Engage « A Software Insider's Point of View

Posts Tagged ‘Engage’

Event Report: CRM Evolution 2012 #CRME12

Published on August 14, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

CRM Continues To Evolve In A World Of Engagement

The CRM industry’s major non-vendor customer focused event kicked off at the Marriott Marquis in New York from August 13th to 15th. Conversations with prospects and practitioners at the event highlighted a few emerging trends:

Shift from transaction to engagement. CRM traditionally focused mostly on the management, a bit on the customer, and very little on the relationship. Major shifts in engagement strategy reflect a move towards two way conversations, unstructured information, and influence models.
B2B and B2C are dead. The notion of forced fit silos to represent a customer no longer applies. The world is rapidly move to people to people models and new systems must reflect this.
The rise of customer experiences. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience.
SaaS/Cloud Best of Breed hell is a real issue. Rapid and random deployment of best of breed solutions versus mature suites results in some basic architectural deficiencies. These deficiencies result in inefficiencies that impact the delivery of customer experience as process, data, and meta data integration increase in complexity and cost.

The Bottom Line: Customers must focus on delivering a single source of truth in the fundamentals

Customers making the shift to next generation customer experiences realize that the basic laws of physics must not be violated. Regardless of where key components reside, a single source of truth must be delivered to support next generation customer experiences. This requires a strong blue print and engagement platform that delivers:

Listening and intent
Interaction history
Master data management (customer master)
Business process management
Complex event processing
Security and identity management
Integration

Your POV.

Are you ready for the new shift to front office? What are you doing to deliver an integrated customer experience? Add your comments to the blog or send us a comment at R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org or R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com

Please let us know if you need help with your business strategy efforts. Here’s how we can assist:

Assessing social business/digital marketing readiness
Developing your social business/digital marketing strategy
Designing a data to decisions strategy
Create a new vision of the future of work
Deliver a new customer experience and engagement strategy
Crafting a new matrix commerce strategy

Related Research:

Reprints

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Disclosure

Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

* Not responsible for any factual errors or omissions. However, happy to correct any errors upon email receipt.

Copyright © 2001 – 2012 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
Contact the Sales team to purchase this report on a a la carte basis or join the Constellation Customer Experience!

Tuesday’s Tip: Why Context Matters – Forget Real-Time, Achieve Right-Time

Published on July 24, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws

The hype around big data, social media, and mobility has many folks imagining the real-time enterprise in the future of work, next generation customer experiences, matrix commerce, or the data to decisions journey. While real-time theoretically leads to quicker information and faster response times, the reality requires closer examination for three reasons:

Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience.
No human can truly handle the volume and flow of real-time interactions. The proliferation of channels and data sources creates a data deluge. Filtering is required in order to handle real-time. Workers already inundated with email, sms, and chats, really just want to get work done, they don’t want to be bogged down with more interactions.
Real time is not fast enough. Real-time is reactive not proactive. Anticipation and prediction emerge as key requirements. Reaction does not lead to a better customer experience or employee interaction. Some customers want options to make the right decision. The same customers may expect a system to remember a preference based on many factors including repetitive behavior.

Delivering Context Is The Secret To Right Time Success

Context provides the key ingredient in improving outcomes. Why? Context provides the relevancy required for not only anticipation, but also prediction. For example, offering a premium channel upsell to an upset cable customer when their cable is down, may not be the wisest idea. Unfortunately, this happens too often. The customer is already upset that the issues have not been resolved and yet the company is still trying to sell instead of resolve an issue. However, offering a free appetizer triggered by a location based service during the morning commute, may lead to higher sales as this is a right time anticipation of a dinner time offer .

The Bottom Line: Start With Seven Dimensions of Context Drivers.

More…

Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With The Real Problem In Social Business Adoption – The People!

Published on June 12, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Social Business Adoption Dependent On Employee Adoption

Social business is more than a technology decision. Many eager early adopters face challenges in adoption past the initial core team. As we move from eager early adopters to ubiquitous usage, an examination of some organizations who have failed at internal social business reveals five common barriers to adoption:

Poorly defined incentives. In the rush to convince everyone to work with each other, most organizations fail to design meaningful incentives for adoption. The reality – most folks collaborate only when they need to, not when they are told to.
Increase in actual effort. For many in the workforce, collaboration often means more work, not less work. Connectedness results in more interactions, some less meaningful than others. Increase in effort often shifts the status quo resulting in internal resistance.
Lack of choice in user experience. Time and time, people want to use the tool they are most comfortable with. For example, activity streams make sense for some folks who are used to high frequency, always on, information flows. However, those accustomed to using email as a task list and structured approach to filing information will find discomfort with activity streams.
Indifference to change. Inertia to do nothing often outweighs the calls for change. The workforce often prefers to do things the way they always have been. The workforce has seen many changes and at this point face change fatigue.
Failure to communicate the urgency. Business model shifts are not easy to communicate to the workforce. Veteran employees often develop coping mechanisms that define the new change as a reincarnation of the old change without understanding the nuance or urgency.

