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 the result. In the opening keynote
Gerry McGovern answered the question what great customer experience is in a
digital world and then how to measure it. His premise is that customers want to
get something done and that it therefore is imperative to help them getting it
done as fast and easy as possible. That begins with page load times, goes on
with simple check-out processes like Amazon’s famous one-click or Uber’s
payment process – hint there is none at the end of the ride. Things are as easy
as saying good-bye to the driver and opening the door. Throughout his keynote
Gerry made the point that it is the relentless pursuit of customer convenience
that drives customer loyalty and retention, and ultimately revenue growth. The
true measure for this is the company’s ability to shave off time that the
customer needs to spend to get her job done.
From here on I concentrated on the ‘Filling
the Pipeline’ track for the day. Michael Fauscette from G2Crowd started the day
delivered his view on the state of digital marketing and Steven Ramirez of
Beyond the Arc gave a practical guide on how to implement and use predictive
analytics to improve marketing.
The most intriguing session of day one that
I attended was sadly also one of the least attended one. Lora Kratchounova
presented Account Based Funnel Management, her extension of Account Based Marketing
that brings a more seamless integration of the marketing- and sales
departments.
Paul Greenberg on day two brought in his
perspective on how to properly deliver good customer engagement. He started off
by identifying the current ‘breed’ of customer, followed up with what this
means for engagement and gave a framework for delivering.
Today’s customer differs from the one of
about 20 years ago – a theme that I brought forward in my own presentation, too
– good to be confirmed by the grandfather of CRM. Today’s customer is digitally
savvy, connected, impatient, and expects information and responses nearly
instantly. Delay is not an option. Customer engagement according to Paul is “the ongoing interaction between the company
and the customer, offered by the company, and chosen by the customer.” The
resulting experience is the “customer’s
perception of the company over time”. I tend to disagree with the over time
part but else this definition seems to nail it. Based on this he suggested a
framework for delivering that bases around the ideas of expectations, knowing
the customer, relationship, resources, value and culture, backed up by two case
studies. The most important insight to me seems to be that it is important to
treat the customer as a partner and a subject
of an experience rather than an object
of a sale and merely a client.
The remainder of the day, with the
exception of my own presentation on helping customers to a good experience
through improved engagement, was more or less about AI. We started off with a
breakfast with the influencers, an informal panel discussion with thought
leaders Denis Pombriant, Ian Jacobson, Josh Greenbaum, Michael Wu, Brent Leary,
Sylvana Buljahn, and myself, moderated by Esteban Kolsky. Reflecting the state
of the worldwide discussion we more or less immediately arrived at the topics
of trusting the machine and ethics. A discussion, under the participation of
all attendees, that surely needed and deserved more time than we had.
Later the day Brent Leary explained how
voice activated conversational interfaces will change the ways of customer
engagement, which I sadly couldn’t follow through due to an appointment. It was
followed by a vendor panel about AI’s role in shaping customer engagement and
Esteban Kolsky delivering his insights into the new reality for automated
interactions in an AI world. The panel was set with representatives of SAP,
Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, and – the only REAL subject matter expert –
Michael Wu. Both, the panel and Esteban agreed that the use of AI/machine
learning for optimization purposes is a little short but that there must be a
significant engagement improvement coming with it. Esteban, in his customary
way of driving the point, taught the audience that AI affects the enterprise in
an O P A way: Optimize, Personalize, Automate.
Day three somewhat returned to the
engagement and experience topics with an interesting presentation by Sylvana
Buljahn on how to reach the next level of customer engagement by becoming both,
a customer- and employee-centric leader. It is certainly worth while listening
to Sylvana.
In the course of the conference I had the
opportunity of speaking to SAP and received a deep dive into Thunderhead, which
for me is also the vendor of the conference. The company has a truly amazing
solution to improve the omni-channel customer journey by linking the customers
touchpoints through their way – from first contact to retiring the purchased
solution. They do this based on the ideas that the journey belongs to the
customer, not to the company, that a customer can be on any given number of
journeys at the same time and that it is of highest importance to integrate
systems. More on both in other posts.
My Take
CRM Evolution in my eyes is still the
vendor independent go-to conference of the year. If the intention is to get
insight into the state of the art of things CRM rather than getting deep into
any vendor, it is the right conference. The networking events are vibrant and
one can discuss a lot of interesting topics, getting hit by many differently
valid points of view.
The conference, however, somewhat suffers
from the artificial distinction between CRM and Customer Service. Customer
Service is an integral part of CRM and they cannot be treated in isolation when
customers shall get a positive experience: Customer Experience is the Customer’s
perception of the Company (over time). This involves the collaboration of all
departments, especially marketing, sales, and service, So, I hope that this
distinction gets removed again.
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