A Love Affair – Nimble Smart Contacts for Outlook
Social Selling pioneer Nimble has an awesome start into 2017. First it got number 1 in CRM satisfaction by G2Crowd earlier in January, then friend and CRM godfather Paul Greenberg named Nimble a winner of the 2017 CRM Watchlist awards, and now Nimble announces the Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook, a deep integration into Outlook for iOS, with an integration into Outlook for Android coming soon. The Nimble Smart Contacts add-in brings the power of Nimble’s view on contacts to Outlook for mobile users, after the widget and Outlook add-on already offered this functionality for the web- and Outlook clients. The add-on follows the philosophy that for most companies the e-mail account is still their CRM system; given this, this is a straightforward enhancement. Nimble acknowledges that there are two main email systems used in businesses: Gmail and Office365, and now fully supports them both. This integration delivers the profiling data that the Nimble back end gathers practically at any place. The browser add-in already today allows to get profiling information about contacts in other CRM systems, e.g. Salesforce or MS Dynamics and works seamlessly in Google Apps and Office365. “The biggest cause of communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. This add-on is closing one missing link in the chain by making it part of Outlook and reducing the need for having yet another app. Relevant business insight about people in a mail conversation and their companies is now directly available in the email client. The add-on, along with the above-mentioned Outlook Add-in,...
Ocean Medallion – Which Customer Problem Does it Solve?
A few years ago Disney embarked on a massive customer experience journey that included the introduction of a ‘Magic Band’. Disney at that time followed (and likely still does) an idea that can be paraphrased as looking at everything through the eyes of the customer and pay attention to all details. During his 2016 CRM Evolution opening keynote Dennis Snow explained this concept and implementation in depth (see also my earlier CRM Evolution post). Dennis talked about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three simple rules Design your processes with the customer in mind, not with internal/operational priorities; look through the lens of the customer Pay attention to details Create little “Wow Moments”. These add up to a lasting great experience and are easier to achieve than single “big” experiences. To me the most important message that Dennis conveyed is that the simple things and consistency are what matters. Consistently provide little experiences throughout the customer life cycle. He underpinned this with some examples from the ‘ordeal’ of getting out of the park and back into the hotel. Everybody is exhausted, kids may be edgy, riding the bus is usually not fun. What about the bus driver singing some songs or doing a little trivia? The rooms showing some little surprise, like specially folded towels? Another of his core messages was that a company gets loyalty and advocacy only by creating those “wow” moments mentioned above. For this to be effective, however, it must not fail at base priorities. Customer expectations can get mapped to a pyramid. Every customer expects accuracy and availability. These...
It is the Customer’s Way – Or No Way!
Today’s customer is impatient. They want – and have the right to – get answers to their questions and concerns about a company’s products and services without being in the need to preform lengthy searches or to dig around. This holds true for pre-purchase questions as well as to post-purchase questions. We regularly see or read statistics that tell us that customers are not very forgiving in cases of poor customer service, but on the contrary are inclined to leave when encountering a single instance of poor service. If customers do not get the answers to their questions without difficulties they are moving on, no matter of the company or its size. This meanwhile has become a kind of public domain knowledge. The only way for a company to avoid customers leaving with the first bad experience is by building up and maintaining a good and credible history of helping a customer with solutions to address their needs (aka jobs-to-be-done) and by regularly providing good customer service. At all stations of the customer journey. An important part of this good service is being available to help the customers on their preferred channels, at the time of their choosing, and at their pace. Theirs, not the company’s! This includes that a customer initiating a conversation, or engaging in a conversation that is initiated by a company, may not respond in a while, or chooses to continue using another device, or both. On the other side a customer will not accept the company being unresponsive or losing information during handovers between different service agents. The conversation between a company and a customer...