thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany

Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany

In the last few days two really interesting acquisitions caught my eye. The obvious one that hardly could be missed, is Slack being acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 bn, which, to put it into perspective, is $2.2 bn more than Salesforce forecasts as its revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. The other interesting acquisition is social network behemoth Facebook plucking up Kustomer, a five-year-old company with origins in customer service. What is interesting about Kustomer is that the company promotes managing customer service from the customer (hence the name) angle and not coming from the ticket as the main entity. Kustomer has since positioned itself more into the CRM area, but still with a focus on service “CRM for customer service” and also implemented an AI to help with routing and the end-to-end handling of (simple) cases by chat bots. Digging a little further, one can find that Snapchat also recently acquired voca.ai, another tech company that specializes in serving natural, human-like conversations. Salesforce acquires Slack I have already covered the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, and so have many other analysts. Thinking a little longer about it, yes, Slack gives Salesforce capabilities that so far only Microsoft can offer, albeit the balance of Salesforce’s productivity suite (acquired with Quip) is no match for Microsoft Office. Using both, MS Teams and Slack, I think that, with all its deficiencies, MS Teams has functional advantages over Slack. And it comes as part of MS 365 (formerly known as MS Office). On the other hand, Slack as part of Salesforce is giving Salesforce customers that are not yet committed...

Some Klout Score Musings

Today I’d like to present some musings about the klout score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below; but the curve is interesting, if set into a context. So far I only followed my klout score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02.2011. You see some immediate effect on the day after. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER’s Twitter account. This usually leads to a few clicks and one or two followers on Twitter. However, the real point I’d like to draw your attention to is the 22.02.2011. This is the day the 6.3 earthquake struck in Christchurch downtown and caused severe devastation. As you may know, I normally blog about CRM and social CRM on the CIBER site, so that event is clearly outside my usual activity. Now the catch is: I do live in Christchurch and quite some of my network friends do know this. So I did some simple things by updating my status in the few networks that I actively use: [unordered_list style=”green-dot”] LinkedIn with direct update to Twitter Facebook XING [/unordered_list] As you can imagine this still caused some reactions of my friends – quite some of which are real life friends. Of course there are still one or two CRM related posts of mine in there, plus an opinion on a political matter in Germany, but the majority of all conversations deals with the Christchurch quake, and the...