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Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
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Ironic
Today, I’ve given up on Nokia - I had owned several, the last one being N6288, and although they all worked reliably, I’ve just grown tired of its mainstream-ness. So, it’s a funny coincidence that hours after having sold my N6288, I read that Nokia is buying Trolltech, the makers of Qt, which is the underlying GUI library of KDE, my Linux desktop of choice (that was a mouthful).
Is Nokia going to put out a Linux phone, forcing me to re-consider? I wish Trolltech all the best now that they’ve sold out but I am afraid they’ll become a footnote, not the driving force that will put Nokia on the technological edge again. The high-end, the leadership goes to HTC, and Nokia’s 40% market share isn’t changing it one bit.
Sphere: Related ContentSometimes, Coffee Is Just Coffee
… and rose is a rose is a … who gives a damn.
via Chris Carfi - Starbucks is now offering a $1 coffee. Say what? Shocking, yes, but not unwelcome. I crave rich experiences and am willing to pay extra for the atmosphere, etc., but there’s something to be said about $5 cup of java. I’ve been a regular of Coffee Heaven here in Prague (even better than Starbucks), and you can pay more for a latte and cheesecake there than you would for a whole lunch with espresso at a nearby restaurant. Starbucks may have started the coffee-awareness boom and it might have just realized it’s gone too far. I would certainly hope so.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Sexification of Enterprise
According to this ChangeWave Research study, summarized in PC World, there is some commotion in the corporate anthouses as more and more employees are using collaborative web technologies to get stuff done:
Overall, 39 percent of respondents said their firms are very or somewhat willing to use social software. In addition, among respondents whose organizations are already using such software, 35 percent said spending on it will rise in the next 90 days and just two percent said it will fall.
Twenty-six percent of companies currently using social software said they plan to invest most heavily in wikis, followed by blogs (15 percent), social networks (13 percent), mashups (5 percent), RSS feeds (5 percent) and collaborative tagging (3 percent).
I don’t know how you can invest a meaningful amount of dollars in RSS (other than hiring Blogging Consultants) but more importantly, I am not sure whether we should be seeing these number at this time.
If the transition of collaborative web tools into the enterprise is to have a meaningful impact, it has to occur at the grassroots level. No committees, projects or CxO involvement of any kind. These technologies are too young, and if the old wolves come and grab them, chances are they will SAPify them… make them serious, gray, bound by workflows and rules and processes.
Point to ponder: many organizations rooted in the Microsoft ecosystem use Sharepoint as their “wiki”. While I won’t dispute it’s a potent application, more often than not it resembles a static & dull intranet “page” without much employee involvement - it’s too easy for the site admin to disallow write access if he’s so inclined. Isn’t it safe to bet that a similar fate would await other technologies if they are officially adopted before they’ll have matured?
Sphere: Related ContentWill “Authenticity” be as misunderstood as the “Experience Economy”?
I quite like the term “Experience Economy” as it fits nicely into the “CRM 2.0″ vocabulary - despite the fact it’s 10 years old!
10 years ago, CRM was just another IT acronym that did nothing to help businesses relate to their customers (but did wonders to the IT consulting companies’ bottom line). I find it fascinating that it’s only now that CRM is re-discovering thoughts that have been here for some time.
CRMBuyer.com has an interview with one of the authors of this term, Joe Pine, regarding his new book Authenticity. Excerpt:
Pombriant: Has the market’s reaction to the idea of experiences been what you had hoped for?
Pine: Yes and no. The acceptance amongst certain classes of folks — particularly environmental and interaction designers, developers and marketers — has been terrific, as well as in certain industries, such as hotels, technology, financial, and, surprisingly, healthcare. I’ve had hardly any clients in the retail industry — but a lot of manufacturers that are getting into retail to create place-making experiences in order to generate demand for their goods.
One thing is really bothersome, and that is that so many folks who claim to have read The Experience Economy missed — or act and talk as if they missed — the main thesis: that, as I noted earlier, experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. So many glom onto the language of “customer experience” or “experiential marketing” rather than truly design and stage experience output. If that continues, the concept will devolve and become bastardized.
Creating experiences seems to be easier for organizations in the “sexy verticals”. I would argue, though, that it’s the rest of the economy that should be thinking of it, longer and harder. Armani will create compelling experiences simply because it’s a fashion house and does & creates cool things. A paper company has - seemingly - a much tougher job. But is it impossible?
