The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 18, 2021 | Blog |

It’s that time of year again. And although I’m not really into trend articles, I think it’s time this year to start thinking about what’s going on in the worlds of customer experience and customer relationship management – and how it’s affecting businesses and customers. Especially since I was also asked … So here’s my list of developments that I think will be relevant in the next few years, in quite random order, and admittedly not entirely without overlap. Digitization – not Digital Transformation If there is one theme that has and continues to permeate through the Covid pandemic, it is that of digitalization. The pandemic has painfully brought to light the failure to make necessary investments in consistent processes and technologies in the past. As a result, many companies continue to have processes that are characterized by media disruptions. The need to improve here is also the overarching theme for some of the other developments and trends currently evident. Companies and their employees, as well as customers, have had to learn to deal with a highly distributed work infrastructure. Companies have responded by building communications infrastructures (zoom fatigue anyone?) and building out or rebuilding their sales and service infrastructures for increased remote capability. This is being done in 3 phases: First, as part of a stop-gap solution, an infrastructure was quickly pulled up that allowed operations to continue somehow. In the second phase, order was brought into the chaos thus produced. Now, in the third phase, more attention is being paid to integration and efficiency. As a result, we will see more end-to-end digitized processes that address the...

CX, communications platforms and what’s great next year

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 5, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

This time, we welcomed Michael Fauscette in our virtual, distributed studio. With him we discussed what will become 2021 trends, looked at his views on the best and worst buzzwords on the market, the role of CDPs and rather communications platforms and what an actually usable AI could be. Michael is a renowned analyst and author, with more than 20 years of experience in and around the CRM industry. He is the Chief Research Officer at G2, an analyst firm that bases that serves companies small to enterprise and that is unique in a sense that its analyses are based on customer feedback. Given that, our discussion of course touched his upcoming book (which sounds like it will be very readable) and the role of analysts — whether they are serving their purpose well and what could be improved. Us being all about CX, the meaning of CX cannot be forgotten. Did you always want to know what a business communications platform is and never dared to ask? Well, Michael has a good answer for you. And then there is photography. As usual – it is a conversation and might lead different directions. Did it? You find out!...

CRMKonvo – Customer Experience and how to do it right

by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 28, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

This episode starred Nicole France. Nicole is VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. She focuses on digital marketing, sales effectiveness and customer experience. We planned to talk with her about platforms and their role in the ecosystem; eventually we got there after talking shop about the larger challenge of enabling and embracing customer experience. How can a customer have an experience? What does it take for companies? Are they properly set up to deliver? What is the role of culture? We covered lots of questions before even going into technology, which is a good thing, as customer experience first of all is about people with technology only being an enabler. Only then questions like: Why have platforms become important (again)? What is necessary to make them a success? Are there winning players? What is the role of a CDP in this, if any? Is there a difference between a suite and a platform, and which (hint: there is)? become important. How to make sense of the buzzword bingo between CDP, personalization, Real Time Interaction Management and Customer Journey Orchestration. There are lots of questions, and even more answers, which depend on which vendor one asks. Also, we asked about her opinions on trends for 2021, how the vendors managed COVID-19 so far and where she saw innovations and “spectacular” things to talk about – with an interesting result. But watch and listen for...

CRMKonvos – Latin American expert insights: How different is this market?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 2, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

Ralf Korb and I had a special guest in Jesus Hoyos, long time CRM practitioner and analyst who works from Mexico and Florida. Jesus concentrates on the Latin American and North American markets. Apart from being a genuinely great person, he had a lot of interesting topics to cover, starting from how different even the various Latin- and South American markets are to how pricing models should be different, not only to accommodate for a pandemic situation but also for the structures of markets that are dominated by small companies, companies that are far smaller that the enterprises that are usually targeted by the bigger vendors. This also has implications on product development, training schemes and its availability, partner and ecosystem enablement and a lot of of other topics (including kayaking in the Everglades). This is a conversation mostly in English, with some Spanglish and a few German in between. And it is jam-packed with valuable information. Well worthwhile viewing and listening...

CRMKonvos – Bob Stutz and Esteban Kolsky of SAP are talking straight

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 26, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

In this episode Ralf Korb, Marshall Lager and I had two very special guests: Bob Stutz, president of SAP’s CX group, who shapes the CRM industry for more than 20 years now and Esteban Kolsky, former analyst, both independently and at Gartner. Esteban has deep roots and a passion for customer service processes and now leads the sales and service products at SAP CX.  And then there was a special star, perhaps the youngest guest who we will ever have. Again, and as usual for our CRMKonvos, we did not stick to one hour. Bob and Esteban actually shared their insights for a full 90 minutes, which is something for which we are deeply grateful. We covered a lot of ground starting with how 22 years of experience in the military services can help in the software industry – and not ending with why it took him and his team that long to publish an SAP CX strategy.  You are interested in the state of AI and machine learning? Ask Esteban – or listen to his statements in this episode. Same for what we are doing wrong in customer service for five decades now. And he needs to know, having a service centre background and having covered the service arena for 20 years now in various roles. Did the acquisitions that SAP did in the past years make sense? Why did it take SAP that long to figure out some of the gems in their portfolio? How should pricing look like and why would make this pricing vendors build better software?  Why Emarsys? Where does it fit into the stack – and why?Ever wondered what the real...