coming all the way from NZ? This is very clearly a yes. Paul Greenberg and the team did an amazing j