Look at Moo.com, a service that prints your Flickr photos on paper of various sizes and mails it to you. It could be totally boring and uninspired. But it’s not. The whole process, from selecting your pictures to cropping them to submitting your order, has a certain smoothness and elegance to it, plus it works really well.
“Experiental marketing”, heh.
(via Paul Greenberg)
Sphere: Related ContentQuote of the day
[...] I will remember this important lesson by Bill Gates on leadership and communication: Take your message, your job, and your cause very seriously, but do not take yourself so seriously.
Garr Reynolds on Gates’s speech at CES.
Point to ponder: isn’t the opposite often the case - companies making half-hearted attempts at making their vision a reality, yet talking so stiff as if drowning in all their seriousness?
Sphere: Related ContentThe Fifth Column
Vinnie Merchandani writes:
Personally, I am as excited as him about gadgets and widgets and web services…but not sure 95% of the predictions on blogs need to focus on them. Because they are still early, promising but have shown very little enterprise payback - preferably financial, but social, emotional, collaborative, whatever. [taken out of context]
Indeed, cool web 2.0 gizmos hasn’t paid off to many enterprises, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t used by the enterprises. Or more correctly, used inside enterprises - by employees in their spare time. And there, the impact is social, emotinal and collaborative, and much more.
Will it disrupt the status quo, will it end the tyranny of grids and forms and grey buttons? I believe so; both SAP and Oracle are already sexifying their CRM offerings to show they, too, belong to the 21st century.
I firmly believe that thanks to SaaS (that liberated business people, long oppressed by internal IT departments), enterprise software X years from now is going to be much more usable and sexy and not that boring anymore.
Sphere: Related ContentNo good needs must go unpunished
Carrots and sticks, misapplied:
Store employee on break gives chase to shoplifter. Catches shoplifter. Store manager orders employee to release shoplifter, who then gets away.
Employee is fired for violating the “never touch a customer” rule.
writes
It gets worse. The fired employee got physical with the shoplifter outside the store, on public ground; he acted as a private citizen. Yet, the store’s spokesman had the audacity to say, “He is still considered an employee of Whole Foods Market regardless of where he was and what was happening.” Fascinating.
I’d say Whole Foods is in need of a careful customer value analysis.
Sphere: Related ContentCRM goal for 2008: do give a damn
I was shopping for a new jacket today.
It was a rather fancy thing that would probably make me slightly ridiculous, only I didn’t really care. However, being self-conscious and all in a clothing store without female escor, I had to ask the assistant her opinion.
She had two choices: praise me mightily and close the deal, or take the slightly longer route, point me to a more appropriate model/size, and close the deal. Instead, she hasn’t quite approved my choice nor has she opposed it, with an expression mixing slight amusement with hesitation, thus giving me the excuse to walk out.
Selling is difficult these days. In the economy of abundance, going the extra mile is a requirement, not an option.
Be it a bank, a mobile operator, or car dealer, I’ll go with the one who’ll not just give me a targeted offer (made in the data-mining department for 50.000 other members of my “group”) but give a moment’s thought to what my needs might be and act on it.
Giving a damn is the first important step.
Second is growing & perfecting competence. People interfacing with customers should be masters of communication skills, consultants in the best sense of the word. Yet it’s seldom the case; billions are spent on software so that less has to be spent on the “brainware”.
The day when a call center job requires 5 years of communication-intense experience and a minimum of 10 client endorsements on LinkedIn is the day when CRM will start working.
Sphere: Related ContentHappy 2008!
All the best into 2008 to all my readers!
While I don’t play the predictions game all that often, I’llnot make an exception today and instead just say I wish for some of the following to materialize:
- the social-everything frenzy to cool off a little; just get a life, everybody
- consumerish web (insert version number here) tools getting traction in the enterprise and sexifying the IT ecosystem; there’s no reason we shouldn’t demand the same attention to usability and design as employees
- the offline following the online in enabling user-driven consumer experiences preferably in sectors that are still deeply rooted in the 20th (or, in same cases, the 19th) century; end of the smallprint slavery
This blog is going to a bit more crm-ish and a little less about software as I am moving that stuff to a soon-to-be-launched site. I’ll keep you posted. For now, have a great year, everybody!
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