aheadCRM

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first – after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many

Just on may way back from CRM evolution 2017 it is time for a little recap. The conference, once more chaired by CRM Grandmaster Paul Greenberg, was again co-located with sister conferences Customer Service Experience and Speechtek. Why there is a separate – and smaller – conference for Customer Services co-located with a CRM conference is beyond me, as Customer Service is an integral part of CRM. But be it as it is. CRM Evolution attracted around 500 professionals, being second to Speechtek. The main topics this year seemed to be Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, and AI, nothing of this coming as a surprise. The size ratio of the conferences and the topics were also confirmed by the exhibitors in the Customer Solutions Expo. We saw an abundance of little booths with AI- and bot-vendors. The mainstays of CRM had fairly small presences, notably SugarCRM, which had a big presence last year. Both keynotes dealt with delivering to maximize customer experience and to measure

I just had the pleasure of getting a few family days in the Club Med Bali resort and, being me, working and writing about customer engagement and customer experience, somehow cannot not observe. On top of this, Chef de Village Jeremie Gonzalez and his 280-strong team certainly deliver something that is worth writing about. Jeremy also agreed to having a chat with me about his resort and customer experience. So here we go. The Impressions We were traveling with 9 persons, 2 families, 4 adults, 5 kids from 7 to 11, coming from New Zealand, with another friend arriving from Germany. Right from the beginning on Denpasar airport we have been in good hands. As one can imagine, in a holiday destination like this there are plenty of hotels and resorts receiving customers. Club Med was very easily spotted and their man took us under his wings with a warm greeting, guiding us to the van that was waiting for us to bring us to the 20 minutes away resort. Where we received another warm