by twieberneit | Sep 25, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 20, 2021 Oracle announced during an Oracle Live event named “The future of CRM” Oracle Fusion Marketing, which is not the same as Oracle Marketing. According to Rob Tarkoff, EVP and GM Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience, Oracle Fusion Marketing is a layer that automatically executes account based marketing and sales campaigns. The product aims at enabling an end-to-end process from creating a marketing campaign to closing the sale, bridging the divide between marketing and sales. It does so by combining services that are delivered by three products: Unity, Oracle‘s Customer Data PlatformFusion Advertising, Oracle‘s digital advertisement platformFusion Products & References, Oracle‘s recommendation platform under one easy-to-use user interface that is modeled as a guided procedure. Oracle Fusion Marketing simplifies and accelerates the creation and execution of marketing by Building a target audience of known contacts: Marketers can select a product or service that is the focus of the campaign, and then select a list of known contacts from any CRM systemExpanding your audience: From that audience, Fusion Marketing will automatically generate a highly targeted audience profile for use in online advertising to target people who are potentially relevant to your campaign – byt unknown to your contact databaseIdentifying the best customer references: based on the focus of the campaign and specific industry of each customer, Fusion Marketing recommends the best reference stories to promote in the campaignSimplifying campaign configuration: Fusion Marketing provides a single user interface to assign all of the campaign assets required to run your campaign across email, website landing pages, and advertising channelsLaunching the campaign: the marketer can easily set up advertising budget, star and...
by twieberneit | Sep 9, 2021 | Blog, Sponsored |
Customer journeys are as individual as customers. Every customer has different needs, preferences, knowledge, information and another way to resolve their issues. In brief, every customer has a context of their own. As a consequence, customer journeys are often non-linear and move across different channels and devices. In between the online steps there might very well be some offline steps. Customer journeys are usually emerging sequences of interactions or engagements between the customer and the business towards a goal. This goal needs to be the customer’s goal, albeit in the limitations of a business environment. Customer journeys can, in fact, be compared to conversations, which are also not linear. With this thinking, it is only a small step to the thought that customers do manage and orchestrate their journeys individually and for themselves. Consequently, there is no need to design their journeys for them. It can even be counterproductive. A better approach is to provide customers with a channel independent menu of interconnected contact points that helps them to achieve their objective, their way. With the company offering – potentially different – contact points to different customers, both parties’ needs are mostly fulfilled; the business need for efficiency, the customers need to build and follow their own journeys, and both parties’ need for effectiveness. This raises the question about why we should be interested in these interconnected contact points. The answer is quite simple. What is the objective? Companies that are working towards supporting their customers’ needs and desires have an edge over their competitors. They have more success acquiring and retaining customers, even turning them into loyal advocates....
by twieberneit | Sep 1, 2021 | Blog, Sponsored |
Schools, universities and other educational institutions have one challenge in common. They need to constantly communicate with their students and often the parents as well. Obviously, the students and their parents are different generations; and guess what, that means they have different communication styles, prefer different communications channels and are on different timeframes. They also have different information needs. What they have in common is that they do have a smartphone and do not necessarily want to see yet another app on their phones’ home screens, or anywhere at all on their phones. They want and need timely information and an easy and simple way to supply information or, in the case of the students, work results. It is a valid assumption that the members of both stakeholder groups also have and use services like text and one or more messengers. Naturally, they all have email addresses. An increasing number of people also use unified communications software like MS Teams or Slack. And, let us not forget about the personnel on the other side, the teachers, assistants, or members of the school boards. Outbound use cases include attracting new students, ongoing information on offers and events to parents and students alike, requests for information, work assignments to students, notifications about upcoming deadlines for pending work, and many more. On the inbound side we have requests for information, submission of information and work results, again amongst many other use cases. And then, there is collaboration; virtual “classroom” education, townhall meetings, briefings, etc. Given all this, how can an educational institution effectively and efficiently communicate with its two main external stakeholder...
by twieberneit | Aug 3, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
What does it take to make a company sustainably successful? Why is it so important to combine the global and the local view? And what is Zohonomics about? The CRMKonvos team had the chance to discuss with Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho about these topics – and some more. As one of very few global companies, Zoho has made it its strategy to not build locations in tier one centres, but to go to smaller towns. According to Vijay, this is highly beneficial. The company is also doing some other things different. As one example, Zoho does not look at resources as something that is constrained, but as something that can and needs to be created! Another interesting view is the one on core competencies? What are they? And why? Will they stay static? What to do if one does not have a competency? Why does all this matter? Vijay explains this in the CRMKonvo. tl&dr? The CRMKonvo is totally worthwhile following. In case you want a shorter version of some key aspects: Vijay Sudaram explains Zohonomics and how the avoidance of fads in favour of sustainable principles is beneficial....
by twieberneit | Jul 30, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
Following the great discussion about Customer Journey Orchestration that we had with Graham Hill it was obvious that this topic deserves and requires more attention. We had a lot of points and different terms, starting from customer journey management, customer managed journeys, customer journey analytics, customer journey mapping and so on. Provocative statements like “customer journey mapping is utterly useless” popped up and were discussed. Is this tool utterly useless? Well, the discussion shed some light! So, we asked the most active participants of the chat conversation whether they would be up for a panel discussion. Graham Hill, Ray Gerber and Kristy Tupper agreed. So, here we are with a panel discussion about this exciting topic. The three of them have different views that help in furthering our knowledge. The CRMKonvos team is really excited to host this discussion, which is cut in three sections. Interested in the leading questions? Have a look at the next three short videos. Or dive right into the discussion, which is at the end of this post. What is customer journey orchestration? Who benefits most of Customer Journey Orchestration? How do customer journey orchestration and customer journey mapping relate to each other? These good questions and points of view opened up exciting and well received discussions. Enjoy watching...
by twieberneit | Jul 23, 2021 | Analysis, Blog, News |
The News On July 18, 2021, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. announced the acquisition of Five9, Inc. in an all-shares transaction. The transaction values Five9 at around $14.7 billion. According to the press release “the acquisition is expected to help enhance Zoom’s presence with enterprise customers and allow it to accelerate its long-term growth opportunity by adding the $24 billion contact center market.” According to Eric S. Yuan, CEO and founder of Zoom, the company is “continuously looking for ways to enhance our platform, and the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers”. He continues with “enterprises communicate with their customers primarily through the contact center, and we believe this acquisition creates a leading customer engagement platform that will help redefine how companies of all sizes connect with their customers”. Rowan Trollope, CEO of Five9 adds that “businesses spend significant resources annually on their contact centers, but still struggle to deliver a seamless experience for their customers”. Trollope will become a president of Zoom and continue as CEO of Five9. Zoom expects the acquisition of Five9 to be “complementary to the growing popularity of its Zoom Phone offering […] The combination of both firms also offers both companies significant cross-selling opportunities to each other’s respective customer bases”. As especially Rowan Trollope emphasizes upon repeatedly in the acquisition briefing, this acquisition is about accelerating growth by combining the respective assets, software as well as customers. The bigger picture The trend towards call centers in the cloud has been there before and it has been amplified with the Covid pandemic. Connecting...
