thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz

Personalisation, Privacy, and Value – is Marketing out of Control?

by | Apr 5, 2016 | Blog |

Today I came across a short discussion on personalisation, privacy, and their value between two great analysts – Esteban Kolsky and Ben Kepes – who, naturally, take different positions. I mean, where would the value of a discussion be when everybody agrees from the outset … Whereas Ben maintains that he very much accepts having his behaviour, whereabouts and preferences collected (in the example by Google) and used to receive targeted advertisements that match his interests Esteban counters that it is none of Google’s business – and you can freely replace Google with any other brand name – to know this and use this, without your explicit consent. Though I think that targeted marketing can be better than the scatter-gun approach of earlier times I side with Esteban. I do not want to become the “target” of a “marketing attack” in Washington DC when I happen to show up there in May, just because Apple and Google, and name-them-all, know that I like a good coffee. If, and when I want a coffee (and it is rather a question of when than one of if), I am perfectly able to find the next coffee shop that I deem fitting. The same holds true for sports gear, appliances, watches, you name it. I want to be able to opt in, probably only for a limited time, and opt out again eventually, knowing that my data doesn’t get sold off and that it gets deleted after me opting out. Yeah, I am a little dreamer … but so far the value of highly targeted advertising is more on the business side than...

Customer Experience, Customer Engagement and CRM – Think Big, Act Small

by | Jan 15, 2016 | Blog |

This is the second post in my mini series about continuously improving the customer experience and customer engagement in the triangle of Customer Experience Management (CEX), Customer Engagement Management (CEM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Well, actually the third, if you include my guest post There’s no customer experience without customer engagement on friend Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet blog. A while ago, in my post CxM and PoS – A Tale of two Cities I have asked you to stay tuned in case you were interested in learning about a way of implementing the strategy of thinking big while acting small in order to be able to keep the big goal – adding value for your customers offering the best possible experiences –  at the center of actions. All this while acknowledging that priorities are shifting, budgets are scarce, and different customers prefer to engage via different sequences of touch points. Sounds like a nasty and complicated challenge. And it is! But if you break it down into smaller pieces it becomes manageable. It requires a kind of SCRUM-like project management approach, on corporate level. The objective is to have a strategy and delivery infrastructure that bases on optimally delivering to customer needs covers every touch point with the customer while remembering that not every customer journey is created equal is flexible enough to quickly adjust to changing customer demands embraces the strengths and weaknesses of the existing systems. Not every touch point needs all available information It all starts with the customer, with customer engagement, customer experience and, yeah, management of the relationship with the customer, in a mobile dominated...

CxM AND PoS – A Tale of two Cities

by | Oct 17, 2015 | Blog |

CxM and PoS, these are two protagonists of an ever continuing story. It comes in many different flavours but it essentially is about change vs. stability. On one hand we have the PoS, the contender, a long time best hated friend of the retailer, an infrastructure that they cannot do without. They can’t! Simple as. The PoS is the infrastructure that all in-store sales are executed on, the infrastructure that is crucial to gain and keep an overview about in-store (and overall) inventory, an infrastructure that also tries hard to gain additional knowledge about the customer. But then the core entities that the PoS works with is not the customer, but are the product and the sales, the transaction. Without the transaction the retailer is dead. On the other hand we have the new kids on the block: CxM, Customer Experience Management, CXM, and Customer Engagement Management, CEM. New, although they, too, are around for quite some while already. Going on I will mainly stick to CxM, lacking something better. Mind the lower case ‘x’! A retailer cannot do without CxM either. As evidenced by the capital C, CxM disciplines are all about the customer, engaging with the customer on every possible meaningful channel, providing her with a positive and lasting experience, pre- and post sale. Consistently. This experience is what makes the customer transact with a retailer in a competitive world. Without a customer there is no transaction. Still, our protagonists are like cat and dog, like fire and water, like two cities at war. This doesn’t sound right, doesn’t it? So why is it like this? And...

