aheadCRM

Note:  The below is an interview by  Natalie Khomyk  covering some nuts and bolts of CRM and digital transformation. It was  originally published  by  Data2CRM  on their blog. Thanks, Natalie for talking to me. Indeed, Thomas, you have an impressive and outstanding list of achievements, and truly in depth knowledge of CRM, digital innovations, and customer engagement. Could you share with us the 3 most exciting moments in your career? What is your source of inspiration (if it isn’t a secret)? Thank you for the praise Natalie. There surely are no secrets involved. Originally, back in 1995, I actually only stumbled into what became CRM by joining a company that did distributed sales force automation systems and later got acquired by SAP. A lot of what you just called inspiration comes from day-to-day life. I want to help people and organizations. As customers we are surrounded by businesses and organizations on one side and technology on ...

  My recent rant on chatbots having the potential to kill user experience got some nice reactions. It brought me into some interesting discussions on support, mobile, the role, strengths and deficiencies of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and so forth. Most of these discussions dealt with mobile support but also with the question where AI could benefit most. Particularly good one were with Abinash Tripathy , CEO of mobile support platform Helpshift and Srikrishnan Ganesan , founder of Konotor, now hotline.io after being acquired by Freshdesk at the end of 2015. Both companies have a focus on in-app support, a solution category that basically got introduced by Helpshift, after Abinash identified a lack of good options or delivering support directly to and via mobile phones. One of the premises is that a lot of the technically necessary and relevant information can get collected directly and sent to the service back end transparently. They have s...

In the past weeks I found more and more articles like this one that talk about the importance of continually exceeding customer expectations to be able to deliver a positive customer experience. Only this way, companies get advised, will they achieve customer loyalty and advocacy. I, frankly, find this more than a bit disconcerting. To me this seems to be a very wrong objective to put the sole focus of customer experience management on. Minimally it is a very short sighted objective. Not to be misunderstood. As a customer I like my expectations exceeded, too. Why is the objective wrong, then? Where we are at … For a starter, and that may be true for many other customers, consumers as well as business customers, we have grown to expect very little. This is probably following many disappointing encounters where already the basics go very wrong. I am talking about basics customer experience failures like: Being ‘targeted’ by and served with irrelevant marketing e-mails...