by twieberneit | May 12, 2020 | Blog |
Let’s fast forward about 6 months and Imagine that the Corona crisis is over. Well, not really over, but being on a way of economic and especially psychologic recovery. There will be (yet another) new normal, a new equilibrium of life, personal as well as business. Societies, governments, economies and people have learned to deal with an unprecedented situation. How will the situation look like for businesses? And how will software vendors and consultants be able to improve the situation of their customers? Businesses were forced to a grinding stop, with obvious and disastrous results not only for themselves, but in particular for their customers’ experience. They will have seen huge losses, in spite of governments providing lots of stimulus in terms of trillions of dollars. Businesses more than ever before are facing the need to look precisely at where they spend their money and how they get their restart accomplished. Many people have seen or still are in unemployment. They need and want to contain their spending, too. Business leaders know that their situation has changed. They do know that they need to make their businesses more resilient. They surely have learned that a – to use this buzz word – digital transformation is not an option. It never was, but Covid-19 taught them the lesson that they severely underprioritized this topic. So the why and the what have been hammered down. What business leaders do not know is: How? They do not yet know how to recover and how to initiate or to continue their much-needed digital transformation. Overall, this translates into a situation of uncertainty for...
by twieberneit | Feb 26, 2018 | Blog |
In the past weeks I have been to some events. Their main topic has been ‘digital transformation’, which is a term that currently gets used all over the place. The good news is that people mostly seem to have understood that digital transformation most of all is a business transformation, with IT being an enabler, not a driver. However, and that’s the bad news, one term popped up everywhere like a bad charm. Sharing Economy And the usual suspect companies are cited as the trailblazers of this sharing economy: Airbnb is apparently the biggest hotel chain. But it does now own a single hotel, rather than a bed Uber, the biggest taxi corporation. It does not own a single taxi I even heard Amazon and Alibaba being mentioned in this context. And then there are plenty more companies that one could mention, like TaskRabbit, Lyft, Zaarly, you name them. There are few terms that make me flinch like this one, maybe ‘democratization of <take your pick of technology>. Why? Because the term does not describe the concept behind the model. Instead it creates a cozy feeling of perhaps doing something good by sharing one’s possessions with someone else. The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb share as ‘have a portion of (something) with another or others’. Sharing in its original context is about jointly using or enjoying something, in a wider sense it is about giving someone else access to something. In any case it has some altruistic touch to it. What the above mentioned companies are about is, positively speaking, helping me to give access to something that I...
by twieberneit | Aug 11, 2017 | Blog |
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about customer service in a world of ambient computing. This article looked at customer service from a customer’s point of view. In it I described how I see customer service getting humanized again by leveraging the advances in AI technologies like Natural Language Processing, speech-to-text- and text-to-speech generation along with intent determination. Leveraging these technologies customer service will turn into a conversation and it won’t matter anymore whether service is delivered by a bot or by a human. For the customer it will all appear to be the same. Instead of FAQs or web searches, bots will be the first line of support and escalate a problem to humans if they cannot solve it on their own. The obvious question is whether there will be an impact on the customer service center? And it probably does. Call centers, and with it the service agents as well as their managers, already now are under intense pressure to deliver, and to deliver more efficiently. With the increasing use of call deflection technologies like FAQs and communities there is a trend for the incidents facing the agents becoming more challenging. For example Helpshift states that already with its technology it is able to deflect about 90% of all incidents, which are solved via the native in-app FAQ that is delivered by the them. This statement basically says that the support staff is basically relieved of dealing with simple matters but has the chance to take up the more challenging ones. Still, in a world of ambient computing any given app can have hundreds of...
by twieberneit | Jul 21, 2016 | Blog |
Yesterday the controversial ride share/taxi company Uber and the leading travel- and expense management company Concur announced an expansion of their relationship. With their “first-of-its-kind partnership and technology integration” Concur-connected businesses “will gain visibility into [their] Uber usage while increasing traveler productivity and satisfaction”. As part of the deal Uber will exclusively (for the moment, I guess) make its business features available to Concur customers available for free. This includes automated employee onboarding, policy controls, savings performance, and trip summary dashboards only available by the combination of data collected in the systems of the two companies. My Take – a Quadruple Win There are five involved parties. Concur Uber Concur customers Traveling employees It is conceivable that this partnership does good to all of them. On the fifth one – later … Concur wins The exclusivity of this partnership gives concur a nice edge over its competition. The travel management market is pretty contested. As you can see in the G2Crowd Grid for Expense Management Concur is not an uncontested leader. There is some scope left in both directions. Which leads us to the next two possible winners Concur Customers win Companies using Concur win by improved efficiencies, better overview and lower cost for taxi expenses – assuming that Concur doesn’t cream off the benefits – as the announcement states. There are basically five areas in which companies benefit: Companies can expect savings on taxi cost due to Uber instantly becoming a preferred provider A centralized account management connects employees to an account; this gives visibility into rides taken, including pick up, drop off, time of day, and route. Employees can use a central payment account or request reimbursement for...
by tz4rgp | Apr 23, 2013 | News |
SocialMeetsCRM and AreteN Ltd are happy to announce our newly forged partnership. “Combining the solution strength of SocialMeetsCRM with the strong sales capabilities of the AreteN team will bring both of our businesses ahead and it will help SocialMeetsCRM enter an important European market and give us more momentum in our internationalization efforts. This is an exciting opportunity for us.” says Thomas Wieberneit, co-CEO of SocialMeetsCRM Ltd. AreteN will be the exclusive reseller for SocialMeetsCRM solutions in UK and Northern Ireland and initialy focus on the UK retail market, offering a uniquely integrated social mobile loyalty and couponing solution. This solution enables retail companies to efficiently get more reach via social networks while at the same time giving them the opportunity to engage with their customers on their smartphones taking advantage of toha, the mobile social networking app. Scenarios include the maintenance of loyalty cards and coupons on the phone, where thy matter to their customers, at reduced cost for the creation and management of loyalty accounts and coupon campaigns. Cards and coupons can be scanned at the POS directly from the...
