CRM evolution 2019 just ended. It has again been a highly interesting two and a half days filled with interesting presentations and discussions. A big thank you go to the organizers and the chairs. It has also been the first time that the venerable Brent Leary chaired it, stepping into the big footprint that Paul Greenberg has left. Unsurprisingly, Brent did very well. Of course, Paul, being Paul, was still there as a speaker with an engaging presentation, concentrating on what he calls the commonwealth of self-interest, on how to be highly successful because of applying an outside-in view. CRM evolution is part of a group event of related conferences that all happen at the same time. This year, in addition to Smart Customer Service and Speechtek, there was a dedicated event focusing on DigitalExperience. This acknowledges how important this topic, that actually touches all the other topics, has become in the past years. It also raises the question again why these four events are marketed as different events. With the possible exception of Speechtek all topics are related enough to be warranted as facets of the same. And they are, in my eyes. I do not know, how the chairs do it, but they continue to attract a number of high caliber speakers, starting off with Jarno Duursma as the main keynoter of day one, followed by a very knowledgeable Barton Goldenberg on day two. While Jarno focused on AI, which is arguably the most exciting topic these days, Barton showcased how to actually get CX profitably done using a community scenario. This breadth explains a good part of the value CRM Evolution and the sister conferences bring. There are just too many experienced practitioners and thought leaders to ignore this conference. This does not only show during the presentations but also events like the ‘breakfast with influencers’ that traditionally happens on day two, the various panels, and the interesting new format of a closing town hall meeting, where every attendee participated as an equal. This is truly a good idea. From a numbers point of view, hoping that I get them from organizer Bob Fernekees, my impression is that the numbers have been up from last year, especially on the Customer Service and Speechtek side of the house. On the other hand, the noticeable change in sponsorship that was already visible last year continued. Of the big brand name only SAP is left. OK, well, Google Cloud being a Diamond Sponsor of the overall event is not exactly an unknown either, which also shows the increasing importance of AI in the customer-facing world. Zoho stepped up as a Diamond Sponsor, too, showing the ambitions of this exciting company that has set out challenging the big four. From then on we see Freshworks, Zendesk and Twilio as sponsors with a brand that is more broadly known. All the other ones, interesting as they are (or may be), are more or less niche players – sorry, if I now stepped on someone’s foot. This is also reflected in the exhibition hall. Although it was vivid at times, vendors I talked with did not see much purchasing interest and some even doubted whether the presence was worth the expense. My interpretation is that this is because this conference is more of a networking and brand-building event than a lead generation event. There may have been some leads, but I do think that people are there for learning, not for purchasing. Having said this, I think that SAP missed an opportunity to create more share of mind, something that SAP needs in comparison to especially Salesforce and Microsoft. How can it be that a panel about AI in customer facing applications consists of Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce only? I do know for a fact that SAP has a lot of good things to contribute here. And they need to do this more. Especially Salesforce and Microsoft can afford being less present, because they already have the mindshare and, frankly, some speakers clearly have their background here. So, what have been my three highlights of this year’s CRM evolution?

• Different presentations and panels show that (Conversational) AI and machine learning are of high interest, not as technologies but embedded into business applications. This shows that the vendors are going the right way
• The intersection of marketing and sales is a topic for businesses. There is a good interest amongst the attendees and speakers delivered different and good perspectives on this field of tension
• Organizations seem to struggle with the same issues they had ten years ago. Data silos, organizational silos, inertia. This means that they are still a ways from implementing truly helpful solutions, because they do not have a strategy, not even talking about a plan. What is also lacking is the ability to acknowledge culture as an important driver to achieve this necessary change. This became abundantly clear when the extremely knowledgeable and persuasive Silvana Buljan had an audience of just six people for her highly interesting talk about how to use a cultural transformation program to increase employee satisfaction and then sales.

 

Just back home from CRMEvolution it is time to do a little recap on this year’s instance of the conference. This year the conference was co-chaired by Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, two of the most accomplished independent analysts and influencers around. And also two great persons! It is with a sad I that we see Paul saying good-bye to chairing the conference after 2018 but then Brent is likely to be a very good successor. It will be interesting to see where he will add his style, connections, and background to the conference. This year, we have seen an Amazon keynote for the first time, which I reckon is one of the first marks Brent set as a chair.

