-
About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
-
Speaking at:
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
Travel
Linkblog
Photos
links for 2008-09-30
-
Berlin is close, I might be going.
-
I hope! Assuming it can attract as many developers as the iPhone, and assuming it doesn't have to be a "sex object" to be successful, how quickly can it get "mainstream" customers without going on a carrier offensive as iPhone did with 3G? Bets are still open.
links for 2008-09-29
-
A couple of hints about what the revenue model of Android apps might be. Will it come down to ads, and more ads? Given Google's obvious interests, it might - but then, what works on the internet does not translate well on the mobile side.
links for 2008-09-25
-
In an ideal world, we'd all be building things we want and there would be no need to find out what others want from it. Before that happens, we'll be gathering requirements, bullshit or not. In the enterprise space, that is.
links for 2008-09-21
-
A thoughtful analysis of the mobile space we live in. Open and closed ecosystems will co-exist - they are serving different constituencies.
links for 2008-08-24
Quote of the day
A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products. - Kontra
Certainly a well-pointed argument. I would think, though, that creating conceptual products is a way of having your engineers and designers release their frustrations from the innovation race where every victory is hard-fought yet short-lived.
Sphere: Related ContentQuote of the day
Jeff Atwood rants against Apple’s walled garden, the iTunes:
[L]inks to any sort of music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, audiobooks or anything else available through Apple’s iTunes store requires custom software to be installed on your computer before they will display thing one to you. Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on?
Yours truly has, on occasion, spit many an unkind word in the direction of Apple’s Evil Empire™. Yet Apple doesn’t cease to flourish in spite of that or any other unfavorable opinion thrown in its face.
Jeff points out how AOL’s custom “gateway to the Internet” hasn’t quite stood up the test of time.
Just wondering, though: would its fate be any different now, with the Web being what it is, a vast universe of endless choices?
Perhaps the mind-numbing complexity of the Web does indeed create a space for an orderly sub-space within it that is much more restricted but also, in a fashion, a lot more consistent and elegant
There is demand for both open and closed business models, but the trend towards more openness does not signify an imminent totality thereof; more things will become open, yet many will remain closed still.
Many will continue to prefer a padded cell to a messy jungle.
Sphere: Related ContentQuote of the day
Ron Shevlin on customer loyalty:
Switching providers — whether it’s banks or firms from other industries — is an act of independence. We switch because we can. We switch to make a statement. We switch to demonstrate that WE are control of our lives and our business relationships. [...]
Successful firms approach customer relationships as just that — relationships. A two-way street. It goes far beyond “customization” and “personalization”.
My take: having loyal customers is great, and trying to keep them loyal is a good business practice. However, as we start moving away from transactional to the relational, we should recognize that relationships aren’t set in stone and that they do end. And that it’s OK to let go.
Sphere: Related ContentHow does oil price affect CRM?
Denis Pombriant wrote an insightful piece on how the economy will change under the pressure of rising oil prices, and why CRM vendors should take that into account.
If fuel prices continue to increase — a reasonable assumption given rising demand for a limited (and most likely dwindling) supply — then we can expect more downward pressure on travel. Less travel means fewer face-to-face sales calls, and a greater reliance on technologies that will enable us to work with and administer customers in indirect settings. Less travel might mean fewer trips to the mall too, so I would expect that B2B and B2C commerce will be affected and that automatically means CRM.
We should see an acceleration of teleworking and, hopefully, a reduction in meaningless meetings and conferences - those that add little value beyond what’s already been stated in the agenda.
Likewise, I’d venture (and that’s a safe bet) a further increase of on-demand popularity. Instead of having to trudge to the office just so that you can log on to a dozen fat-client applications (or web-based, but equally firewall-protected), more and more office activities (=record keeping and communication) will be conducted online.
Having said that, I don’t see how the importance of human contact would diminish, even when it’s going to be a bit more expensive to meet. Some things are simply only going to happen when there are people together in a (physical, not virtual) room.
And so CRM is going to have to support both virtual and physical collaboration. It’s already doing both, and I suspect that, in the end, oil prices don’t represent the major shift that will steer CRM in a new direction - it’s already been happening for some time.
Sphere: Related ContentQuote of the Day
Sun’s bs on social, social everywhere:
In order to continue the growth of social networking sites, I think that users will demand some changes. In fact, I’m probably not alone in being ready for some change. The big question is how this will be resolved. I think that some of the loose concepts around federation are very useful to help solve this. Depending on what kind of personal information you want to share, some it can be quite sensitive. Because of this, you want to be certain about how it’s stored and who you’ve given that data. The idea of a feed-based mechanism with a personal datastore like a Mine! can be quite compelling. In the end, the ability to manage and track my own data is the goal. The mechanism needs to be fairly straightforward and provide the ability for existing sites to adopt the functionality. In the short term, there may not be a lot of incentive for social networking site to adopt such a mechanism but it’s crucial for growth in the long term.
Social networks (and all other organizations keeping your data) would love it if they could keep it to themselves; customer data is the Holy Grail of CRM efforts and enables reasonably specific marketing communication.
I am more and more convinced, though, that they’ll have to give in to data portability (small-letter d and p) because we are all tired, tired, tired of filling the same registration forms again. And again. And again.
It’s your data - they should come to you and take a look if you let them. And use it according to your terms of service, not theirs.
-
Recently featured
-
Stay in touch
-
Blogroll
Promotion
