Zohonomics: How to make a difference by creating resources

by Thomas Wieberneit | Aug 3, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

What does it take to make a company sustainably successful? Why is it so important to combine the global and the local view? And what is Zohonomics about? The CRMKonvos team had the chance to discuss with Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho about these topics – and some more. As one of very few global companies, Zoho has made it its strategy to not build locations in tier one centres, but to go to smaller towns. According to Vijay, this is highly beneficial. The company is also doing some other things different. As one example, Zoho does not look at resources as something that is constrained, but as something that can and needs to be created! Another interesting view is the one on core competencies? What are they? And why? Will they stay static? What to do if one does not have a competency? Why does all this matter? Vijay explains this in the CRMKonvo.  tl&dr? The CRMKonvo is totally worthwhile following. In case you want a shorter version of some key aspects: Vijay Sudaram explains Zohonomics and how the avoidance of fads in favour of sustainable principles is beneficial....

Why privacy is not an option

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 6, 2021 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

Data breaches, ransomware, stolen identities, collecting of data for no benefit of the customer, are only some of the things that we do see every day. There does not seem to be any privacy anymore. This makes privacy and data protection hot topics not only for customers, but also for software vendors – or at least should make it hot topics. Apple put in some privacy controls and got chided for it by Facebook and the rest of the adtech industry. Google, with FLOC, tried to establish a technology that aimed at being able to track users in a post cookie world. To adapt a quote of the Asterix books: The whole world tracks users and customers. The whole world? No, there is one brave company that doesn’t. All this is reason enough to have a #CRMKonvo with one of the most accomplished and outspoken protagonists of privacy in the enterprise software arena and we were very excited about the opportunity to have an intense and interactive discussion with Raju Vegesna of...

Outlaw Spirit – Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021

by Thomas Wieberneit | Mar 3, 2021 | Analysis, Blog |

The 2021 Zoho analyst day certainly was different. Different not only because it was not an offline but an online event but in the way it was prepared and conducted. Apparently, the team around Sandra Lo has taken up quite some lessons that other events had to learn, too. This is kind of the advantage one has not being the first one in a season. But this was only one part of it. The second part is that the whole event was run using Zoho software, in particular Zoho Backstage and Zoho Meeting. Overall, there have been some 150 attendees with what I assume, very different levels of knowledge about Zoho. The event In contrast to most other analyst events, this one required actual preparation, as product and roadmap topics have been sent out beforehand for self-study – and were kind of “required reading”. Going through all videos at least once was an exercise that lasted more than five hours. The event itself was split into two days of two and a half hours each, covering topics from corporate responsibility via status up to roadmap topics. Day one started with a corporate presentation, the past 25 years and a view into the next 25 years, based upon CEO Sridhar Vembu’s vision and the partly interrelated themes that he sees (and builds his company around): De-Layering the tech stack, which means that within the tech stack from chip level to business solutions that a company operates, less vendors will be neededExtreme financial bubbles that we have seen and will continue to seeThe emergence of self-reliant regional economies and the regionalization...

CRMKonvos – beyondCXM: How to turn customers and employees into raving fans

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 25, 2020 | Blog, CRMKonvos |

#BeyondCXM. To turn customers and employees into fans as a possibiility to achieve sustainable business is what Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit as hosts discussed with Dr. Winfried Felser and Marc Schmid, CEO of Novadoo. Sometimes the magic of customer experience if found beyond normal processes and classic expectations and therefore individual, consumable, experiences. This happens especially if one offers a genuine and heartfelt ‘Thank you’ and with that creates an emotional bondo or relationship with the customer, instead of just a transactional one. Leading up to this: What are companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, or Zoho currently doing and how can these developments help with a Corona restart with ten times the current possibilities? Big topics, discussed in this CRMKonvos episode. The episode is in German...

Zoho Workplace – David has swung his sling

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 13, 2020 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On September 10, 2020 Zoho announced Zoho Workplace, a new cloud based product bundle that is targeted at making a workforce more effective and efficient by bundling collaboration, productivity, and communication tools into one integrated set. As a part of this release Zoho enriched the applications that are part of Zoho Workplace with additional capabilities, following the vision of driving better business outcomes easier. Zoho Workplace consists of nine tightly integrated applications that are built on a common data model and that share a common dashboard and AI based enterprise search. The bundle is “centered around a full-featured business mail and office suite”. The nine applications Zoho Workplace consists of, are: Mail for business e-mail Cliq, as a messaging system Meeting for online conferencing Connect, a social intranet solution Writer for word processing Show for collaborative presenting Sheet for spreadsheets Workdrive as the cloud based document management system ShowTime for online training and/or webinars. Zoho did a study together with Beagle Research on what the main issues with current collaboration and productivity tools are. Results of this study include that applications that employees work with are “not intuitive and difficult to integrate”. Additional findings include that businesses often use different technology stacks which hampers productivity. Instead, they want “unified solutions that streamline complex processes”. Zoho Workplace is addressing this and as a result has seen a rapid adoption, “now supporting 2 million organizations, with 15 million users located across more than 150 countries. More than 25 percent of new Zoho Workplace customers have made the decision to switch over from G Suite and Microsoft”. The Bigger Picture...