Nimble – To CRM or To Not CRM

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 26, 2016 | Blog |

After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with Jon Ferrara again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course, Nimble. As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in 1990. Jon is also a very vocal advocate of sales and marketing being first of all “human to human”, something that he claims that most CRM systems are not good at. Consequently, he dubs these systems as “Customer Reporting Systems” as they do not excel at helping salespeople giving a good look at the persons they interact with but are more focused on reporting. Being in the CRM world for a long time myself I cannot really disagree with him about this fact itself; we might have a discussion on what CRM overall is and why it went the (wrong) way it took. Some thoughts on what I think CRM is and how Nimble stands in this, along with some thoughts on how to go ahead with Nimble will come below … Historically CRM systems require a lot of data entry. This is where Nimble is somewhat different, which is something that I like. No CRM can do without manual data entry, but Nimble makes this pretty simple. The system is built around persons and interactions with them and strives to merge calendar, email, social media and contact data base into aggregated views, giving context about involved people. Changes done by the contacts in their external profiles can get pulled into Nimble in a semi-automated way. The goal is to always have the context of...

Go Digital or Die – CRM Evolution 2016

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 27, 2016 | Blog |

CRM Evolution 2016 – Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The CRM Evolution 2016 conference, organised by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the conference appeared to be bigger than the years before it all seemed more intimate, but not crowded, which probably can get attributed to a good choice of venue. The event being vendor independent is only the icing on the cake. In my eyes this is the one CRM related conference that one must not miss. In contrast to last year I attended CRM Evolution only, which in retrospective was a mistake. But let’s have a look at the conference themes. There is no CRM without Customer Engagement and good Customer Experiences In the opening key note Dennis Snow told us about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three...

Measure Customer Experience – But Don’t Over-Engineer

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 6, 2016 | Blog |

You have determined for your SME business that you want to improve your customers’ experience.But you do not know how to measure it. And you want tangible results fast. And you want to contain the risk.  After all there is nothing more risky than a big venture that promises results only in the far away future… You have heard about this Internet of Things thing, beacons, customer journeys, sentiment analysis, and predictive, even intent driven analysis. But this all seems a bit big and daunting. You ask yourself: How to go ahead? And how do I measure success? Many companies, especially bigger ones, already have a voice of the customer (VoC) program, which is a good start. Not to be gotten wrong, there are all sorts of challenges with VoC programs. Getting insufficient replies, data that doesn’t really help, data that covers only one single channel, etc. etc. But then a VoC program is a very good start, if kept simple, and also consistently available across channels. It again is about thinking big while acting small. Key is to Ask the questions immediately in context with the activity you refer to, e.g. on exiting the store or the web site Keep the number of questions for your customers very low and to make answering them extremely easy. Correlate the customer replies with information that you get from your employees. Lastly: Act on the results. Nothing is worse than asking customers and employees for feedback and then doing nothing with it. Keeping the numbers very low while retaining the ability to get meaningful data is a stretch. There should not be more than 4, in...

Personalisation, Privacy, and Value – is Marketing out of Control?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 5, 2016 | Blog |

Today I came across a short discussion on personalisation, privacy, and their value between two great analysts – Esteban Kolsky and Ben Kepes – who, naturally, take different positions. I mean, where would the value of a discussion be when everybody agrees from the outset … Whereas Ben maintains that he very much accepts having his behaviour, whereabouts and preferences collected (in the example by Google) and used to receive targeted advertisements that match his interests Esteban counters that it is none of Google’s business – and you can freely replace Google with any other brand name – to know this and use this, without your explicit consent. Though I think that targeted marketing can be better than the scatter-gun approach of earlier times I side with Esteban. I do not want to become the “target” of a “marketing attack” in Washington DC when I happen to show up there in May, just because Apple and Google, and name-them-all, know that I like a good coffee. If, and when I want a coffee (and it is rather a question of when than one of if), I am perfectly able to find the next coffee shop that I deem fitting. The same holds true for sports gear, appliances, watches, you name it. I want to be able to opt in, probably only for a limited time, and opt out again eventually, knowing that my data doesn’t get sold off and that it gets deleted after me opting out. Yeah, I am a little dreamer … but so far the value of highly targeted advertising is more on the business side than...

Customer Experience, Customer Engagement and CRM – Think Big, Act Small

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jan 15, 2016 | Blog |

This is the second post in my mini series about continuously improving the customer experience and customer engagement in the triangle of Customer Experience Management (CEX), Customer Engagement Management (CEM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Well, actually the third, if you include my guest post There’s no customer experience without customer engagement on friend Paul Greenberg’s ZDNet blog. A while ago, in my post CxM and PoS – A Tale of two Cities I have asked you to stay tuned in case you were interested in learning about a way of implementing the strategy of thinking big while acting small in order to be able to keep the big goal – adding value for your customers offering the best possible experiences –  at the center of actions. All this while acknowledging that priorities are shifting, budgets are scarce, and different customers prefer to engage via different sequences of touch points. Sounds like a nasty and complicated challenge. And it is! But if you break it down into smaller pieces it becomes manageable. It requires a kind of SCRUM-like project management approach, on corporate level. The objective is to have a strategy and delivery infrastructure that bases on optimally delivering to customer needs covers every touch point with the customer while remembering that not every customer journey is created equal is flexible enough to quickly adjust to changing customer demands embraces the strengths and weaknesses of the existing systems. Not every touch point needs all available information It all starts with the customer, with customer engagement, customer experience and, yeah, management of the relationship with the customer, in a mobile dominated...