What the heck is Customer Centricity?
Reading the very interesting post Customer Centricity is MORE than Customer Experience by Joseph Michelli I engaged into a discussion about things centricity. The discussion basically is about answering the question “What the heck is customer centricity?” – this elusive thing. And how does it relate to customer experience and other ‘centricities’, like price centricity, product centricity, or service centricity? When do we call a company customer centric? Of course there are some usual suspects that can be used as examples to make one point or another. Is Ryanair customer centric? Aldi? Amazon? Apple? Google? Starbucks? Jiro’s sushi restaurant? Luckily all participating disputants have a different view, so there is a vivid discussion going on, from which one can learn a LOT. But first things first. Let’s get the issue of customer centricity vs. customer experience out of the way. Joseph states, that “customer centricity is a commitment or a strategy to assure the success of your customer. Whereas, customer experience is a set of customer perceptions forged across all their interactions with your brand.” (emphasis by Joseph Michelli). In brief: customer centricity is a strategy and customer experience is an outcome. This distinction is important, as not only a customer centric strategy leads to customer experiences (plural, every interaction with your brand results in an experience), which accumulate to customer experience (singular, the weighted sum total of all customer experiences over time). So, let’s assume there are four possible pure strategies: customer centric, price centric, product centric, service centric, and put a stake into the ground by briefly defining them. I call a strategy service centric if all...
The Return of the Suite
The suite is back. I have said and written that a good number of times in the past few years. And that is a good thing (that the suite is back, not that I said it, of course), because one of the major challenges with a best of breed approach is integration. The suite is back, but it is in an incarnation that vastly differs from what we knew about suites back in the times before cloud computing and Salesforce brought back a supremacy of best of breed over the suite. Integrating different pieces of software from different vendors into one coherent whole is easily accounting for one third to one half of project budgets. And this part of the overall cost for implementing new software is often plaid down by best of breed vendors. Which is not a crime, especially if the benefits of the best of breed software outweigh the cost of integration. However. Often it does not. And not openly addressing cost of integration backfires. Always. Believe me. If you research my background well enough you will find out why you should. Little hint: I am not only writing about things. Another strong argument in favor of the suite is the platform war that is currently going on. Why? Simply, because a platform is not only a technical platform. It is more. A platform consists of mainly four pieces: a technical platform the ability of turning data into insight, an ecosystem, and productivity support. And, very importantly, a necessary capability that is provided by the technical platform is integration. Some other aspects include the provision of...
Nimble 2018 – The Story continues
The year 2018 is coming to an end, which means it is high time for some interesting product and roadmap news. Here’s some Nimble news (ok, not THAT fresh anymore, I have been incredibly busy recently). For starters, Nimble released its long awaited Mobile 3.0 for Android, complementing the iOS version that got released earlier this year. Nimble unifies contacts from teams’ mobile, cloud-based, and desktop records into an all-in-one relationship manager. With minimal taps, sales and marketing professionals can prepare for meetings by quickly scanning social insights, sales intelligence, and contact engagement history from their portal device. To keep the momentum going, Office 365 and G Suite users can send personalized responses using template, trackable emails, and monitor opportunities across all deal stages from their portable devices. “People buy from the people they know, like, and trust,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “We therefore designed Nimble Mobile to give users the insights they need to build confidence, engage in productive discussions, and follow through promptly anytime, anywhere.” With this milestone, Nimble has now truly achieved a vision of being a simple, smart ‘CRM’ for MS Office and G-Suite users that works for the user. I put the CRM into quotes as this term for me and most other people relates to a stragegy or system that includes marketing, sales and service capabilities and not only Sales Force Automation (SFA). And SFA, particularly contact management, is what is at the core of Nimble. Still, Nimble combines key ingredients of the digital workplace that a mobile, sales person needs, into one single place. It provides the user with vital information about...