by twieberneit | Dec 5, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
This time, we welcomed Michael Fauscette in our virtual, distributed studio. With him we discussed what will become 2021 trends, looked at his views on the best and worst buzzwords on the market, the role of CDPs and rather communications platforms and what an actually usable AI could be. Michael is a renowned analyst and author, with more than 20 years of experience in and around the CRM industry. He is the Chief Research Officer at G2, an analyst firm that bases that serves companies small to enterprise and that is unique in a sense that its analyses are based on customer feedback. Given that, our discussion of course touched his upcoming book (which sounds like it will be very readable) and the role of analysts — whether they are serving their purpose well and what could be improved. Us being all about CX, the meaning of CX cannot be forgotten. Did you always want to know what a business communications platform is and never dared to ask? Well, Michael has a good answer for you. And then there is photography. As usual – it is a conversation and might lead different directions. Did it? You find out!...
by twieberneit | Dec 2, 2020 | Blog |
A bit more than one year ago I asked whether SugarCRM is getting its mojo back after the company shed its open source roots in 2014 and got acquired by Accel-KKR in August 2018. End of July 2019 the company published its renewed vision under CEO Craig Charlton. The vision is “to create a world where companies cultivate customers for life by anticipating and fulfilling needs before customers realize they have them”. It revolves around the three topics Intelligent Customer Experience platform and the underlying ‘time-aware’ data modelNo-Touch Information Management with the idea of enabling users to spend less time entering and searching for data in favor of spending more time with their customersContinuous Cloud Innovation to provide a modern and future proof cloud-based software platform Since then quite some things happened to implement this vision. In addition, SugarCRM held a four-hour virtual analyst summit on November 16, 2020. The Analyst Summit The summit itself was fully live, i.e. without any pre-canned parts, and executed using Zoom, including the break-outs into 1:1’s and small group sessions. At least one of the SugarCRM execs also took advantage of the polling feature during his session. The choice of this format made the event both, not so “cineastic” (the new mot-du-jour for virtual events) and very authentic. I need to say that I prefer authentic over cineastic. The sessions covered the status quo, the overall strategy, a customer testimonial and, of course, future plans of the various products, as usual under NDA, so I will not dive into details here. During all sessions I perceived a genuine interest in feedback for the...
by twieberneit | Dec 1, 2020 | Blog, Sponsored |
Smaller enterprise software vendors today operate in a world where their fortunes may rise and fall on their ability to integrate with one or more cloud computing platforms. In many cases, having a connector or API for multiple platforms is a great means to survive and thrive. But it’s not the only way. Versatility has always been one of the watch words of cloud computing. The ease of adding and updating functions, or of moving to a new platform entirely, created an incentive for vendors to embrace that versatility. The CEO or CFO who is looking out for their company’s future would thus rarely be faulted for trusting vendors whose products work on as many platforms as possible. The CTO, on the other hand, might not share that view. While that role has to allow for future moves their company might make, they are also the person who is most responsible for choosing the best tools for the job and making sure they keep working. For the CTO, a vendor’s ability to serve across multiple platforms is far less relevant than the quality, usability, and robustness of their product for the platform being used right now. Disclosure: The inspiration for this article comes from working with FastCall (www.fastcall.com), a business communications system vendor that works exclusively with Salesforce. FastCall is my client; the words and thoughts presented here are my own. Is This A Game? Think of it this way: Let’s say you have a Playstation gaming console. Does it matter if your favorite game is also available for XBox, Nintendo Switch, and PC? You can only use one...
by twieberneit | Nov 28, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |
This episode starred Nicole France. Nicole is VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. She focuses on digital marketing, sales effectiveness and customer experience. We planned to talk with her about platforms and their role in the ecosystem; eventually we got there after talking shop about the larger challenge of enabling and embracing customer experience. How can a customer have an experience? What does it take for companies? Are they properly set up to deliver? What is the role of culture? We covered lots of questions before even going into technology, which is a good thing, as customer experience first of all is about people with technology only being an enabler. Only then questions like: Why have platforms become important (again)? What is necessary to make them a success? Are there winning players? What is the role of a CDP in this, if any? Is there a difference between a suite and a platform, and which (hint: there is)? become important. How to make sense of the buzzword bingo between CDP, personalization, Real Time Interaction Management and Customer Journey Orchestration. There are lots of questions, and even more answers, which depend on which vendor one asks. Also, we asked about her opinions on trends for 2021, how the vendors managed COVID-19 so far and where she saw innovations and “spectacular” things to talk about – with an interesting result. But watch and listen for...
by twieberneit | Nov 26, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |
The News Today various media outlets broke the news that Salesforce is in advanced talks with Slack Technologies about a possible acquisition. The news had two effects: Slack stock went up nearly 40 per cent during trading hours while Salesforce stock loses out by 5 percent, which basically says that Salesforce investors are not so convinced about this acquisition being a good thing, whereas Slack investors clearly are. Slack and Salesforce share an integration, which is listed on appexchange since 2019. There have been speculations on Slack being a good target for Salesforce that date back till August 2016, basically ever since the integration between Salesforce and Slack got announced. The Bigger Picture There are several aspects to this news. Salesforce already has Chatter, a tool that often gets negative feedback. The company also owns Quip, which is essentially a solution for the collaborative creation of documents and spreadsheets. And Salesforce has created work.com, as a solution to increase business resiliency and to improve collaborative work. On a larger scale, and accelerated by the Covid crisis, the need for fast and efficient communication and collaboration of distributed work forces and their customers, using various means of communication is there. Actually, it has been there for quite some time, as the emergence of solutions from Slack to Teams, Zoom, etc. proves. E-mail is still very important, but only a part of this communication, which includes near instant chat, voice and video communications as well as collaborative work on documents – inside and outside an organization. Another part is, that this communication needs to be tied to business processes and enable...