Overcoming Barriers Of Adoption Require A Mix of New and Classical Change Management Techniques

Despite compelling benefits to achieve better collaboration among teams, improved engagement among the workforce, and faster speed of internal communication, adoption efforts require careful design. As with any organizational change, it’s the people, stupid! The five barriers can be countered with the following five strategies (see Figure 1.): More…

Event Report: Clarabridge Customer Connections 2012 #cbc312

Published on April 9, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Clarabridge “Turns Up The Heat” On Delivering Context For Customer Experience

CEO, Sid Banderjee, opened up Clarabridge‘s 4th annual user conference to 350 customers at the Doral Golf & Spa in Miami, FL on March 5th, 2012. Clarabridge, a sentiment and text analytics software provider helps companies discern insight from their text based customer feedback and the growing plethora of social and mobile data points. The goal – aggregation of insights from qualitative analytics that transform key organizational processes in customer experience, new product development, and employee satisfaction.

Clarabridge has shown success with a Global 1000 customer list that spans key verticals in technology/telco, retail/CPG, manufacturing, travel/hospitality, financial services/insurance. Major clients include Bank of America, Best Buy, Cisco, Dell, Disney, Fidelity, General Mills, Hilton, IHG Hotels, Kaiser Permanente, Marriott, Siemens Sony, T-Mobile, United Airlines, Verizon, Visa, Walgreen’s, Walmart, and Zynga.

Some highlights from the event include:

Keynote from customer experience transformist Bruce Temkin. Bruce’s keynote discussed how organizations apply Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs to augment customer experience. Temkin highlighted his VoC Maturity assessment methodology that drills in on six key areas – detection, dissemination, diagnosis, discussion, designing, and deploying. The key quote from Bruce was “Customer feedback is cheap, actionable insight may be valuable, but taking action on insight is precious. VoC programs are useless unless you act on what you find”
Best practices discussions from Global 1000 companies.Leading brands such as Acer, Best Buy, B/E Aerospace, Charming Shoppes, Choice Hotels International, Inc., Dell Inc, Expedia, Estée Lauder, Fidelity Investments, GE Appliances, United Airlines, Sage, Verizon, Vodaphone, Wendy’s, Walmart, and Zynga shared best practices. Experiences from Wynn Parrish, VP Product Support of B/E Aerospace showd how customer management and warranty liability could be minimized. Michael Silverman at Silverman research highlighted how Unilver uses VOC for internal employee programs. One of the highlights was Jared Anderson (Best Buy) and Jonathan Sunberg’s (Confirmit) panel on voice of the customer at the leading edge/
Official details on the Clarabridge 5.0 launch. The launch of Clarabridge 5.0 provides the foundation for a customer insight data analytics hub (See Figure 1). As part of the launch, Clarabridge Collaborate adds integrated notifications and alerts. A new satisfaction scoring and sentiment transparency capability brings customer satisfaction scores into the equation to determine customer loyalty and retention programs. Many attendees expressed interest in the new theme and event detection capabilities which provide custom categorization models to quickly surface new trends. Last but not least, the natural language processing engine now supports Italian, Dutch, and Japanese.

Figure 1. Transforming Feedback Into Insight

More…

Vendor Event: Exact Software’s Engage 2009!

Published on January 7, 2009 by R "Ray" Wang

Title: Vendor Event: Exact Software’s Engage 2009!
Location: Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center Nashville, TN
Link out: Click here
Description: Engage 2009!

Engage is Exact Software Americas’ annual customer conference dedicated to sharing knowledge and ideas with the users of our award-winning business applications. With Engage 2009, Exact is offering your employees the opportunity to “engage” with our product experts, business partners, companion solution providers, and other Exact Software customers. Conference attendance will help you discover more ways to maximize your current software investment, as well as help you prepare your organization for the next generation of Exact software!

Why you should Engage with Exact Software
This conference is truly all about you, and our vision is that you will come away from this event with more knowledge about the products you currently use, more ideas for using them in unique and more profitable ways, and a clearer idea of what to expect from Exact in the months and years to come.

In addition to the strategic general sessions and informative keynote addresses, Engage attendees will also benefit from targeted educational opportunities, tremendous networking opportunities, third-party product demonstrations, and customer success stories that illustrate how other companies have deployed Exact software to improve performance, productivity, and/or profitability.

The conference schedule includes sessions that apply to all areas of your company, including your management, financial, administrative, and technical teams. We encourage you to send as many attendees as possible so your business can maximize the benefits of Engage.

Attendance has many advantages, including:

Connect with Exact Software executives
Access to product training sessions and development staff
A first look at Exact Software’s next generation of solutions
Discussions with peers that address specific solution issues
New product test-drives in the Solutions Lab

See you at Engage 2009
March 22-25, 2009
Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center
Nashville, TN
Start Date: 2009-03-22
End Date: 2009-03-25