by twieberneit | Oct 14, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
The News In the past 5 weeks or so, there have been quite a few news items about Nimble, with the biggest product news dated September 28 and the most interesting business development dated October 11. The headlines include Nimble’s deeper collaboration with Microsoft and its channel partners, as well as product innovations intended to increase the value delivered to Office 365- and G Suite users. In particular, Nimble: Now integrates with Circleback, an AI-powered contact capture and cleaning tool as well as their business card scanner. Nimble is now able to extract high quality contact information from email signatures and to add it to the Nimble contact record. This way it becomes easier to keep contact information current. Has partnered with NeoCloud. NeoCloud is a managed cloud services company that deploys and manages Office 365. The company now bundles Nimble into all its Office 365 deals and thus offers business applications on top of its infrastructure- and productivity-focused solutions. This is based on the (valid) assumption that Office 365 users benefit from having a simple and powerful contact management platform that resides on top of the productivity suite. Has become selected by Microsoft to join its Seattle Accelerator program. On the product front released Nimble Prospector, a ‘powerful email/phone and address discovery engine that enables Nimble users to build outbound prospects’. According to Jon, prospector draws upon dozens of sources (not LinkedIn, so much he volunteered) to deliver contact information based on a company or domain name. Nimble also introduced an Add-In for Outlook on Android and, not surprisingly, support for Microsoft’s Edge Nimble also continues to pursue...
by twieberneit | May 12, 2017 | Analysis, Blog |
It has been three months since I last talked with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other. Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any other smaller vendor tools. The logical next step is to … … integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365. I already speculated about this in my February post: Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce,...
by twieberneit | Nov 16, 2016 | Blog |
Today’s customer is impatient. They want – and have the right to – get answers to their questions and concerns about a company’s products and services without being in the need to preform lengthy searches or to dig around. This holds true for pre-purchase questions as well as to post-purchase questions. We regularly see or read statistics that tell us that customers are not very forgiving in cases of poor customer service, but on the contrary are inclined to leave when encountering a single instance of poor service. If customers do not get the answers to their questions without difficulties they are moving on, no matter of the company or its size. This meanwhile has become a kind of public domain knowledge. The only way for a company to avoid customers leaving with the first bad experience is by building up and maintaining a good and credible history of helping a customer with solutions to address their needs (aka jobs-to-be-done) and by regularly providing good customer service. At all stations of the customer journey. An important part of this good service is being available to help the customers on their preferred channels, at the time of their choosing, and at their pace. Theirs, not the company’s! This includes that a customer initiating a conversation, or engaging in a conversation that is initiated by a company, may not respond in a while, or chooses to continue using another device, or both. On the other side a customer will not accept the company being unresponsive or losing information during handovers between different service agents. The conversation between a company and a customer...
