aheadCRM

The News On November 11, 2021 Freshworks held its annual Freshworks Refresh event. This year, the event had a hybrid format with around 250 customers, partners and analysts participating on site while around 17k people have registered for online participation. There was a social pre-event and an after-event for entertainment and networking purposes.  The event itself was themed around “delight made easy”. Naturally, it had different agendas for customers and partners on one side and analysts on the other side. The morning was dedicated to a 4-hour sequence of keynote sessions for everyone. The event was kicked off with a keynote by Neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author David Eagleman , who spoke about the “Science of Delight”. The closing keynote was delivered by Amy Purdy , who shared her inspiring story of how she used creativity, a positive outlook and a never-give-up attitude to turn her life from nearly dying, finding herself with a double lower leg amputation and failing org

During the past weeks I had a couple of observations and conversations that lead me to thinking that sometimes software vendors underestimate the power that their machine learning based systems could have to improve the lives and experiences of employees and customers.  From various vendors in various lines of business, from process mining and automation via application performance monitoring to vendors of conversational AI and pretty much everything in between I hear something like the following: “Our machine learning based system continuously analyses the process/interactions and detects anomalies. From there on it identifies the patterns and can make suggestions how these anomalies can be avoided or resolved.” Of course, this is paraphrased, but you get the meaning. Here are some examples. A real life scenario that I once encountered is as follows: A global B2B e-commerce solution using synchronous pricing is set up in a template approach. It is using one single ERP system for prici

The News I haven’t written about Nimble in a while. Probably a mistake, because there is always something interesting going on in the Nimble world. Already on October 19 2021, Nimble announced the availability of a workflow functionality that is targeted at enabling teams to replace spreadsheets with a when following through processes. Nimble workflows support Relating workflows to contact records with the objective of getting a complete overview of the relationship, including interaction history, attachments and custom fields Managing business workflows across departments to support more than sales and marketing needs Pre-built workflow templates that are delivered by Nimble to already support a variety of common workflows for short time-to-value Creating own workflows by modifying the delivered templates or creating new ones from scratch Visualization in a Kanban- or spreadsheet style with inline editing for making quick changes Offering the ability to add contacts to workflows f

The news On November 2, 2021, SugarCRM held an analyst summit to share what is going on at the company and to get some candid feedback from the participants. As usual for this type of event, there is quite some information that is still under NDA, so I will be able to cover some of it only in broad strokes rather than the detail that the matters deserve. After a business update by CEO Craig Charlton, the event itself revolved around two themes: ·       customer success stories, including customers describing how they are using SugarCRM to improve their own business by better serving their customers in an interview style format ·       SugarCRM business development, technology, and its future trajectory. Naturally, this part is largely under NDA. There were breakout sessions covering Sugar Sell, Sugar Service, and Sugar Market As usual, and with the notable exception of the customer interviews, the event was slide-driven with giving the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the re