CRM Evolution – Some not so random Thoughts

by | Aug 21, 2015 | Blog |

CRM Evolution 2015 was a very vibrant conference with lots of discussion that included a number of high profile industry influencers. For me as a first time attendee it was amazing how approachable many of these people are. But then this might come with the territory. To understand these takeaways it is important to know that my reason for attending was getting into closer touch with what is going on in the CRM world outside SAP – and New Zealand. So, these are purely notes and thoughts that result from sessions, discussions with influencers, speakers and other conference attendees, and not learnings from vendor briefings. Also, this event was split into three separate conferences: CRM Evolution Customer Service Experience Speechtek I nearly exclusively concentrated on CRMEvolution and one session from the Customer Service Experience. First things first: Was it worthwhile coming all the way from NZ? This is very clearly a yes. Paul Greenberg and the team did an amazing job in lining up interesting speakers. What now are the topics that currently seem to move the industry in random order? Customer engagement (CEM), customer experience (CEX), customer journey (CJ) and how these topics relate to CRM Big Data, with a view on the Internet of Things IoT, and related to it: Predictive analytics How to do things CRM right Not surprisingly: The Future of CRM (technology as well as industry) Also not surprisingly these are all interrelated. CEM, CEX, CJ and CRM The intersection of these three topics is extremely interesting. These are also controversially discussed topics. Paul Greenberg recently, in another “stake in the ground” article, gave...

Top 5 Tips for Retailers to connect with Customers

by | Mar 3, 2014 | Blog |

A few days ago I was asked for my top 5 tips for retailers on how to connect with their customers, limited to 100 words. For a topic that one could write a novel on … Well, here is my answer: –       Help customers solving their problem. This distinguishes and makes you found by the customer –       Marketing/loyalty programs offer your customers value and are not mere vehicles to gather more data points –       Simplify your customers’ life, e.g. with a card wallet instead of own app that directly integrates with your CRM and POS –       Relevant communications at the right time, place with the right content – without appearing intrusive. For this you need to know your customer –       Consistent communications across channels and interactions, optimized for used touch point They probably need some more elaboration, especially the last one. First and foremost, the reason for any business to exist is making profit for its owners. This is not equal to producing and selling things (or providing a service) with a margin. The business will succeed only if it focuses on identifying its customers needs and then delivering solutions for these needs. It is not about pushing a product into the market (mostly, consider that needs can be created by smart businesses). This thought is well in the domain of Service Dominant Logic although I am not a strong proponent. Marketing and loyalty programs are important interaction vehicles between businesses and their customers. Both, especially loyalty programs, need to be set up to be mutually beneficial. It is not only about gathering more customer data that can be...

CRM is dead! Yeah, right – and Earth is a disc

by | Dec 2, 2013 | Blog |

A few days ago I came across a blog entry by @MikeBoysen titled Customers Don”t Want Relationships…PERIOD! A really intriguing title and read – perhaps written to stir up a discussion. Works for me, as it stirs me up from of my absence from this blog of mine… Mike, after this very strong claim the starts with another one: CRM is dead. Well, CRM seems to be pretty alive for a dead one; as a strategy and also as a technology. And here is exactly the point where Mike and other influencers – I had discussions about this topic e.g. with @bob_thompson from CustomerThink as well – are dead wrong (I couldn’t resist this pun). Their argumentation is solely based upon CRM being a technology. And then they compare CRM with another acronym that they claim is a strategy, concluding that the other one is far better. Apples vs. pears. Technology vs strategy. CRM is not a technology. It is also not a process area. CRM is a strategy. CEM is another, related, strategy. Buying a technology without a strategy to implement is bound to fail. It is like entering a road without a destination in mind. This holds true for whatever acronym is used, including CRM, SCRM, or CEM, but also “Loyalty Management”, or “Social Media”, or “Big Data”. What do I need “Big Data” for? Or what is the purpose of doing “Social Media” in an enterprise context? Are customers loyal to a vendor or does a vendor simply manage to create the impression that he is better able to deliver to customers’ needs than other vendors?...