Is SAP serious about CX? You bet, and here’s why

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 23, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

The News SAP flexes its muscles. Bob Stutz returns to SAP as the new president of the CX group. In this role he becomes the successor of Alex Atzberger who held this role since January 2018, himself succeeding Carsten Thoma. In his new role Bob will report directly to Co-CEO Jennifer Morgan. The Bigger Picture Bob Stutz certainly is one of the creators of CRM, where Paul Greenberg is its godfather. He was instrumental to the success of Siebel, the company that basically created the industry and dominated the market in the early days of the millennium, till the company got acquired by Oracle. From there, Bob moved on to SAP in 2005, with the objective of making a successful business unit out of SAP CRM. Which he did. With CRM 7, released towards the end of 2007, he and his team created a very competitive product, functionally, and from a usability point of view. He also, with CRM on Demand, laid the foundation for an SAP move into the cloud. Not entirely successful, that one, as it the whole architecture was not cloud orientated, but it was the first step into the right direction. And an important one, as the whole market, led by Salesforce, went for the cloud. It was a hard transition; believe me, I was there. By then, Salesforce was hot on the heels of the then market leader SAP, with Oracle and Microsoft making themselves heard as well, Oracle hampering itself with the transition to Fusion and Microsoft at the start of its journey that created Dynamics. His tenure ended in 2010. He moved...

S/4 vs. C/4 – Is SAP finally getting CRM right?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 12, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

It has been a while since I last mused about things S/4HANA and C/4HANA (or Customer Experience Suite) at SAP. So, it is time to have a look at what happened since. Last year I concluded that “the differentiation between the old world transactional systems and the systems of engagement is more and more being sorted out” and that the “modularization of the various clouds into ‘Micro’-Services would allow for a seamless recombination of systems that allow for the definition of functional scope according to customer needs as opposed to only offering pre-packaged systems”. Has there been any change, since? Let’s go along the questions that I asked in my previous post. How reliable is the roadmap, or rather, are the roadmaps? At the end of the day there is the eternal dilemma between flexibility and stability. How to go ahead with multiple back end systems? How are engines and industry solutions dealt with? How is the differentiation between S4 including customer management and the C4 offerings? All these questions continue to be relevant, as they are touching the core of SAP’s strategy. What is the current answer to them? Let me give my take on them, as I see it evolving. Just to be sure, this is my observation and me listening to customers, not an official word of SAP. Just my interpretation. After all I am not on the distribution list of SAP’s internal strategy discussions. Being a CRM guy and a suite guy, for me the last question is the elephant in the room. The answer to where SAP sees the boundary between S4 and C4...

Salesforce Einstein Search – The Formula for Customer Success?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 25, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

The News Last week Salesforce announced Einstein Search, an enhancement of the search mechanisms that are already available in its applications. As usual you can read the announcement online or below. Salesforce wants to release three main issues with Einstein Search:     The diverse interests and objective of users of enterprise search make it hard to be as good as a consumer search as delivered by Google or Bing, or the other consumer search engines, especially if in an ecommerce environment. In an enterprise setting, objectives can vary between closing a deal or solving a case, or creating new campaigns. This creates hidden complexities. There are no safe assumptions. Data is residing in different silos and frequently not linked. Further, there is no one size fits it all as Salesforce as an application normally is customized to suit an individual customer’s needs Third, the data simply does not belong to Salesforce, with the consequence that Salesforce cannot look into the data, even not with the objective of improving search. This makes it impossible to use traditional machine learning approaches. As per now Einstein Search is in a private beta stadium with only a few customers using it. General availability is planned for 2020 but limited to customers on Unlimited, Enterprise, or Performance Edition plans with 150 or more active licenses for the Sales or Service Cloud. So far the implementation of Einstein Search covers the top 5 searched objects: accounts, opportunities, contacts, cases and leads, but is intended to support further objects. According to Will Breetz, VP of product management for Einstein Search at Salesforce, Einstein Search is...

SugarCRM – A Vendor getting its mojo back?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 21, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

Anno Domini 2019 SugarCRM seems to be on its way to getting its mojo back. I remember Sugar as a well renowned brand in the sales force automation arena with roots in the open source community. If memory serves right, the company lost a lot of momentum when switching from a freemium model to a paid model by essentially discontinuing the community edition. Since then I need to admit that the vendor somewhat vanished from my personal radar. This happened around 2014 or 2015. SugarCRM had lost its mojo for me, which is somewhat sad. I knew it existed but it somehow faded away with the exception of news about the intensified partnership with IBM and then the company being acquired by a venture capitalist last year. Is it only me? Not quite. This fading away is also mirrored by Google Trends. On the other hand it is entirely possible that I did not appear on SugarCRM’s analyst relationships radar. Fast forward to today, and SugarCRM consistently rates pretty well in the Gartner Magic Quadrants for sales force automation. The company ranks as a visionary at least since 2017 and is close to the threshold of becoming a leader. The Gartner Group finds it suitable for organizations of all sizes with a focus on mid-sized to large organizations. Forrester research also speaks favourably of the company. Sugar Sell (formerly known as SugarCRM) ranks well on G2Crowd, where it is placed amongst the leaders. SugarCRM also over time belted a few awards. My interest was piqued again by Bob Thompson of CustomerThink who asked me for a comment when he...

CRM is 30 and Salespersons still hate it

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 7, 2019 | Blog |

We are now almost fourty years after the first CRM tools were introduced, initially as helpers for the sales force, but then with an ever increasing scope. We have seen ‘CRM’ systems start as point solutions that morphed into suites – and back to what is called ‘best-of-breed’ to witness the rebirth of the suite. We have seen CRM as a strategy, as a tool. There has been social CRM, and more recently we have seen customer engagement management (CEM), even customer experience management (CXM). Regardless of the name and scope, the goal has always been to help businesses and their representatives on one side and customers on the other side to build lasting and profitable relationships. Amazingly, many users, especially salespersons, still hate CRM. Why? And how can this be overcome? A little history of CRM In the early days we have seen activity management tools, contact management tools, and account management tools, the latter as a kind of shared electronic rolodex. One of the important tools at this time was Goldmine, that successfully combined activity-, account- and contact management for teams, as a first of a kind. Amazingly, founded in 1989, Goldmine is still around. Salespersons used some of these tools and hated the fact that they weren’t integrated. They had to use and live with many different tools, which improved some aspects of their lives – or not. As a consequence we have seen the emergence of sales force automation (SFA) tools that targeted at integrating and streamlining sales processes from lead to order and to establish a common repository of data that could get used...