CRM Evolution: The Main Themes

This year there have been some main themes; none of them really surprising, if one follows the industry: It is all about people, not about technology. And in order to successfully get things done in the coming years people need to ‘unlearn’ a thing or two, in order to become open for solving challenges in the novel ways that are required. This point was already hammered down in Brian Solis’ opening keynote. Iteration (doing the same in a better way) doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. Thriving in future will require more innovation (doing new things) and increasingly disruption (doing new things that make the old ones obsolete). At the same time it is crucial to keep one’s audience in mind. AI, machine learning, and with it chat bots are taking centre stage. Customer as well as user engagement needs to be in real time and engagement needs to be frictionless across channels. People do not think in channels. They just communicate. This seamlessly leads to the next main theme: People communicate ideally using voice. This was made abundantly clear by Brent Leary in his session and also by the Amazon keynote featuring Cloud Connect, Amazon’s cloud based call centre, which heavily relies on AI services, including speech understanding and speech generation. Lastly, engagement, engagement, engagement. This was covered in various tracks under various names, and different levels of detail. The topic was covered by Brian Solis, or me as well as Paul Greenberg, or Brent Leary, and also was a major part of the closing sports panel, which to quite an extent was about how to effectively and efficiently interact with fans in order to improve their experience. Sports clubs have powerful means at their hands, which can be exciting – or outright creepy if not used wisely.

My 3 Main Learnings

Nice and brief:

• GDPR now becomes a topic across the planet. Coming into full effect on May 25, 2018, the regulation seems to make people nervous now. This confirmed earlier impressions that by far not every company feels (or is) well prepared.
• Systems, now more than ever, need to help people, customers as well as employees, get their job done.
• AI technologies are a big helper when it comes to overcoming the data problem that companies have. Humans do no more have the bandwidth to identify the needle in the haystack in the required reaction times. However, AIs are – and will continue to be for the foreseeable future – will not be able to get anywhere near human capabilities of hard problem solving. This means that there are very good avenues for combining human and machine strengths.

Final Impressions and Thoughts

As usual this conference has been more of a networking event than a vendor event. CRM Magazine again managed to line up a number of great speakers, including Brian Solis as the main keynoter. There have been just too many great minds as speakers and attendees to name them all. They know, who they are. All of the sessions I attended were thought provoking and gave a vendor independent insight into their topic – apart from the equally valuable vendor sessions, that is. Also, as usual, the conference was co-located with SpeechTEK and Smart Customer Service. This year, more than even last year, I ask myself why there is a construct like this and whether these three conferences should actually get merged back into a single one. Customer Service is a part of CRM. This year’s CRM evolution was to quite an extent also about speech technology, digital assistants and smart speakers. Having said this, CRM Evolution was enlightening and fun, especially the interactive sessions, including the breakfast with influencers, the GDPR panel and the customary closing panel with sports executives. I haven’t got any numbers but my gut feeling is that the attendance of CRM evolution has been lower than last year with the overall attendance of the conferences having been about the same. However, what was very noticeable, was the small exhibition and the absence of some key sponsors. In 2017 we have seen Salesforce as a diamond sponsor, Microsoft along with SAP Hybris and Thunderhead as platinum sponsors plus nine gold sponsors. In 2018 we have seen Convergys as diamond and keynote lunch sponsor (2017 only keynote lunch sponsor), SAP Hybris and X2CRM as platinum sponsors, followed by 8 gold sponsors. No Salesforce. No Microsoft. SAP was not present with a booth on the exhibition floor, but was present with a good solution session, Gigya participation at the GDPR panel and some experts to talk to. In 2017 they had a big booth and interviewed a number of influencers and analysts including myself about various interesting topics. Salesforce was present with a number of analyst relations people, plus Vala Afshar, their Chief Digital evangelist, and other ranking participation, including the GDPR panel. Thunderhead was available with executives, analyst relations and participating at the important GDPR panel. Other vendors I talked to did not see buyers at their booth. No wonder. CRM Evolution and its sister conferences are about thought leadership more than anything else. And the chairs of all three conferences have done a good job in attracting renowned speakers. Just look at the list, I mean, it is incredible. Talking about booths: The exhibition has been the smallest that I have seen since I attend CRM Evolution. In my eyes CRM Evolution is one of the most important events of the year, because it is vendor independent. Yet my, and other attendees’ perception is, that there is something that needs to get changed in order to continue on the success of this conference. But what change would help advancing the conference? I cannot answer this question at the moment other than thinking that consulting companies might make a good audience for sponsorships, as many attendees do not seem to use the conference for software selection but rather for getting insight and advice. Having said all this: April 29 – May 1 are marked in my calendar. This is when CRM Evolution 2019 will take place.  

