Rethink CRM to be CEM
Businesses are in a difficult situation. Today’s customers demand more experiences and contextually relevant engagements than they are equipped to deliver. The secret behind the abbreviation CEM is more important than ever. This places the businesses on a difficult and challenging trail that they need to carefully navigate in order to be and stay successful. The business challenge is that technology helps everyone, especially customers. This is because to the increasing proliferation of consumer technology, it is far easier and cheaper for customers to implement and use technology to their advantage as it is for businesses. A director of merchandising of a 1 Bn+ retailer put like this: “By the time we catch up to technology it will have moved past us again.” Examples for the truth of this statement in the past decade include the meteoric rise of messaging services and, before that, social media, powered by smartphones that made the Internet ubiquitous. As a consequence of this today’s customer is less depending on company marketing- or sales organizations and has a far higher reach when it comes to satisfying an information need. Consequently, Google finds that a whopping 99.8 per cent of all online ads are simply … ignored. Sales representatives are on the verge of becoming irrelevant. An increasing number of studies find that customers contact a sales representative only after a product decision has been made. Other studies determine that customers are abandoning shopping carts already following a single poor service experience. While these studies often are commissioned by vendors there still are too many of them to not indicate that there is a problem....
SAP CRM for S/4HANA – News from the Customer Frontier
It has been a little more than half a year now that I didn’t update on what is going on with SAP CRM and S/4HANA (which I will refer to as S/4 from now on; SAP it is time for you to change the unwieldy name to something more manageable). What Happened – So Far As you are well aware SAP is working on integrating a simplified version of SAP CRM into S4. The original roadmap offered a first customer release of an integrated product in early 2018, based on the September 2017 release of S4. The integration was planned as an add-on to S4. The initial scope of this CRM add on for S/4 was supposed to cover what is referred to as ‘core service’ functionality. This initial release shall be followed by ‘core sales’ functionality later in 2018. 2019 then is supposed to be dedicated to another round-off release covering further sales and service functionality, including loyalty management and migration tools. Roadmap and statements also so far have been fairly fuzzy about the strategic distinction between CRM as a part of S4 and the SAP Hybris line of CRM- and CEM systems. What does the Future have in its Basket? As it seems now, the release is not going to happen as fast as planned, nor in the originally planned way. Instead, in a webinar recently held for partners, SAP ‘announced’ two very interesting changes, with the second one likely also being a consequence of the first one. SAP CRM will no more be referred to as an add-on to S/4 but, at least for the service...
Salesforce embraces the User Microsoft like – A Dreamforce Analysis
Now that the major waves of Dreamforce 2017 have settled, the announcements and a good part of the running commentary has been delivered, it is time for me to have a look at my pre-Dreamforce predictions. Having been briefed before the event but unluckily not been able to attend (nor having had the time to write this piece earlier, I now have the advantage of having had more ‘thinking time” and can put the main announcements that we were briefed on into a bigger picture. On the backdrop of an IDC study (sponsored by Salesforce) that postulates 3.3 million new jobs and an overall GDP impact of 859 billion dollar by 2022 in the “Salesforce economy”, the announcements basically revolve around one single topic: How to enable the employees (of Salesforce customers and partners) to deliver to this magnitude. They were around Easier consumption of AI technology with Einstein, and improved IoT support, Opening up Trailhead to Salesforce customers in order to support company specific learning maps Enabling Lightning, as the platform to become fully themed, i.e. embrace the customers’ brands. Although technologically different I club the ability to create and easily upload branded mobile apps to the app stores into this Collaboration using Quip, the software that Salesforce acquired about a year ago, and a new partnership with Google And in order to emphasize on the fact that they are serious about enabling people individually, Salesforce resuscitated the dot com prefix “my”. Thus myEinstein, myTrailhead, myLightning, mySalesforce, myIOT and mySalesforce got born. A topic that might be slightly overlooked is covered by two sentences in the announcement of...