Thomas Wieberneit
Customer Experience Management and Customer Expectations
In the past weeks I found more and more articles like this one that talk about the importance of continually exceeding customer expectations to be able to deliver a positive customer experience. Only this way, companies get advised, will they achieve customer loyalty and...
A banking tale of mystery and imagination
After some investigation into SME CRM Nimble and Freshsales and travel management software traform today is the day of a reflection on customer orientation in one of the industries that managed to become almost indispensable in our lives. Banks. So let me tell you A…
Fresh wind in the SME CRM Market with Freshsales?
It appears to be demo week for me. After Jon Ferrara gave me a deep dive into the leading social sales application Nimble and I got a dive into the new travel management solution Traform by my old friend Balamurugan Kalia, Sreelesh Pillai introduced...
Nimble – To CRM or To Not CRM
After a long while I had the pleasure of chatting with Jon Ferrara again for some time, covering things CRM and, of course, Nimble. As you may know Jon is a long time CRM veteran who released his first product named Goldmine back in...
Microsoft, Quo Vadis? You are the last one to the Party!
Salesforce acquires DemandWare. Lots has been written about the acquisition itself, so I will not comment on the fact itself. Instead I will ponder about implications on Microsoft. After all Microsoft is the remaining of the big CRM players that does not have an ecommerce...
Go Digital or Die – CRM Evolution 2016
CRM Evolution 2016 – Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning,…
Bots can kill Customer Experience
Bots are all the rage currently. By the looks of it they are at the peak of the hype cycle. We will see their deep fall into the trough of disillusionment soon. After all the well-known examples based on the Facebook messenger are somewhat...
Value, Relevance, Convenience – The Future of Retail
the Future of Retail is, well, interesting. Retailers today face an increasingly fierce competition. This competition is both, between brick-and-mortar retailers as well as between online-retailers and brick-and-mortar. Amazon, for example, is eating an increasing share of department stores’ lunch. It already now is...
Measure Customer Experience – But Don’t Over-Engineer
You have determined for your SME business that you want to improve your customers’ experience.But you do not know how to measure it. And you want tangible results fast. And you want to contain the risk. After all there is nothing more risky than a...
Customer Experience, Customer Engagement and CRM – Think Big, Act Small
This is the second post in my mini series about continuously improving the customer experience and customer engagement in the triangle of Customer Experience Management (CEX), Customer Engagement Management (CEM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Well, actually the third, if you include my guest...
CxM and PoS – A Tale of two Cities
CxM and PoS, these are two protagonists of an ever continuing story. It comes in many different flavours but it essentially is about change vs. stability. On one hand we have the PoS, the contender, a long time best hated friend of the retailer, an...
Digital Transformation. Heck, YES! But why?
Digital Transformation, much like customer journey mapping, customer engagement, customer experience management, is all the rage at the moment. Everybody – and their dog – talks about it. Including me … but then I think the term is widely overused. The other ones, too. Many companies…
Top 5 Tips for Retailers to connect with their Customers
Customer Loyalty A few days ago I was asked for my top 5 tips for retailers on how to connect with their customers, limited to 100 words. For a topic that one could write a novel on … Well, here is my answer: - Help…
What is key to the success of (social) CRM?
Inspired by a blog post by Dr. Harish Kotadia I started to rethink about what the real key success factors for a social CRM strategy are. Harish used Walmart as an example, based upon their introduction of the "local" Walmart on Facebook. Walmart, being...
Customer Service – the Great, the Bad, and the Ugly
We recently read Peter Shankman's raving experience report about Morton's Steak Houses where essentially the management of the restaurant chain went out of their way to provide a loyal, valuable (and influential on the web) customer with a surprise meal after he jokingly tweeted...
Social CRM – A customer oriented view on the state of affairs
I have spent the last week talking about CRM and SCRM to three retail companies. They cover different, although overlapping ranges and are of very different organizational maturity states. They are also on different positions on both, the CRM and SCRM scales. What they...
The future of CRM
A few days ago @MarkTamis called me with a question: "Where do you think CRM heads to in future?" Uhhm, not that simple a question. It really forced me to think as all those thoughts, observations and discussions of the needed to be brought...
Social CRM needs a CRM system, doesn’t it?
Some days ago Bob Thompson interviewed Graham Hill about his take on Social CRM. The interview covered a lot of topics, most notably the future of Social CRM about which Graham has a particular view and led Bob to ask the question whether it...
Social Shopping = Groupon? Nope, this is only the beginning.
Some time ago my wife Nicole posted a small series of blogs about the topic of Loyalty on ciber.com. In these readable blogs she identified and summarised three main strategies of acquiring loyal customers, which are • Every day low price • Classic loyalty programs…
Social Shopping – A Retail Future
A while ago I blogged about threats and solutions in the retail industry that have their origin in rise of social media; with this post I would like to continue on this topic, focusing on possible solutions for retail companies. This blog also ties in...