Today’s businesses are in a difficult situation. Their customers demand more experience and contextually relevant engagements than they are equipped to deliver. This places them on a difficult trail that they need to navigate in order to be and stay successful. Their challenge is that technology does help everyone, especially their customers, because, also thanks to the consumerization of technology, it is far easier and cheaper for customers to implement and use technologies. Good technology examples of the past decade include the meteoric rise of messaging services and, before that, social media. As a consequence of this today’s customer is less depending on company marketing- or sales organizations and has a far higher reach when it comes to satisfying an information need. Consequently, Google finds that a whopping 99.8 per cent of all online ads are simply … ignored. Sales representatives are on the verge of becoming irrelevant. An increasing number of studies find that customers contact a sales representative only after a product decision has been made. This was a topic that was already discussed during CRM evolution 2016. Other studies determine that customers are abandoning shopping carts already following a single poor service experience. While these studies often are commissioned by vendors there still are too many of them to not indicate that there is a problem. After all there is bound to be a fire where there is smoke. The 1990’s customer was happily working with and believing in corporate messaging that got delivered via unidirectional channels like TV, radio, or the newspaper. Today’s customer uses available technologies and is always online, digitally connected and socially networked – and trusts peers, ‘people like me’ far more than corporate executives, -spokespersons, or consultants/analysts/influencers. This trend is clearly shown by the changes in the Edelman Trust Barometer and it gave birth to notions like ‘a company like me’ or the debatable one of the customer being in charge. Customers are using available technologies to navigate their own buying journey, which stretches across devices and channels, is non-linear and proceeds at the customer’s pace. They are simply following their own preferences, not a company’s. Yet customers have some demands to the companies:

• They want the company being available on their communications channel of preference
• They want the company to know more about the product or service that they are inquiring about than they already know themselves
• They want the company to know and address their intentions and not being bombarded with irrelevant and out of context messaging. Information they volunteer to the company needs to be used to their benefit
• At the same time they do not want their data being used outside the boundaries of their interest. They do not give a perpetual license to use their information

Companies need to address this by offering a menu of interlinked touch points that collect the right data and offer meaningful data in real time, so that the customers can proceed on their journey with minimum friction and loss of time. Those companies that succeed in building this menu have a good part of a foundation for engaging in a way that results in good experiences. Of course this foundation needs to also include non-technical aspects like people, process, culture. Does this work? Studies show that concentrating on good customer experience can be linked to tangible business benefits, like higher customer retention, higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty and revenues. It is definitely worthwhile concentrating on engaging in a way that results in good experiences. Yet, the supporting IT landscape at businesses is highly fragmented with different, unconnected applications supporting different channels. This leads to inconsistent data, duplication of data, broken processes, frustrations, and ends in poor customer experiences. Some examples:

• Vinnie Mirchandani found in his book SAP Nation that more than half of all SAP shops run more than 40 satellite applications. And there is no reason to believe that Oracle- or Microsoft- or other vendor’s shops are any better off.
• A 2015 Forrester study found that the average marketing department runs 15 applications

