Customer Experience in Times of Remote Work

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 20, 2020 | Blog, Webinar |

Many analysts, including myself, have repeatedly written about us having entered a new normal, which is enforced by a so-called green swan event – an event that according to BIS is “extremely [financially] disruptive and that could be behind a systemic [financial] crisis” (brackets set by Thomas Wieberneit). Supply chains are broken, employees need to work from home, stores were forced to close for prolonged times, and so on. This has the potential to seriously harm the base function of a business, which is helping their customers solve their problems. Looking at the pyramid of customer expectations, businesses are often barely, if at all, able to maintain its lowest level – the level of effectivity – and are far away from making it easy for their customers or even providing them with a joyful experience when interacting and engaging with them. Figure 1: The hierarchy of customer expectations Yet, we are in an era where products and services themselves get increasingly deprecated and the experience becomes the main distinguishing factor for continued success. Still not all organizations are set up to deal with this. Most are not resilient enough to fend off or at least mitigate the disruption caused by a crisis. Some organizations are affected more than others. So are the people who work in these organizations. Salespeople cannot interact with their customers in the ‘usual’ way anymore. They cannot go out and visit them currently. Customer service professionals need to change their ways of collaboration with their colleagues, they cannot just ask their neighbour anymore. Marketing Teams cannot create and host offline events due to distance and...

Corona is over! And now? Trust, agility, and relevance are key

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 12, 2020 | Blog |

Let’s fast forward about 6 months and Imagine that the Corona crisis is over. Well, not really over, but being on a way of economic and especially psychologic recovery. There will be (yet another) new normal, a new equilibrium of life, personal as well as business. Societies, governments, economies and people have learned to deal with an unprecedented situation. How will the situation look like for businesses? And how will software vendors and consultants be able to improve the situation of their customers? Businesses were forced to a grinding stop, with obvious and disastrous results not only for themselves, but in particular for their customers’ experience. They will have seen huge losses, in spite of governments providing lots of stimulus in terms of trillions of dollars. Businesses more than ever before are facing the need to look precisely at where they spend their money and how they get their restart accomplished. Many people have seen or still are in unemployment. They need and want to contain their spending, too. Business leaders know that their situation has changed. They do know that they need to make their businesses more resilient. They surely have learned that a – to use this buzz word – digital transformation is not an option. It never was, but Covid-19 taught them the lesson that they severely underprioritized this topic. So the why and the what have been hammered down. What business leaders do not know is: How? They do not yet know how to recover and how to initiate or to continue their much-needed digital transformation. Overall, this translates into a situation of uncertainty for...

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...

Salesforce goes SMB – again

by Thomas Wieberneit | Jul 29, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

The News Last week, on July 24, 2019 Salesforce announced adding conversation channels to its Salesforce Essentials offering with the goal of giving small businesses more personalized ways to interact with their customers. As usual, you can read the press release below or directly on the Salesforce web site. In a nutshell, Salesforce adds the ability to have conversations with Facebook Messenger, to get notifications when customers comment to posts and videos on Instagram or Youtube, and native phone support. All this can get set up with the help of simple guided walkthroughs. The overall goals are to speed up the setup and to offer a path for growth. The latter being offered by the fact that Salesforce Essentials is built on the same platform as Salesforce’s enterprise applications and is essentially an entry tier for small businesses. Still, talking to Melissa Meli, Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Essentials, the emphasis is on easy.   Salesforce Adds New Conversation Channels to Salesforce Essentials, Giving Small Businesses Personalized Ways to Interact with Customers    With Salesforce Essentials, small businesses can easily adopt the world’s #1 CRM platform— designed to scale and grow with them   New social, chat and phone capabilities in Salesforce Essentials empower small businesses to communicate with customers on their preferred channels—and can be deployed in just minutes    Customers like G Photography, Mission.org and PepTalkHer rely on Salesforce Essentials to reimagine and grow their business   SAN FRANCISCO—JULY 24, 2019—Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today delivered new conversation channels in Salesforce Essentials, the all-in-one CRM solution built specifically for small businesses. Salesforce Essentials empowers every small...

CRM evolution 2019 – A Recap

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 3, 2019 | Analysis, Blog |

CRM evolution 2019 just ended. It has again been a highly interesting two and a half days filled with interesting presentations and discussions. A big thank you go to the organizers and the chairs. It has also been the first time that the venerable Brent Leary chaired it, stepping into the big footprint that Paul Greenberg has left. Unsurprisingly, Brent did very well. Of course, Paul, being Paul, was still there as a speaker with an engaging presentation, concentrating on what he calls the commonwealth of self-interest, on how to be highly successful because of applying an outside-in view. CRM evolution is part of a group event of related conferences that all happen at the same time. This year, in addition to Smart Customer Service and Speechtek, there was a dedicated event focusing on DigitalExperience. This acknowledges how important this topic, that actually touches all the other topics, has become in the past years. It also raises the question again why these four events are marketed as different events. With the possible exception of Speechtek all topics are related enough to be warranted as facets of the same. And they are, in my eyes. I do not know, how the chairs do it, but they continue to attract a number of high caliber speakers, starting off with Jarno Duursma as the main keynoter of day one, followed by a very knowledgeable Barton Goldenberg on day two. While Jarno focused on AI, which is arguably the most exciting topic these days, Barton showcased how to actually get CX profitably done using a community scenario. This breadth explains a good part...