Go Digital or Die – CRM Evolution 2016

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 27, 2016 | Blog |

CRM Evolution 2016 – Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The CRM Evolution 2016 conference, organised by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the conference appeared to be bigger than the years before it all seemed more intimate, but not crowded, which probably can get attributed to a good choice of venue. The event being vendor independent is only the icing on the cake. In my eyes this is the one CRM related conference that one must not miss. In contrast to last year I attended CRM Evolution only, which in retrospective was a mistake. But let’s have a look at the conference themes. There is no CRM without Customer Engagement and good Customer Experiences In the opening key note Dennis Snow told us about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three...

Bots can kill Customer Experience

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 23, 2016 | Blog |

Bots are all the rage currently. By the looks of it they are at the peak of the hype cycle. We will see their deep fall into the trough of disillusionment soon. After all the well-known examples based on the Facebook messenger are somewhat underwhelming, to formulate it carefully. There is not much artificial intelligence visible – nor needed – to provide services like these. They also come with a poor user interface. And this combination of hyped examples, mixing up chatbots and AI, has the potential to kill customer experience. They certainly kill the user experience. Unless, this is, that these machines already reached a level of intelligence that they are magic to my simple mind… Which I doubt. To be sure, there are AIs around that amaze us: IBM’s Watson, Apples Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Now, …   even Microsoft’s infamous Tay which got a pretty bad reputation in no time, to name but a few. Recently a whole class of graduate students didn’t realize that their teaching assistant Jill Watson, an AI based upon IBMs Watson, was actually an AI and not a person. And I sincerely believe that in not so far future we will see AI in many places that is indistinguishable from a human. As Salesforce’s Marc Benioff recently said we will have AI do things that we cannot even imagine right now. The potential is virtually endless (pun intended). But what we see right now being built standalone or embedded into messaging apps has nothing to do with AI and it often has a poor user interface. This needs to get fixed, or...

Value, Relevance, Convenience – The Future of Retail

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 16, 2016 | Blog |

the Future of Retail is, well, interesting. Retailers today face an increasingly fierce competition. This competition is both, between brick-and-mortar retailers as well as between online-retailers and brick-and-mortar. Amazon, for example, is eating an increasing share of department stores’ lunch. It already now is the second largest apparel retailer in the US. According to Morgan Stanley research, quoted in a recent business insider article: “Internet retailers (led by Amazon) have added $27.8 billion to their apparel revenue since 2005, while dept stores have lost $29.6 billion,” … “This share loss appears at risk of accelerating given 1) Amazon’s bigger push into fashion, and 2) consumer willingness/acceptance to shop fashion through Amazon.” Additionally, customers are increasingly demanding, which is fuelled by being better informed and by the willingness to leverage this information. As a result of both of these trends retailers are losing relevance. One of the main challenges facing retailers (and brands, btw) is that big scale online retailers can very strongly compete on price. They also have a strong edge in data, which fuels their online experience. But here is also the chief weakness of online retailers like Amazon: They are online retailers, which confines the experience that they can offer to, well, online. Consumers used and use stores for showrooming to get a physical experience of the product and/or service. This is a clear indication that online is not everything! Which is one of the reasons why Amazon experiments with Internet of Things devices like their Dash button, which they recently enhanced with an SDK; it does also explain why Amazon is experimenting with kiosks and retail stores....

Measure Customer Experience – But Don’t Over-Engineer

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 6, 2016 | Blog |

You have determined for your SME business that you want to improve your customers’ experience.But you do not know how to measure it. And you want tangible results fast. And you want to contain the risk.  After all there is nothing more risky than a big venture that promises results only in the far away future… You have heard about this Internet of Things thing, beacons, customer journeys, sentiment analysis, and predictive, even intent driven analysis. But this all seems a bit big and daunting. You ask yourself: How to go ahead? And how do I measure success? Many companies, especially bigger ones, already have a voice of the customer (VoC) program, which is a good start. Not to be gotten wrong, there are all sorts of challenges with VoC programs. Getting insufficient replies, data that doesn’t really help, data that covers only one single channel, etc. etc. But then a VoC program is a very good start, if kept simple, and also consistently available across channels. It again is about thinking big while acting small. Key is to Ask the questions immediately in context with the activity you refer to, e.g. on exiting the store or the web site Keep the number of questions for your customers very low and to make answering them extremely easy. Correlate the customer replies with information that you get from your employees. Lastly: Act on the results. Nothing is worse than asking customers and employees for feedback and then doing nothing with it. Keeping the numbers very low while retaining the ability to get meaningful data is a stretch. There should not be more than 4, in...

Digital Transformation. Heck, YES! But why?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 27, 2016 | Blog |

Digital Transformation, much like customer journey mapping, customer engagement, customer experience management, is all the rage at the moment. Everybody – and their dog – talks about it. Including me … but then I think the term is widely overused. The other ones, too. Many companies strive to ‘digitally transform’ themselves. Because this is what one does. Everybody does it. But why? How? What does digital transformation deliver? Does it deliver? And what is digital transformation at all? Lets start with the last question. A transformation is a wholesales change of an organisation, e.g. a business. A transformation touches all departments of the business, its whole value chain. Digital, in its broadest sense, refers to anything computer. So, in combination ‘digital transformation’ means to change a business in order to take more advantage of computers and software, in all departments, along the whole value chain. It can even mean a change of the whole business model. Quite a tall order. Nothing that one just does just for the sake of it, one would think. This is an endeavour that an established business embarks on only if it faces the risk of failing, and one that usually takes quite some time. What are possible triggers? I see three, two of them relate to the market place, one to technology. Changing customer demands New or changed competition Technological advances OK, now we are talking. These days many businesses realise that all three of these triggers are set. Technology surely leapt forward in the past few years. E.g. the adaptation of mobiles on the consumer side is unprecedented. This got followed by drastically, and ever faster, changing...

Customer Experience and Design

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 18, 2016 | Blog |

A brief while ago I had a talk with Ian Hodge, a very established Australia based consultant. One of the topics we talked about was what customer experience is and how to measure it. This led to following brief conversation on LinkedIn. Hi Ian, you told me that you are thinking about what customer experience is about. Have a look at below article by Paul Greenberg. The main topic is something else but in the second half there are some very good thoughts. http://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-doubles-down-but-it-cant-stay-in-vegas/ Cheers Thomas Thx Thomas – interesting. I like the “catch 22” problem that delighting a customer runs the risk of increasing expectations etc. An interesting challenge I perceive is the integration of data analysis with creativity in design. This was always an important aspect of “marketing” and now applies more intensively and broadly with designing “customer experiences”. Look forward to keeping in touch. Rgds Ian yes, this challenge is what I tried to voice. It is not always a technology approach. But then once could have the idea of using marketing approaches to it – at least in a B2C world something like the following could work in the digital world: Try different approaches (designs) and roll them out to different target groups. Let it run parallel to current state while gathering data. This can be usages, usage patterns, abandoned carts, changes to cross-, upselling behaviour, recommendations, endorsements, etc. Apparently this needs to be planned. bugger – hitting enter to send should be forbidden 😉 Combine this with sentiment analysis and all of the sudden you have an approach that can cover both: The consumable experience...