How to improve collaboration with Fastcall CTI
Since February or March of Anno Domini 2020, the Corona pandemic is making the headlines and is driving digital transformation, or at least the digitalization of businesses. For sure, this crisis has forced and is continuing to force many a company into enabling its employees to work remotely. This has accelerated an already ongoing fundamental change of the way people work. It has also had an impact on work culture. People can no more just drop by a colleague to ask a question, but need to pick up a phone. Meetings do not happen in the meeting room around the corner anymore but by utilizing technology – virtual meeting rooms – voice and video. Salespeople can no more travel to their customers for face-to-face meetings. Instead they were forced to adopt and master virtual meetings, something they didn’t believe they could possibly do in 2019. It seemed far too alien. Many of us have learned that this change is rather an opportunity than a threat. We needed to, and did adapt, on a business- and a personal level. In doing so, we realized that many things that we thought of “will never work” actually work quite well. This adaption happened and happens in three distinct steps. We first used any available technology, just to keep the lights on. Then we started to put processes around them to become more effective and now we are looking at improving efficiencies. These efficiencies, that we look for, will be achieved by the harmonization and reduction of the number of the used tools and their deep integration into each other and essential business...
How to add more Punk to CX
With our guest Adrian Swinscoe the CRMKonvos team walked the line between Punk and CX, discuss what they have in common. Adrian is the author of Punk CX, a book that he is not ashamed to admit was conceived after having a drink or two. Punk is a reaction to the attempt at perfection and an obsession towards technical skill that are a hallmark of Prog Rock. Prog Rock simply appeared overblown. Punk, in contrast, is not about perfection. Instead it is about doing, getting started, with corners and edges. In this sense, Adrian is a punk of CX, and his book is absolutely readable, with quite some food for thought. It is DiY style, just as punk is. But how does this apply to CX? Find out punk style. Watch this great CRMKonvos episode. Of course, we didn’t just stick to this but also looked into what are similarities and differences between CX in the US and Europe, and so much more, including the future and microphone...
Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany
In the last few days two really interesting acquisitions caught my eye. The obvious one that hardly could be missed, is Slack being acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 bn, which, to put it into perspective, is $2.2 bn more than Salesforce forecasts as its revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. The other interesting acquisition is social network behemoth Facebook plucking up Kustomer, a five-year-old company with origins in customer service. What is interesting about Kustomer is that the company promotes managing customer service from the customer (hence the name) angle and not coming from the ticket as the main entity. Kustomer has since positioned itself more into the CRM area, but still with a focus on service “CRM for customer service” and also implemented an AI to help with routing and the end-to-end handling of (simple) cases by chat bots. Digging a little further, one can find that Snapchat also recently acquired voca.ai, another tech company that specializes in serving natural, human-like conversations. Salesforce acquires Slack I have already covered the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, and so have many other analysts. Thinking a little longer about it, yes, Slack gives Salesforce capabilities that so far only Microsoft can offer, albeit the balance of Salesforce’s productivity suite (acquired with Quip) is no match for Microsoft Office. Using both, MS Teams and Slack, I think that, with all its deficiencies, MS Teams has functional advantages over Slack. And it comes as part of MS 365 (formerly known as MS Office). On the other hand, Slack as part of Salesforce is giving Salesforce customers that are not yet committed...