by twieberneit | Jan 30, 2023 | Blog |
In 2022, the Forrester CX Index dropped for the first time in years, with nearly twenty percent of US brands seeing a drop in customer experience. Towards the second half of 2022, an increasing number of companies fear a recession and put their spending under scrutiny. At the same time, companies still struggle to link CX projects to business outcomes and their metrics, let alone to financial metrics. In addition, Forrester predicts that also in the next few years, CX teams will lack critical design, data and journey skills. In parallel, there is an increasing number of companies that deliver software and/or services that are intended to help businesses improve their CX. In the past years, CX has established itself as a whole new category of software. Many a company has repositioned itself to become a CX vendor, examples including all major CRM vendors, but also call center specialists like Genesys. And, naturally, a good number of these new CX actors got – and get – acquired by bigger fish. A very good example of this trend is the decrease in the number of independent journey orchestration vendors or the concentration of chatbot vendors into conversational AI vendors. Of course, this list cannot be exhaustive in any case. So, clearly vendors are betting big on CX being a growth market, while their clients still struggle to justify the expense into CX. This leads Forrester to predict that twenty percent of CX programs will be stopped and the teams correspondingly disbanded and probably be merged into other parts of the organization. Why is this? Although the true differentiator of every business nowadays is not product,...
by twieberneit | Jan 20, 2023 | Blog |
Rest in peace, Social Media! Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead thing walking. You had a short, yet exhilarating life. And you, admittedly, developed astonishingly fast and far from your humble beginnings in the early 1970s and the first bulletin board systems around 1980. These have been the glory days of FidoNet, CompuServe, or AOL. SixDegrees.com followed later. The early noughts gave us a flurry of messaging systems, LinkedIn and XING, not to forget the infamous 4chan. Anno domini 2004 brought us Facebook, 2005 brought us YouTube, Twitter followed in 2006. Google attempted repeatedly to get the hang of you (Orkut, Google+, anyone?) and still has some messaging services up and running. All of these platforms have in common that they started up with the claim, some of them even with the objective, to make the Internet more social, to foster user generated content and to, ultimately, shift the power balance from corporations to their customers. Who does not remember the war cry “the customer is in control”. This referred to the idea that the customer could get more information that is not controlled by brands, so that they can be better informed, instead of being forced to rely on corporate broadcasts. This should have been achieved by giving customers a voice that is as strong as the corporate one, albeit without the (marketing) budget behind. In line with the definition of social, it enabled...
by twieberneit | Jan 13, 2023 | Blog |
At the end of a year and the beginning of the following year all kinds of research organizations and pundits make their predictions. So could I but then, this year I choose to have a look at some predictions and comment on them. After all, there are predictions for all sorts of areas, including CX. So, what I’ll do instead is having a look at some them. I’ll analyse their rationale and give brief recommendations on what can be done to help work with them. This should be far more beneficial for you than me adding my own – probably redundant – predictions for 2023. So, here we go! These are my top three, along with some recommendations for enterprise software vendors and their customers. One in five CX programs will disappear One of the predictions of Forrester Research is that “one in five CX programs will disappear”. The good news is that at the same time one in ten will get stronger. This is largely, because businesses have not yet embedded CX into their business strategy. A second reason is that CX professionals still struggle with calculating and defending the ROI of a CX initiative. Sadly, Forrester is right. I agree and am actually a bit more pessimistic. Many business’s haven’t yet managed to tie the outcome of CX initiatives to business results. And at the end of the day, an expense needs to have a monetary consequence. This means, more revenue or less cost, more profitability. Being able to establish and defend this link is even more important in times where general uncertainty tightens budget strings. What to do as...
by twieberneit | Jan 3, 2023 | Blog |
Happy New Year to everyone! Apart from all the political suff that I do not want to dive into, the year 2022 has seen a lot of exciting events and topics, from the rise and fall of the Metaverse, to lots of defaulting crypto companies. Towards the end of the year, chatGPt stirred up quite some waves. Not to forget the long story of Elon Musk taking over and handling Twitter … In more conventional areas, we have seen more of a renewed interest in affordable CX suites. Earlier in the year, also CDPs have been a big topic. Tips for good engagement to achieve customers having a positive experience is also always a topic. (Nearly) all of this is reflected in the 2022 top ten of my blog, which has seen a good number of visits. A big and heartfelt thank you to all my readers! Here are your top ten articles of 2022. #10 How to engage for customer experience and success #9 How to create value with a CDP #8 The impact of the supply chain on the customer experience #7 A great human – bot conversation with lots to learn #6 How (and why) a marine consultancy made Zoho core of their business #5 The almighty Metaverse – its Rise and Fate #4 How to make Zoho a business’s operating system #3 How to Zoho’matize a business #2 Don’t mess with Zoho – A Zohoday 2022 recap #1 Metaverse – the return of the Undead All of these are well worth revisiting. Thank you again for your readership. I wish you all the best for 2023. Exciting times are lying ahead of...
by twieberneit | Dec 29, 2022 | Blog |
The CRM Playaz asked me about my take on CRM for 2023. Of course, I happily supplied an answer … So, here we are. CRM in terms of concept and software is quite mature, after all it is around for quite some time. It went through some iterations and spun out into other areas, being more transactionally focused, instead of engagement focused. This led to the creation of more software categories, termed customer engagement management or, more recently, customer experience management. This had the potential to create misconceptions and ambiguities, especially when all three categories, customer relationship management, customer engagement and customer experience are looked at. There is confusion across these terms – as there are no generally accepted definitions around – and there is even confusion when looking at the terms individually. That made me express three wishes and advice, one for customer relationship management, one for customer experience, and one for customer engagement. TL;DR – if you do not want to read, here is the video that I created. Let’s start with CRM CRM stands for customer relationship management. I do not want to dive into the discussion about whether there is too much focus on the M and not enough on the R. This is certainly worth a discussion of its own. Instead, let me share the observation that, sadly, CRM is far too often used when actually SFA – sales force automation is meant. This is a limited view on CRM that has been introduced mainly by vendors that focus on enabling sales forces and that has gained far too much traction. Customer relationship management, as a...