The ideal landscape looks different, more consolidated. It requires the company’s systems of engagement and systems of record being based upon a common platform that offers integration services, analytics, AI and machine learning, amongst other services. This platform can also be called system of intelligence (thanks to friend Abinash Tripathy from Helpshift for this term), and manages data persistency on the data layer, which may consist of multiple harmonized databases. This way, signals coming in from the customers can be reacted to with contextually relevant engagements while the machine learning layer takes care of continually optimizing the necessary personalization. Continuous learning leads to continuous improvement. While this is an ideal situation a number of case studies that I gave as part of my CRM evolution presentation clearly show that it is possible to improve engagement capabilities for better experiences using a Think Big – Act Small approach that aligns strategic and tactical requirements. The case studies that all depict individual digital transformations

• An Australian based mid-sized retail company targeting higher systems resilience and systems simplification
• A city council that streamlined systems and processes
• Microsoft Outlook Mobile, embracing Helpshift’s mobile in-app support technology
• A Swiss based food retail cooperative that embarked on an omni-channel journey with the help of movento

show that companies need to consider four aspects to achieve success in their digital transformation. In every case, with different emphasis, there was a keen focus on platform, stakeholder involvement, prioritization, and data. The strong platform builds the core for nimble business applications. Stakeholder engagement is key for delivering value to internal as well as external customers and allows for prioritization and regular reprioritization, which happens based upon a strategy and is supported by solid data. This is the transcript of my speech at the 2017 CRM evolution, which, as a conference, I reviewed earlier. You can download my presentation from here. (Disclaimer: Helpshift is a customer of mine and movento is a company I work for; they have provided me with information on two of the cases but did not influence me other than making sure that I did not disclose private information)

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAP’s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAP’s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes.

First Things First – After All I Am A CRM Guy

Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAP’s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many of these customers are net new customers. The challenge is that S4/HANA doesn’t have a CRM (yet). I have earlier already suggested two ways how this could change – marrying up the SAP Hybris family of modern CRM solutions or modernizing SAP CRM and integrating it into S4/HANA based upon HANA technology and therefore avoiding the costly CRM Middleware and data duplication. Both approaches have their merits: The cloud based SAP Hybris set of solutions is far more modern and already bases on the new SAP standard Fiori user interface. SAP CRM, on the other hand and despite only minor investments into it in the past years, is still far more powerful in many areas, and has a good installed base. It turns out that SAP decided to merge SAP CRM into S4/HANA. This is not really a surprise for me, rather a confirmation of what I earlier heard through the grapevine. SAP is working on it for a while now as this is no minor piece of work. It includes replacing the CRM Web UI with a Fiori-based UI, adapting the main business objects, especially the customer and the business transaction, on both sides, removing CRM Middleware and replacing it with a combination of merged data models and HANA views. The latter means that there still is a kind of middleware, albeit a much simplified one, which hopefully over time can vanish altogether, following the 15 year old vision of Hasso Plattner to be able to create business applications by recombining business objects. I do expect the first release of a (renamed?) S4/HANA that includes CRM capabilities in early 2018. There is no real rush for it, if SAP provides a migration path. It is more important to get it right in order to not antagonize already nervous customers. On the other hand I do not expect a full CRM being migrated in the first instance. For example marketing: With Hybris Marketing (formerly known as Customer Engagement Intelligence) SAP In the past years has built a fairly strong solution and continues to invest into it. Hybris Marketing, furthermore, is capable of running on-premise and in the cloud. It can be used in combination with both, an S4-based CRM and SAP Hybris. The main advantages of merging SAP CRM into S4/HANA are that this approach

2025. Opens a future roadmap for current SAP CRM customers that stretches beyond 2025. These customers else are at risk of defecting.
2026. Provides the continued chance for customers to run their SAP instance on-premise. According to Volker there are still a good number of customers that do not want to run their instance in the cloud. The key word here is choice.

Now What About SAP JAM?

SAP Jam has been a success story for SAP. Guided by Sameer Patel, SAP early on discovered that collaboration is key to successful business and to being able to engage customers in a way that results in good experiences. In order to achieve this, Jam is deeply integrated into both, SAP CRM, and the SAP Hybris set of solutions (and others, which I do not look at here). It, for example, drives the review- and community-functionalities in Hybris e-commerce. And it is exactly here, where we can expect further exciting things. Think about combining this with a bit of AI, a bot, and a knowledge base. This way a customer’s search query can first hit the KB and present a relevant result to the customer. Or, failing that, it can route the request to an agent for further processing, who is already informed about the failed search and can initiate an ad-hoc collaboration with potential experts who helps answering the customer’s inquiry. Human-machine collaboration is certainly a topic that is high on SAP’s priority list.

