The Secret Sauce for Companies Lies in Distinguishing Themselves Where It Matters
Note: The below is an interview by Natalie Khomyk covering some nuts and bolts of CRM and digital transformation. It was originally published by Data2CRM on their blog. Thanks, Natalie for talking to me. Indeed, Thomas, you have an impressive and outstanding list of achievements, and truly in depth knowledge of CRM, digital innovations, and customer engagement. Could you share with us the 3 most exciting moments in your career? What is your source of inspiration (if it isn’t a secret)? Thank you for the praise Natalie. There surely are no secrets involved. Originally, back in 1995, I actually only stumbled into what became CRM by joining a company that did distributed sales force automation systems and later got acquired by SAP. A lot of what you just called inspiration comes from day-to-day life. I want to help people and organizations. As customers we are surrounded by businesses and organizations on one side and technology on the other. Organizations, especially businesses, communicate with us and try to get and retain our loyalty increasingly using technology. Sometimes with, sometimes with less of a strategy. This often bothers us as customers and ultimately harms the businesses. Who of us does not have countless experiences of bad service, strange and perhaps intrusive advertisements, products and brands that do not live up to promise, … Combining the topics of people, process, strategy and technology to solve problems and to find creative solutions is exciting. Having over 20 years of leadership experience in the software industry, business development and consulting, you are currently CEO at two companies: Epiconic and aheadCRM. And here question splits into...
Putting the Cart in front of the Horse – Chatbots in Support
My recent rant on chatbots having the potential to kill user experience got some nice reactions. It brought me into some interesting discussions on support, mobile, the role, strengths and deficiencies of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and so forth. Most of these discussions dealt with mobile support but also with the question where AI could benefit most. Particularly good one were with Abinash Tripathy, CEO of mobile support platform Helpshift and Srikrishnan Ganesan, founder of Konotor, now hotline.io after being acquired by Freshdesk at the end of 2015. Both companies have a focus on in-app support, a solution category that basically got introduced by Helpshift, after Abinash identified a lack of good options or delivering support directly to and via mobile phones. One of the premises is that a lot of the technically necessary and relevant information can get collected directly and sent to the service back end transparently. They have some big customers, including Microsoft and a raft of gaming companies, including Zynga and Supercell. He, of course, has an opinion on bots in support, which he recently also expressed on Venturebeat. Hotline.io has a customer base that is mainly made of transactional companies, which, too, leads to a high message load but also leads to different approaches, as the user context is often about past transactions. This means that regularly not that much information gets sent together with the support request. Sri, too, has a vision on how to incorporate AIs and bots into support. Hotline.io is offering a browsing style of offering help using a shallow tree with icon-supported categories on top of...
Customer Experience Management and Customer Expectations
In the past weeks I found more and more articles like this one that talk about the importance of continually exceeding customer expectations to be able to deliver a positive customer experience. Only this way, companies get advised, will they achieve customer loyalty and advocacy. I, frankly, find this more than a bit disconcerting. To me this seems to be a very wrong objective to put the sole focus of customer experience management on. Minimally it is a very short sighted objective. Not to be misunderstood. As a customer I like my expectations exceeded, too. Why is the objective wrong, then? Where we are at … For a starter, and that may be true for many other customers, consumers as well as business customers, we have grown to expect very little. This is probably following many disappointing encounters where already the basics go very wrong. I am talking about basics customer experience failures like: Being ‘targeted’ by and served with irrelevant marketing e-mails, or plainly with too many of them Complicated onboarding processes Unavailable, uninterested, or plainly overly busy in-store personnel, or the personnel not having information at their hands Long wait times in the customer service lines, even in chats Inadequate solutions to problems Different experiences when using different channels, like the necessity to repeat information Delivery windows that span a whole day Information about delays not being provided Confirmations that differ from the agreement Privacy policies that almost need a law degree, are very long and that put the customer on the back foot Loyalty programs that clearly rather serve the company than offering value to the...