How to add more Punk to CX
With our guest Adrian Swinscoe the CRMKonvos team walked the line between Punk and CX, discuss what they have in common. Adrian is the author of Punk CX, a book that he is not ashamed to admit was conceived after having a drink or two. Punk is a reaction to the attempt at perfection and an obsession towards technical skill that are a hallmark of Prog Rock. Prog Rock simply appeared overblown. Punk, in contrast, is not about perfection. Instead it is about doing, getting started, with corners and edges. In this sense, Adrian is a punk of CX, and his book is absolutely readable, with quite some food for thought. It is DiY style, just as punk is. But how does this apply to CX? Find out punk style. Watch this great CRMKonvos episode. Of course, we didn’t just stick to this but also looked into what are similarities and differences between CX in the US and Europe, and so much more, including the future and microphone...
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...
This is the way of SugarCRM – a CRMKonvo
In this conversation we had the pleasure of talking to Clint Oram, chief strategy officer and one of the founders of SugarCRM. We discussed 2021 trends to find out which ones Cllint does see and, of course, which path SugarCRM is following on its trajectory to becoming a platform player and participating in the #ClashOfTitans. This couldn’t be covered without discussing the reasons for SugarCRM leaving the initially highly successful path of using Open Source Software (hint: there have been very good reasons) and what it entails to become – and stay – successful. Clint related a very valuable personal story here to make his point: It is not only about having the right idea. There is so much more to it – but watch it in the CRMKonvo. It being the season, we also asked him about which trends he sees and what customers are asking for. Good answers here. The worst word of the year? “New normal”. Well, I cannot but agree here … although … something has changed, hasn’t it? Enjoy this awesome CRMKonvo....