My Take

The CRM Part of the Equation

I think that it is a wise decision to merge SAP CRM into S4/HANA. SAP CRM has an installed base and customers that are at risk of defecting, lacking a roadmap. It also has a lot of very valuable industry-specific functionality that simply does not exist in SAP Hybris – and probably will never be there. Modernizing SAP CRM, putting it on HANA, merging it into S4, while making it ‘cloud-ready’ therefore seems to be a very good way. However there are some cautions that need to get considered! For SAP this means that there will be two different code lines – “S4CRM” and the SAP Hybris set of CRM solutions – that need to get maintained. This is a pretty costly adventure. In order to minimize the redundant efforts as much functionality as possible needs to get modularized in a way that it can get used with both core solutions, S4/HANA, and SAP Hybris. This does not only affect Hybris Marketing but also solutions like Retail Execution or Trade Promotion Management, to count only two. Proper positioning is also an issue. Having two different solutions always has the inherent risk of confusing customers; and SAP does not have a real good track record in properly positioning solutions in a way that minimizes this confusion. And here we have the added layer of on-premise versus cloud.

Jam and Collaboration

Human-Machine collaboration is a ‘thing’, especially in times like these where structured knowledge, unstructured data sets come together in very huge amounts that can no more be handled by humans. SAP seems to have understood this and bases further improvements on the groundwork that has been done in the past years. SAP probably just needs to spread the word of what they are doing a bit more actively. I certainly would love to hear more.

Overall

Looking into customer facing functionalities SAP is back on a good road for a while now. On-demand CRM seems to be competitive sine around the second half of 2016 and the strategy becomes more clear as well. Giving on-premise customers an outlook beyond 2025 was the thing to do. Next items on my wish list for SAP to do are getting more into detail on how the CRM road goes. While the target sector is clear now there are bunches of open questions, as mentioned above. Secondly – and although it is somewhat refreshing that SAP does not jump onto the “I am so AI” bandwagon – SAP needs to do something here to not appear as a laggard, which the company certainly is not. I am sure that SAP can manage to make their mastership of AI and machine learning more clear than they are doing now while continuing to make clear that both are means to an end: More intelligent business applications that help businesses optimizing and automating their processes, while personalizing employee and customer interaction and engagement. A good first step into this direction could be getting rid of CLEA as a name. ‘Einstein’ and ‘Leonardo’ paved the way – how about Marvin?

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, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The CRM Evolution 2016 conference, organised by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the conference appeared to be bigger than the years before it all seemed more intimate, but not crowded, which probably can get attributed to a good choice of venue. The event being vendor independent is only the icing on the cake. In my eyes this is the one CRM related conference that one must not miss. In contrast to last year I attended CRM Evolution only, which in retrospective was a mistake. But let’s have a look at the conference themes.

There is no CRM without Customer Engagement and good Customer Experiences

In the opening key note Dennis Snow told us about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three simple rules

1. Design your processes with the customer in mind, not with internal/operational priorities; look through the lens of the customer
2. Pay attention to details
3. Create little “Wow Moments”. These add up to a lasting great experience and are easier to achieve than single “big” experiences.

