by twieberneit | Apr 29, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM – Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First Things First – After All I Am A CRM Guy Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many of these customers are net new customers. The challenge is that S4/HANA doesn’t have a CRM (yet). I have earlier already suggested two ways how this could change – marrying up the SAP Hybris family of modern CRM solutions or modernizing SAP CRM and integrating it into S4/HANA based upon HANA technology and therefore avoiding the costly CRM Middleware and data duplication. Both approaches have their merits: The cloud based SAP Hybris set of solutions is far more modern and already bases on the new SAP standard Fiori user interface. SAP CRM, on the other hand...
by twieberneit | Apr 28, 2017 | Blog |
Just on may way back from CRM evolution 2017 it is time for a little recap. The conference, once more chaired by CRM Grandmaster Paul Greenberg, was again co-located with sister conferences Customer Service Experience and Speechtek. Why there is a separate – and smaller – conference for Customer Services co-located with a CRM conference is beyond me, as Customer Service is an integral part of CRM. But be it as it is. CRM Evolution attracted around 500 professionals, being second to Speechtek. The main topics this year seemed to be Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, and AI, nothing of this coming as a surprise. The size ratio of the conferences and the topics were also confirmed by the exhibitors in the Customer Solutions Expo. We saw an abundance of little booths with AI- and bot-vendors. The mainstays of CRM had fairly small presences, notably SugarCRM, which had a big presence last year. Both keynotes dealt with delivering to maximize customer experience and to measure the result. In the opening keynote Gerry McGovern answered the question what great customer experience is in a digital world and then how to measure it. His premise is that customers want to get something done and that it therefore is imperative to help them getting it done as fast and easy as possible. That begins with page load times, goes on with simple check-out processes like Amazon’s famous one-click or Uber’s payment process – hint there is none at the end of the ride. Things are as easy as saying good-bye to the driver and opening the door. Throughout his keynote Gerry made the...
by twieberneit | Apr 6, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
Following some of my posts on AI in customer service environments I got contacted by Daniel Doctor from Tenacity who invited me for a chat with Ron Davis, the founder and CEO of the company. Which I had. And it was an interesting conversation. In my articles I spent a lot of time focusing on how AI, machine learning and chatbots can help improving both, the customers’ and the service agents’ experiences by making sure that all relevant data is collated and available, reducing wait times for customers, being able to already suggest good solutions to both, customers and agents, and so on. The objective is at all times to have the customer get a good solution as frictionless as possible and to enable the service agent to concentrate on the hard jobs. The idea behind this approach is that it reduces customer irritation by having the answer faster and improves the agent situation by making the work more attractive. After all, who of us loves dull, boring and repetitive work. Not many, I bet – certainly not I. Of course, this is only half of the truth. Service agents, like all employees also react strongly on who they work with, who they work for, whether they have the right tools at hand to get their job done, how their stress levels are, whether their private lives are untroubled, whether they have enough sleep, and so on. Additionally, the more interesting situation of the dull jobs being taken care of by the machine creates stress, as the customers tend to already have an elevated level of frustration that was...
by twieberneit | Mar 31, 2017 | Blog |
Today’s customer service requirements are getting ever more complicated for businesses. Customers encountering problems increasingly rely on self-help. Customers may start looking for solutions by searching on Google, on community sites, or inside a mobile app. A logical starting point depends on the device and application, as well as personal preferences. The bottom line is: customers want to get to their solution as quickly and easily as possible, and they do not want to change their habits and preferences in order to reach support. Many companies run several customer service applications that support different channels, each with a separate knowledge base (KB) subsystem. These may include a support application for an ecommerce site, some general help pages on the company web site, and FAQs on a mobile application. For internal purposes, there might even be an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system with information for contact agents to use but that are not published externally. Of course the normal situation for a service agent is to work on more than one channel. This means that depending on the nature of the inquiry, agents need to use and update multiple knowledge bases. This results in additional, redundant work and information. Furthermore, information gets easily out of sync—resulting in confusion. Similarly, customers need to navigate through different knowledge bases and FAQs. Apart from being highly inefficient and ineffective, this has an impact on both employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. It leads to frustration because customers who do not find their solution need to relay the same information multiple times, and they could be put on hold while the agents research different databases,...
by twieberneit | Mar 30, 2017 | Blog |
A few weeks ago Domino’s Pizza announced that they introduced conversational AI capabilities in their ordering process to enhance the customer experience. DRU Assist, a Virtual Assistant that is powered by Nuance Technology’s Nina Intelligent Virtual Assistant technology. Of course that caught my interest, looking at AI, chatbots and Virtual Assistants for some time now from a customer experience angle. I believe that there is quite some potential in Virtual Assistants although I saw and still see some risks for customer experience in using them. Used in a wrong way, raising too high expectations that subsequently are not fulfilled, bots can kill the user experience. The doubts I expressed earlier are still there but then I am happy to be convinced otherwise. Domino’s managed a tremendous turnaround after having some serious issues late in the aughties and early tens. Apart from rediscovering quality they implemented a very strong technology strategy that helps them understanding their customers better and helps their customers to a pretty smooth ordering and delivery process. The Intention So, I took the chance to have a conversation with Nuance’s Robert Schwarz about DRU assist, and of course ordered some Pizza using DRU shortly after it came online in New Zealand. Having some Pizza-loving children and a busy lifestyle I am a frequent mobile customer of Domino’s (and no, they didn’t incentivize me for this article in any form). Unluckily I couldn’t get statements from Domino’s, but here we are … Nuance as a vendor has a long history in speech-based interfaces. According to Mr. Schwarz Nina, the Nuance technology behind DRU Assist is really good at...
