Truly Zoho – how doing right and capitalism coincide

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 2, 2023 | Blog |

The past 9 months have seen quite a rollercoaster in the tech industry. We have seen staggering profits, we continue to see stock buybacks, we have seen consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – and we have seen mass layoffs. Few of them were well handled or communicated. Even fewer showed any sign of executives taking accountability besides stating that they made mistakes during the pandemic and that they feel sorry for what they need to do now. They had simply over-hired and now need to take corrective action to stay on a ‘growth path’. One of these executives arguably took the prized company culture of regarding the employees as family to grave. What do these layoffs have in common? They were initiated to please the capital markets, i.e. shareholders and venture capitalists. The idea behind this is that layoffs is the fastest way to solve or avoid impending financial problems. However, there is mounting scientific evidence that this idea is a myth, as e.g., expressed here, here or here as summaries. There is often no financial benefit, even not after 3 years; instead, some scientists look at these layoffs as “the result of imitative behaviour [that is] not particularly evidence based” and that there are other, better ways that businesses can pursue. But, as Raju Vegesna says “customers are inherently loyal, employees are inherently loyal, investors are not. Yet, businesses are most loyal to this least loyal group of stakeholders”. Ouch! One of these better ways And, indeed, one company that pursues other avenues is Zoho. Zoho CEO and co-founder Sridhar Vembu pledged that there will be no layoffs for economic reasons, no matter what. But this isn’t...

Beyond the hype – How to use chatGPT to create value

by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 15, 2023 | Blog |

Now, that we are in the middle of – or hopefully closer to the end of – a general hype that was caused by Open AI’s ChatGPT, it is time to reemphasize on what is possible and what is not, what should be done and what not. It is time to look at business use cases that are beyond the hype and that can be tied to actual business outcomes and business value. This, especially, in the light of the probably most expensive demo ever, after Google Bard gave a factually wrong answer in its release demo. A factual error wiped more than $100bn US off Google’s valuation. I say this without any gloating. Still, this incident shows how high the stakes are when it comes to large language models, LLM. It also shows that businesses need to have a good and hard look at what problems they can meaningfully solve with their help. This includes quick wins as well as strategic solutions. From a business perspective, there are at least two dimensions to look at when assessing the usefulness of solutions that involve large language models, LLM. One dimension, of course, is the degree of language fluency the system is capable of. Conversational user interfaces, exposed by chatbots or voice bots and digital assistants, smart speakers, etc. are around for a while now. These systems are able to interpret the written or spoken word, and to respond accordingly. This response is either written/spoken or by initiating the action that was asked for. One of the main limitations of these more traditional conversational AI systems is that they are...

How to tie CX to business success in three simple steps

by Thomas Wieberneit | 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,...

Social media is dead – long live social media

by Thomas Wieberneit | 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...

Three CX predictions and how to get some value from them

by Thomas Wieberneit | 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...