Thomas Wieberneit: Artificial Intelligence Trends and Applications
How Chatbots with Conversational AI Help Deliver a Great Service Experience
My last two articles of this column dealt with empowering sales, e-commerce and marketplaces and how to use them to increase business resilience by offering additional channels for customers. It is interesting (well, and a bit pleasing, too) to see that some of my...
How Marketplaces Can Help You Stay Nimble and Resilient in Times of Crisis
I hoped that, by now, we would see different news than just Corona related ones. But it sincerely ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. So, let’s continue with more learnings and consequences that we can put in action to make our businesses more resilient by becoming...
How to Digitalize Sales
Stores, offices, and showrooms were closed. Fairs and trade shows got canceled. Customers were not able to come. The salesforce needed to stay in their home office and was barely able to stay in touch with customers. The ability to sell diminished and sales figures...
Five Ways to Be More Agile in Customer Experience
You might already be sick of the topic, but of course this post is influenced by COVID-19. Businesses have been unprepared, and I ask myself: What can be done to prepare? Agility in customer experience management is a thing, a big thing. Both products and...
Sales Reps (Still) Hate CRM. Here’s What to Do About That
Salespeople really love to feed data into their CRM system after a long day, or even during the weekend. They are truly looking forward to their weekly sales call with numbers that every single one of their colleague massaged themselves. They are obsessed with...
Customer Service Done Right, With a Little Help From Your Bot
In the past weeks two independently interesting things happened. Early September, as a member of the valantic team, I attended the German SAP User Group (DSAG) annual congress. As you can imagine, this event is about all things SAP users like and also those...
Use the 7S Model for a Successful AI Transformation
Being a CRM consultant working with many organizations it is hard to not see AI as a topic that is thought about. Does it help? Where is the biggest impact? How to start? What skills do I need? These are only some of the...
Field Service in the Age of AI
How often is it that a call to a service hotline ends up with the need to have a service technician come to your place? Something like, for example, your washing machine does not work but shows an error code, so you start your...
To Fix Customer Service, Solve 3 Challenges to Improve the Agent Experience
This is evident in our everyday experience. Whether we are waiting in a telephone queue, or do not get a meaningful answer to an inquiry or are even brushed off with funny answers relating to GDPR. Who of us didn’t hear the line "Due...
There’s a Bot in the Future of CxM
Modern customer relationship management, if I may use this ancient term, is undergoing significant change. It is a change towards achieving customer outcomes. But then, whether we call it Customer Relationship Management, Customer Engagement Management, or Customer Experience Management does hardly matter. What does...
AI 2019 – A View Into the Glass Bowl
It is hard to believe, but the year 2018 is already coming to an end. It has been an exciting, yet incredibly busy year for me personally, as you might have realized by my decreased frequency of posting. First things first! Still, I would like…
Are AI-Powered Chatbots Ready for Mainstream Adoption?
Blockchain, hyped as the technology is at the moment, has not only quite some potential but has matured considerably over the past months. Still, after having critically looked at some promising use cases of blockchain throughout the last articles of this column, it is time...
How Blockchain Can Fix Advertising
The biggest asset an organization can work with is trust. Trust in a brand and its messaging, aka marketing, is what makes marketing successful and credible. At the same time, people say that there are three types of lies: Lies, damned lies, and marketing. Trust…
Blockchain and AI — Power Unleashed
Two of the biggest and most discussed topics in the past couple of years or so have been Bitcoin and artificial intelligence with machine learning. Bitcoin obviously had a real peak around the beginning of 2018. Just have a look at Google Trends. No surprise...
How to use Technology Drivers to Create Engagements that are Successful and Stick
Will we see immersive advertisements like they are in all plasticity shown in the 2002 movie Minority report (yeah, it is that old)? Will our social media status be used for ‘appropriate’ customer engagement like in the Black Mirror episode Nosedive? How will customer engagement...
Get Ready for the Rise of Voice Commerce
“Alexa, order me a package of washing detergent from my supermarket.” “Hey, Google, what are the must see spots near Kaikoura? Is there a whale watching tour next week Friday?” “Please book places for my wife and me for the 2 pm tour.” “Siri, who…
Top AI Developments and Priorities in 2018
2017 is coming to an end. That makes this the perfect time to do two things. To say a big thank you to you, my readers. I am grateful that you find my articles interesting enough to read them – and to thoughtfully comment on...
Use AI for “Dirty Jobs” and Be Employees’ BFF
There are plenty of tasks in a company that are simple and repetitive, or in the words of Vinnie Mirchandani, dull, dangerous, and dirty. These tasks still need to get done although hardly anyone wants to do them. Often they are actually not done...
To Avoid Bot Failure, Solve These Technology and Human Challenges
After becoming increasingly popular in 2015 and 2016, this year has truly become the year of the bot. Countless businesses have embraced bot technologies, built applications supported by bots, deployed bots for varying purposes. There are bots “doing” marketing, sales, customer service, bots that connect...
How AI Can Mend the Marketing-Sales Gap
It is almost an urban myth that sales and marketing are facing difficulties in cooperation. VP of Sales: “I do not get any relevant lead from marketing! My sales team and...