How autonomous automation is the future
During the past weeks I had a couple of observations and conversations that lead me to thinking that sometimes software vendors underestimate the power that their machine learning based systems could have to improve the lives and experiences of employees and customers. From various vendors in various lines of business, from process mining and automation via application performance monitoring to vendors of conversational AI and pretty much everything in between I hear something like the following: “Our machine learning based system continuously analyses the process/interactions and detects anomalies. From there on it identifies the patterns and can make suggestions how these anomalies can be avoided or resolved.” Of course, this is paraphrased, but you get the meaning. Here are some examples. A real life scenario that I once encountered is as follows: A global B2B e-commerce solution using synchronous pricing is set up in a template approach. It is using one single ERP system for pricing. This is a pretty common B2B scenario, as it is often not feasible to replicate all prices to the e-commerce system, due to the sheer amount of product – customer combinations that are possible. In this scenario, adding a product to the shopping cart involves multiple calls from the e-commerce solution to the ERP system to establish the price. The pilot country site is close to the country that hosts the ERP system. Implementation of the e-commerce solution happened in the country that hosts the ERP system for all e-commerce sites. Deployment into the target countries can happen only after the testing phase, which is clearly suboptimal. Adding a product to the cart...
How SugarCRM is setting out to become a Titan
The news On November 2, 2021, SugarCRM held an analyst summit to share what is going on at the company and to get some candid feedback of the participants. As usual for this type of event, there is quite some information that is still under NDA, so I will be able to cover some of it only in broad strokes rather than the detail that the matters deserve. After a business update by CEO Craig Charlton, the event itself revolved around two themes: customer success stories, including customers describing how they are using SugarCRM to improve their own business by better serving their customers in an interview style formatSugarCRM business development, technology, and its future trajectory. Naturally, this part is largely under NDA. There were breakout sessions covering Sugar Sell, Sugar Service, and Sugar Market As usual, and with the notable exception of the customer interviews, the event was slide-driven with giving the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the respective agenda items plus offering a brief Q&A with the executives. Last, but not least, part of the event is a 1:1 session with a SugarCRM executive a few days after the summit. After a short opening by Sarita Kincaid, Craig Charlton offered a business update, showing how SugarCRM developed in the past twelve months. The company is focusing keenly on the mid-market. Craig painted a bright picture that shows a very high customer retention combined with a good growth rate. Noteworthy are a steep increase of the recurring ARR. He quoted a nearly doubled number of new logos, combined with a more than doubled new/upsell ARR...
How to overcome the process knowledge challenge with a little AI
Many a company has a severe challenge with how their processes actually work. Documentation may or may not be there. Tribal knowledge exists. Lots of repositories, too, including file systems, collaboration tools, chat tools, email, etc. In brief, there is the need for a solution. Startup Sevantiz has taken on this challenge with its Flockwise platform, which is reason enough for the CRMKonvos team to invite Sri Sabesan, Mani Manivannan and David Pickrell into our studio to discuss their approach and how it relates to CRM (spoiler alert: it does) and CX (it does, too). But what is Flockwise? Flockwise brings knowledge from the documentation, tribal knowledge and the transaction systems to answer the questions that employees in businesses have every day. Although we utilize a chat interface, It is much more than an Chatbot. Flockwise is designed to discover knowledge and serving it to the user in a way that the user get the right answer to the question. Flockwise creates the opportunity for the Enterprise Flock and their trusted advisors / consultants and outsourcers to capture knowledge and provide answers to the questions in a way that no other solution does. Creating an efficient way for something that we have always talked about. And that is capturing expert knowledge in a way that is truly reusable for the benefit of productivity of the employees and customers and suppliers of an organization. Sounds good? Then dive deeper into this CRMKonvos...