Engagement, Experience, GDPR and Data Greed
As you might guess if you have read a few of my posts, I am not a person that is adverse to CRM and other customer facing technology that help improving the value created for said customer. Well, I am working in the CRM arena for more than twenty years now. A good part of what I am currently working on involves marketing automation software. And frankly, a lot of what I see and am allowed to do with and for forward-looking companies is just amazing! However! Talking to CEO’s and executives of CRM- and marketing automation companies about the European General Data Protection Regulation GDPR, I repeatedly heard statements like “it is a way for lawyers to make money”. And they probably are right with this assessment. Why? Because too many executives still bet their house on this law being a toothless tiger, or being under the radar; or they are claiming ‘legitimate purposes’ according to sentence f of section 1 in article 6 of the regulation, to justify their collection of data. Their legitimate purpose being the ability to serve targeted – or in new lingo relevant – advertisements. And I am sure they have some guidance by their lawyers, when arguing like this. However, there is the caveat to these legitimate purposes: the overriding “interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data”. Soon we will find out how serious the GDPR is taken by the European Union – whether it is a roaring lion or a toothless tiger. There are only a few days left until this law...
GreenRope – A Simple yet Powerful CRM for E-Mail Marketers
A while ago I had the pleasure of talking with Austin Willms who took me through a tour presenting GreenRope, a CRM solution for small businesses that offers three ‘suites’ of functionality across ales, marketing, and operations. The operations suite probably needs a bit of explanation but is essentially the customer service portion plus functionality covering project- and event management, knowledge management, a wiki, collaboration and – important – the majority of contact management functionality. The Sales suite covers workflows, activities, leads, and contact handling and the marketing suite provides marketers with the tools they need to do their job. ‘Their job’ mainly being e-mail- and website-marketing, with some social media marketing added to it. This is something that GreenRope is particularly well geared for. The software has its origins as an e-mail marketing tool that evolved into a business suite of CRM-related tools that supports additional customer requirements. The objective behind it is to provide as many tools as possible in very affordable packages, while being able to support a nearly unlimited number of contacts. GreenRope has customers that run the solution for millions of contacts in their database. The philosophy behind GreenRope is that it shall make people effective, by allowing them to organize easily and efficiently. It is not necessarily there to serve as an immediately revenue generating tool. There is no preferred industry for GreenRope, although its ability to deal with millions of contacts shows a B2C affinity. This making it easy for users philosophy is also exhibited by GreenRope regularly sending mails that help in the onboarding process and the easily accessible and very...
CXM! What the Heck is That?
In his recent very readable article ‘iCXM Comes of Age – Using AI to Know, Engage, and Server Your Customers Better’, CustomerThink.com founder and chief editor Bob Thompson explored how Artificial Intelligence can improve Customer Experience Management – and with extending CXM to iCXM created a new acronym, jokingly noting that the industry is running short on buzzwords. The opportunities that Bob identifies are Knowing your customer Engaging your customer Serving your customer While this is all true, I contend that none of this is about customer experience management, simply because customer experiences are living in the perception of the customer, and hence are solely managed by the customer, not by any company. I wrote about it earlier in my article There is no customer experience without customer engagement. According to Wikipedia, customer experience ‘is the product of an interaction between an organization and a customer over the duration of their relationship. This interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the environments the customer experiences … ‘. Therefore customer experience ‘implies customer involvement at different levels – such as rational, emotional, sensorial, physical, and spiritual. Customers respond diversely to direct and indirect contact with a company.’ Lastly, customer experience ‘can be defined as the internal and personal responses of the customers …”. A company, supported by the software it uses, can engage customers in a way that these customers have a positive – or negative – experience. What now is customer experience management? Friend and CRM Godfather Paul Greenberg, in a seminal article clarified on the definitions of...