aheadCRM

It is the end of 2021 and I do not have anything better in mind than writing a last post for the year. So let’s do it. There have been some terms that were used more than others with some of them actually being quite hyped. Some of them for the right reasons, some of them for the wrong ones. My favorites of these terms include in no particular order: ·       Metaverse ·       NFT (non-fungible token) ·       RPA or robotic process automation ·       Hyper personalization ·       Hyper automation ·       Customer Journey Orchestration ·       Low code / No code ·       Artificial intelligence / machine learning Hyper personalization I already did a short video that expresses my thoughts on hyperpersonalization. You cannot really avoid the term when browsing the web with anything related to CX in mind. Back in the day, what is now called hyper personalization was called one-to-one marketing. This was in the eighties. The problem was that we didn’t have the technology nor the computing p

Amazon is surely an example for a company that has the reputation for good CX. Where does it come from? After all, the site is ugly. There is too much advertisement, too. But then Amazon has outstanding supply chain and logistics. Customers like having alternatives even when they buy habitually. Amazon was good at delivering in 2-days and forgiven for not doing so during the pandemic. So they established their reputation before disruption upset it. Mason also focuses on consumer experience. Many other firms don't manage their supply chains that far forward. We are discussing with Steve LeMay, Associate Professor for Marketing and Logistics at the University of West Florida and Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Logistics at Mississipi State University. Steve has a long history in researching supply chain, supply chain ethics and circular closed-loop supply chains. And he is the person who knows Paul Greenberg longest - apart from Paul's brother ... This makes him the perfect g

It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing them and commenting on them. Thank You! Below is the list of the top ten posts read by you in 2021. #10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis #9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revisit this one for 2022?) #8: CRMKonvo - Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI #7: Outlaw Spirit - Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021 #6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale #5:  Digitisation, Digitalization, Digital Transformation - A Stake in the Ground #4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM? #3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed ... they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one) #2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is #1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time Obviously, I do not know yet in detail wha

The word is that it takes two to Tango. It turns out that sometimes it needs three! I will not spoil the excitement by naming who they are, though. Why do we have silos in enterprise software? How to remove them? Do they even need to be removed? Does throwing more software at a software problem help? Aren't the problems a software problem after all? If more or different software helps, what type of software can or should be used? Or are corporate silos even a Wallstreet problem? Great questions and even better answers by Joshua Greenbaum of Enterprise Applications Consulting in this CRMKonvo. < This one got even bigger than I expected. But then, Josh thinks in big lines. And he has wits, a lot of wits. Apart from a lot of knowledge. He did not disappoint, really! Listen in to our CRMKonvo. I can also highly recommend to read Josh's article Death to all Silos, with Aphorisms . It is very worthwhile, promised.

Customer service is in the middle of a transition. Not only is technology capable of doing far more than it was, say, ten years ago, but also are customers expecting far more. That has a consequence for businesses. Automation and conversational AI are one thing. These technologies already help companies serving their customers more effectively, efficiently, and the customers way.  But this is not enough! The same technologies that allow this, allow it for every company. Which means that one needs to elevate the game.  How this elevation can happen using unstructured data to improve the customers' service experiences by e.g. leveraging unstructured data to avoid escalations is something that Martin Schneider of SupportLogic has good and very interesting stories to tell about. He argues that systems must become more intelligent and that purpose built AI is the way ahead, of course fuelled by the demands and learnings of Pandemic times. In a nutshell he says: For years, people wer not

The year 2021 comes to an end. More than three years have gone by since the last look at the Clash of Titans, an analysis of how the then big 4.5: Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe – along with some other players, are shaping the greater CRM and CX arena. A lot has changed since Thomas Wieberneit published his 2018 series that consisted of 4 articles: ·               Platform Play ·               Microsoft and SAP weigh in ·               The War Cry: Oracle and Salesforce ·               The IaaS Platform Providers It is obvious that the commoditization of the business application continues, and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has even increased since 2018. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. Two obvious reasons for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences needs a consistent technical platform, or we

These days every significant software vendor and some others, too, is positioning itself as a CX- and/or a platform player. By now, it is well known, what it means to be a platform player , and this is also not the main topic of this post. Just as much: In order to be a significant CX player, one quite simply needs to be a platform player.  Also, regardless of whether one has a platform or not, if everyone is a CX and a platform player, then obviously this is nothing that differentiates one vendor from the other anymore. Customers meanwhile nearly expect a set of solutions by one vendor being built upon one platform – or at least to appear like they are built on one platform. This basically means that “platform” as a thing to emphasize on has reached its zenith. And then, there is an additional problem associated with the platform game. A platform market is a kind of a winner takes it all market. Following the analysis and argumentation of Ray Wang in his new book Everybody Wants to R