To me the most important message that Dennis conveyed is that the simple things and consistency are what matters. Consistently provide little experiences throughout the customer life cycle. He underpinned this with some examples from the ‘ordeal’ of getting out of the park and back into the hotel. Everybody is exhausted, kids may be edgy, riding the bus is usually not fun. What about the bus driver singing some songs or doing a little trivia? The rooms showing some little surprise, like specially folded towels? Another of his core messages was that a company gets loyalty and advocacy only by creating those “wow” moments mentioned above. For this to be effective, however, it must not fail at base priorities. Customer expectations can get mapped to a pyramid. Every customer expects accuracy and availability. These are just the baseline, however. If a company fails at these then there will not be a good customer experience. There is also no chance to create wow moments in these layers – only negative ones. Opportunities for wow moments lie at the top of the pyramid, where a company can become a partner or ultimately become a trusted advisor. The latter was also emphasized upon by other speakers and during the panels; e.g. when it comes to selling it is now paramount to become a part of the customer’s network of trust. Michael Fauscette provided some survey data showing that vendor sales professionals are about the last ones to be influential to purchasing decisions and they nearly 2/3 of all surveyed companies agree that they engage with a sales person only to seal the deal after the decision has been taken. On the other hand, even more would appreciate being engaged by sales persons with relevant and contextual information. This currently does not come from vendors. Denis Pombriant had some good words to say about this from a loyalty angle. He started off with the observation that due to poorly implemented loyalty programs around 6.2 trillion dollar get wasted per annum due to customer churn etc. His basic conclusion was that a company cannot buy customer loyalty anymore but needs to earn it via superior engagement and providing a superior customer experience.

Go Digital or Die

The second big topic was digital transformation. Digital transformation can be defined as ‘the realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy”. The consensus opinion can be summed up as ‘go digital or die’. This message was hammered home in his usual refreshing style by Ray Wang and, from a more organisational maturity point of view by Brian Solis during his day 2 keynote. Brian Solis looked at digital transformation from organisational maturity and people points of view. He started off stating that one is on the wrong end of innovation when waiting for someone else to tell what needs to get done. Innovation, also digital innovation and innovation in customer experience, starts from within: Observe, believe in it, act! Similar to Dennis Snow the day before Brian Solis makes it a strong point that innovation in customer experience is about making the company “conform to expectations and aspirations of people instead of making them conform to assumptions or legacy investments and processes”. If people look for shortcuts, then the designed experience is wrong. Ray Wang stated that digital disruption is not about a technology shift but that it is about transforming business models and how businesses engage with their customers. In his opinion products and services will become less and less important. Business models will shift to sell outcomes or customer experiences, which are fed by data that is converted to insights. This will also allow for developing business models that couldn’t be imagined before. He provided a few examples like Symmons Industries who built a business model around sensor driven shower heads. These shower heads help hotels mitigating a derailer of the experiences they provide while allowing Symmons Industries to move competitors’ parts and services out of hotels that use their shower heads.

Tying it Together

The connection between customer engagement and customer experience on one hand and digital transformation on the other hand is insight. Insight is data converted to actionable knowledge. In so far predictive analytics, machine learning, and Internet of Things are the glue. The ability to meaningfully engage with relevant, timely, contextual information (at every touch point, if it is allowed to add yet another buzz word) requires data and the ability to do real-time predictive or, in the words of Ray Wang ‘anticipatory’, analytics. Ray Wang defines anticipatory analytics as predictive analytics plus machine learning. Personally I’d rather think that this is an unnecessary distinction that probably will vanish soon. Predictive analytics will embrace machine learning instead of relying on static models. The necessary data comes from all types of sources, traditional ones as well as from an increasing number of sensors – the Internet of Things. How to strategically put all this together was covered by various speakers, including Barton Goldenberg, who places the CRM system as the hub of a number of systems that jointly implement a coherent strategy. Sheryl Kingstone looked deeper into how to use especially predictive analytics to achieve better customer engagement by delivering contextualised and personalised experiences consistently across channels. Volker Hildebrand from SAP succinctly said that “marketing has become a weapon of mass distraction” and that companies need to deliver reliable, contextually relevant, and timely information in a way that is convenient for their customers – or else they face the risk of getting out of business. A path of getting step-by-step to a very consistent and successful customer engagement in the retail world that combines online- and offline behaviour was also presented using the CRM approach of General Mills as an example. I found this one very impressive. Amy Halford and Molly Hjelm who presented also emphasised that “CRM is responsibility”, meaning that CRM is not only about getting customer data but also about giving back to customers, which nicely ties into Denis Pombriant’s findings that customer loyalty needs to be earned. They also put an emphasis on one theme that I haven’t heard much about in other tracks: Data Quality! Data needs to be invested into in terms of quality and tagging in order to be really useful for CRM processes.