by twieberneit | Apr 6, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
Starting with the concept of blades we went across a number of different topics related to customer experience with our guest Denis Seynhaeve. Denis is the CEO of 3CLogic, a company that is dedicated to ‘pluggable’ contact centers in the cloud, helping organizations to provide good customer experience via voice technology. So, naturally a number of questions arises. What is blade technology (hint, it doesn’t have anything to do with the blade runner but is closer to the blades used in data centers …)? How does this technology contribute to a customer experience? Why choosing AWS and not another hyperscaler – or run out of own data centers? And, first, and foremost: Why the concentration without exclusivity on ServiceNow? Here, Denis clearly has a strategy that differs from the one pursued by Richard Rosen of Fastcall, who has an exclusive focus on Salesforce. And, last but not least the fundamental question: How to choose the right ecosystem to play in, if one is not an 800-pound gorilla? Answers to these questions and more in our...
by twieberneit | Mar 16, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
Ecosystems is all I say – was his post in Linkedin. And as you can imagine, this sparked quite a discussion. Why? Because “he” is SAP’s venerable Chief CX Evangelist Esteban Kolsky. Not that it needs a reason to invite Esteban to a CRMKonvo (because he is always good for a well founded opinion) but this discussion and the topic itself certainly made it highly interesting to cover some ground and Esteban is always good for a lively discussion. What is an ecosystem – and how does it relate to the word “symbiosis” – if at all? How does one get an ecosystem viable? What is fairness in that context? Is trust a factor? Fairness? Or is that all too fuzzy? And – spoiler alert – as you can imagine by the title: They do not revolve around the customer. I will not tell you what it is though and leave that to Esteban himself. Best of all: Some highly interesting insight in the comments as well. Enjoy the CRMKonvo. We certainly...
by twieberneit | Feb 8, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
Ecosystems are a big topic. What makes an ecosystem successful? What hurts? Are there any key elements to ecosystems to make them succeed? Does it differ from communities? Can a vendor survive without one? Or even better: Can customers succeed without? There are lots of questions to be answered in the times of platform play. The CRMKonvos team had a vivid conversation with Alan Berkson, Global Director of Community Outreach and Analyst Relations at Freshworks, who, as part of is job works with, and builds ecosystems – pretty well, in fact. He has a lot of interesting things to say, also about the current rage, which is Clubhouse – will it succeed? Is there any good to it? Enjoy the...
by twieberneit | Feb 2, 2021 | Blog, Guest Post |
For a few months now I have the pleasure of frequently interacting with Richard Rosen of Fastcall, a company that exclusively focuses on extending Salesforce with CTI software. Rich is a firm advocate of focusing on one ecosystem and to not serving multiple ones. As such he is a friend of Salesforce. Still, he makes some astute critical and important observations about the market place and the customer experience that it offers. He also has some suggestions. Here is what he has to say. It’s been a few months since I walked into Nordstrom but I do remember the experience. The store is nicely curated with classic brands I recognize and a few emerging brands. Nordstrom keeps their stores fresh and well designed. While our experience has moved more and more online the idea of merchandising has not changed. Amazon on the other hand does a very bad job merchandising fashion. E.g. tThe search “shirts for men” results in “more than 30,000” results. When shopping I may be looking for one or two new shirts. Nordstrom does a great job suggesting a few ideas. I do not want to see or look at “more than 30,000” shirts. Amazon offers a few options to narrow down my search. There is a definite benefit in curation. How does consumer software deal with curation? There are approximately 2.87 million apps in the Play Store (Android) and 1.96 million in the Apple App Store. The strategy in the consumer app marketplace is “more is more.” They give top lists in many categories. These consumer apps’ Top n lists are not well curated; the...
by twieberneit | Jan 29, 2021 | Blog, Sponsored |
In my recent article on how to improve collaboration with Fastcall CTI I summarized a number of requirements that need to be fulfilled by a solution. A good vendor needs to fulfil at least this set of requirements. · First and foremost: The software needs to do the job of making life for the employees easier · It needs to be embedded into the host software, and not run side by side · Ideally, the vendor is specialized on the software stack that your employees use and the software uses the same UI as the host software · The software needs to share information and data with the host software and write into the same database · The vendor needs to offer good support and regular, frequent updates to the software The article was deliberately abstract and not dealing with any platform, as I wanted to make a general point. The way to do this is to keep it independent of any major (or minor) platform. But what does it mean, specifically, to work with these criteria? Let’s get our hands dirty Imagine that you are a Salesforce customer and are looking for a matching CTI app to extend the footprint of your implementation with the goal of better and more efficient availability. Then Salesforce AppExchange is your first point to start the search, as this is just the kind of use case that it has been built for. Still, there are some pitfalls to observe. Not whatever is on top of the list, is best for you. Salesforce AppExchange ranks and lists by popularity. Popularity is calculated by...
