aheadCRM

Digital Transformation, much like customer journey mapping, customer engagement, customer experience management, is all the rage at the moment. Everybody - and their dog - talks about it. Including me ... but then I think the term is widely overused. The other ones, too. Many companies strive to 'digitally transform' themselves. Because this is what one does. Everybody does it. But why? How? What does digital transformation deliver? Does it deliver? And what is digital transformation at all? Lets start with the last question. A transformation is a wholesales change of an organisation, e.g. a business. A transformation touches all departments of the business, its whole value chain. Digital, in its broadest sense, refers to anything computer. So, in combination 'digital transformation' means to change a business in order to take more advantage of computers and software, in all departments, along the whole value chain. It can even mean a change...

A brief while ago I had a talk with  Ian Hodge , a very established Australia based consultant. One of the topics we talked about was what customer experience is and how to measure it. This led to following brief conversation here on LinkedIn. Hi Ian, you told me that you are thinking about what customer experience is about. Have a look at below article by Paul Greenberg. The main topic is something else but in the second half there are some very good thoughts. http://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-doubles-down-but-it-cant-stay-in-vegas/ Cheers Thomas Thx Thomas - interesting. I like the "catch 22" problem that delighting a customer runs the risk of increasing expectations etc. An interesting challenge I perceive is the integration of data analysis with creativity in design. This was always an important aspect of "marketing" and now applies more intensively and broadly with designing "customer experiences". Look forward to keeping in touch. Rgds Ian ...

Back in 2012 thought leader Esteban Kolsky went through the efforts of defining a  pure, open cloud architecture  with its three constituting layers: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and samples of their interactions.  A core focus lies on how an open cloud model solves the issues of security, scalability, and integration. Esteban also makes it abundantly clear that it can easily take 10 to 15 years to be widely adopted. First things first: He is right – at least to quite an extent. Personally I am of the opinion that any open cloud model necessarily includes private, and thus hybrid clouds. I say this while I agree that the panacea is the open model. Private and hybrid models are at least challenged in the security aspect and, to a lesser extent, in the integration with the latter usually being mitigated by maintaining a white list of ‘approved’ applications, technologies, vendors, etc. Scalability shouldn’t be a private cloud issue for most companies, given that they wor...

Back in February  I argued that SAP does not exhibit a real strategy in the CRM world  and is leaving on premise customers out in the cold with all the talk focusing on HANA, having Hybris, Cloud for Customer, doing lots of (often good) stuff for on-demand solutions while minimising investments into their powerful, yet somewhat outdated, on premise products. And this without a migration path.  While it was clear that Hybris is to become the leading entity - after all "Customer Engagement and Commerce" was organised around Hybris there have been a number of products and solutions with overlapping scope, mainly in a still emergent state - yes, I am talking about the C4C suite of products.  It was, and likely still is, not really clear  to customers whether there is a better transition than re-implementation for them and how it could work.  Along came Hybris marketing, maybe initially a re-branding of the marketing cloud but nowadays more...

Today I came across a short discussion between two great analysts -  Esteban Kolsky  and Ben Kepes  - who, naturally, take different positions. I mean, where would the value of a discussion be when everybody agrees from the outset ... Whereas Ben maintains that he very much accepts having his behaviour, whereabouts and preferences collected (in the example by Google) and used to receive targeted advertisements that match his interests Esteban counters that it is none of Google's business - and you can freely replace Google with any other brand name - to know this and use this, without your explicit consent. Though I think that targeted marketing can be better than the scatter-gun approach of earlier times I side with Esteban. I do not want to become the "target" of a "marketing attack" in Washington DC when I happen to show up there in May, just because Apple and Google, and name-them-all, know that I like a good coffee. If, and when I want a coffee (a...