Customer Experience is the way! But where is its value?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 28, 2020 | Blog |

These days, everyone, including myself, is talking about a great experience being the new differentiator. About product, and service being less and less of a factor distinguishing businesses. There is talk of customer experience, user experience, brand experience, product experience, consumable experiences, but mostly this is summed up under the umbrella of customer experience. With this, of course, businesses are reacting with creating customer experience initiatives, building strategies, and implementing solutions, from customer journey orchestration via 1 to 1 marketing solutions, or voice of customer programs. The result is significant investment and CEOs being convinced that their customers have a very good experience. Just that their customers tend to not agree to this assessment, which leads to a considerable experience gap. Abbildung 1: Experience Gap. Source Qualtrics What is the experience gap? At the end of the day, it is the mismatch between brand and product promise and delivery to these promises. This experience gap is a strong indicator that something is at odds with the assessment of the own performance. This might be a consequence of wrong KPIs, wrong measurements or, in the worst case, a wrong or failed strategy. It might also simply be a matter of confusing all these terms, that I mentioned above. So, let’s start with putting some stake in the ground by doing some definition work. Brand Experience On Techtarget we can read that brand experience “is a type of experiential marketing that incorporates a holistic set of conditions created by a company to influence a feeling a customer has about a particular product or company name.“ This is a very inside-out definition,...

Zoho – A True Unicorn

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 2, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |

End of January Zoho held its 2020 Zoho Days, an analyst summit, which I was happy to attend, along with more than 60 colleagues, as the only analyst from Germany, as it seems. Sadly, it took me quite a while to complete this – Zoho deserves a faster commentare. But hey, let’s look forward and get rolling. Zoho is a privately owned enterprise software company that has quietly evolved from a small software company in 1996 to an ambitious global player that serves the SMB- and enterprise CRM market with cloud applications. The company has a set of 45+ business apps with more than 50 million users, 10 data centres and counting, and is available in 180 countries. The company is profitable and maintained a CAGR of more than 30 percent over the past five years. But why quietly? Because Zoho managed its growth pretty unusually (almost) fully organically with only very minor acquisitions. Crunchbase lists one. Following this unique approach, which defies the traditional law of going big fast, the company managed to build a solid platform with a unified data model that allows it to crank out amazing software at an incredible speed, and with a track record of growth that is well in the double digits. Zoho offers a suite of business, collaboration, and productivity applications, supported by development environments, services and infrastructure. Besides CRM, the applications cover a good part of the value chain, including some ERP type of applications, like order management, warehouse management, or billing and project management, HR and accounting. These apps are built upon a services oriented soft- and hardware stack...

Clouds, Data Models, and Experiences – Three Entities, One Topic

by Thomas Wieberneit | Dec 2, 2019 | Blog |

After having covered some press releases about new releases and commenting some interesting organizational changes it is time to have a look at another topic – the need for consistency in a suite of cloud products. Consistency not only in the most obvious part of a family of products and solutions – the user interface – but the more important aspect of consistency, namely the data model. If you wonder how this relates to customer experience I invite you to read on. This post is actually spurred by a brief conversation that I had with Jon Reed of Diginomica about this very topic during one of the recent CRM Playaz episodes. Btw, if you do not yet listen in to the LinkedIn conversations of CRM Playaz Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, discussing important developments and current events in the world of CRM – then you should. Really! But I digress. Back to the topic. The question is about whether it is necessary to have a unique data model or not. And this question might be answered differently, based upon the definition of ‘data model’. There is no doubt that a unique data model across applications is very helpful, actually a necessity. Where there is doubt, is whether this data model needs to be defined on database level or not in order to be really helpful. My point of view is that it does not need to be defined on database level. This point of view might be contradicting some ‘common sense’ wisdom and the strategy that some very successful companies are pursuing, including Oracle – as it seems –...

Salesforce News on different Topics – But Hey, are they really different?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Nov 14, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

The News In the past month, Salesforce made announcements around some interesting topics. First, beginning of October, the company introduced Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases, a web tool that is targeted at helping businesses identify viable use cases and provide some information about what it takes to support it. It starts with information and videos that explain AI, terms around AI and give some examples how AI can help improve different aspects of a business.  According to Sarin Devraj, Associate Product Marketing Manager Salesforce Einstein, for time being the site covers some fifty use cases but will be updated regularly to increase the coverage of relevant and interesting use cases. The website is intended to be top-of-funnel. The second and more recent announcement was about introducing Lightning Order Management, which shall enable brands to deliver end-to-end commerce experiences from shopping to shipping. Lightning Order Management is currently in beta and will be made available later this year. Right now it focuses on B2C processes. Based upon Lightning and enabled by Salesforce’s vast partner network, Lightning Order Management offers a low code platform that helps companies to easily create order management flows, including some partner applications. Salesforce expects the number of partner applications to increase steadily. Lastly, in the beginning of November, Salesforce announced its own Salesforce CMS, a hybrid content management system designed to help easily create and deliver content across channels. Salesforce CMS is designed to be simple, fast yet flexible, and closely connected to the Salesforce infrastructure. For time being Salesforce CMS is geared towards the Salesforce B2C e-commerce solution, but shall be extended to support...

Is SAP serious about CX? You bet, and here’s why

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 23, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

The News SAP flexes its muscles. Bob Stutz returns to SAP as the new president of the CX group. In this role he becomes the successor of Alex Atzberger who held this role since January 2018, himself succeeding Carsten Thoma. In his new role Bob will report directly to Co-CEO Jennifer Morgan. The Bigger Picture Bob Stutz certainly is one of the creators of CRM, where Paul Greenberg is its godfather. He was instrumental to the success of Siebel, the company that basically created the industry and dominated the market in the early days of the millennium, till the company got acquired by Oracle. From there, Bob moved on to SAP in 2005, with the objective of making a successful business unit out of SAP CRM. Which he did. With CRM 7, released towards the end of 2007, he and his team created a very competitive product, functionally, and from a usability point of view. He also, with CRM on Demand, laid the foundation for an SAP move into the cloud. Not entirely successful, that one, as it the whole architecture was not cloud orientated, but it was the first step into the right direction. And an important one, as the whole market, led by Salesforce, went for the cloud. It was a hard transition; believe me, I was there. By then, Salesforce was hot on the heels of the then market leader SAP, with Oracle and Microsoft making themselves heard as well, Oracle hampering itself with the transition to Fusion and Microsoft at the start of its journey that created Dynamics. His tenure ended in 2010. He moved...