The new year just started, so it is the perfect time to look at some data. To keep you curious: There are some interesting data points. I looked at and reviewed the success of our CRMKonvos. We are streaming live on various channels, including my LinkedIn profile, several Facebook channels including mine, the one of Ralf Korb, Korb & Kollegen as well as Tante Emma 4.0 and occasionally Kompetenztraining Ralf Korb. Of course, we are on Twitter using @twieberneit and @loneRangerCRM. Last, but not least we stream to our YouTube channel CRMKonvos.

We are live every Tuesday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. Why do I say that? Because we are serving an international audience and timing matters for live shows.

On all of these channels the videos remain available for viewers who could not make it to the live episodes.

Shameless plug: Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel!

Streaming to Twitch doesn't seem to be that successful for us. I think, this is due to being live once a week is not often enough to build an audience. And then Twitch is full of gamers, who might be less interested in the latest and greatest of CRM and CX, delivered via good discussions with our expert guests.

A hard part is that we haven't found a solution that gives us detailed statistics, like views over time, duration of the view, engagement, etc. across platforms. Means, getting this data it is all manual work. If there is anyone who has a solution for this: I am all game, let me know via the comments or ping me via my LinkedIn or Twitter profiles.

So, I did the data collection and am now able to tell you the 5 most viewed CRMKonvos at the end of 2021. 

But first, some more insight based upon this data collection:

• Quite obvious: Multicasting onto several platforms pays off in terms of reach and engagement. 
• Another quite obvious one: Having expert guest who are not only knowledgeable but who are also well known leads to an increased number of views.
• A third (and last) pretty obvious one: Hitting a nerve with a topic of current interest generates views.
• Our audience is quite divers: CRMKonvos that were successful on one channel weren't necessarily very successful on another.
• When it comes to viewing episodes at later points in time: Do not forget that YouTube is not the only important channel. Only three of the top five videos are also amongst the top five on YouTube.
• Interestingly, Facebook seems to be doing a good job at bringing videos into the stream of followers and other people. So does YouTube. LinkedIn ... not so much.
• Collaborative announcement matters as well. We are normally starting to announce the episodes 5 - 6 days in advance, using social media. When this announcement got taken up by the guests and/or their organisations, there tend to be more viewers.

Of course, own brand-building helps as well.

But now, our top 5 CRMKonvos of 2021

(drumroll)

No 5: Raju Vegesna on Privacy and data collection

No 4: One of our very early ones. Bob Stutz and Esteban Kolsky talking straight

No 3: Another oldie. A conversation about Qualtrics going public, MS Inspire and more

No 2: Initial reactions to the 2021 SugarCRM Analyst day

No 1: A conversation about Privacy shield and more (due to very high reception on Facebook)

Enjoy reviewing them. They are all worthwhile. They also show how our degree of professionalism increased over time.

Also have a look at some other ones as well. They are all available on our YouTube channel CRKonvos.

Oh, yes: Please subscribe, if not yet done.

Starting with the concept of blades we went across a number of different topics related to customer experience with our guest Denis Seynhaeve.

Denis is the CEO of 3CLogic, a company that is dedicated to 'pluggable' contact centers in the cloud, helping organizations to provide good customer experience via voice technology.

So, naturally a number of questions arises. What is blade technology (hint, it doesn't have anything to do with the blade runner but is closer to the blades used in data centers ...)? How does this technology contribute to a customer experience? Why choosing AWS and not another hyperscaler - or run out of own data centers? And, first, and foremost: Why the concentration without exclusivity on ServiceNow? Here, Denis clearly has a strategy that differs from the one pursued by Richard Rosen of Fastcall, who has an exclusive focus on Salesforce.

And, last but not least the fundamental question: How to choose the right ecosystem to play in, if one is not an 800-pound gorilla?

Answers to these questions and more in our CRMKonvo

The CRMKonvos gang had the immense pleasure to chat with Ginger Conlon, CRM Playaz alumna and freshly minted Thought Leadership Director at Genesys.

Throughout her career, Ginger has seen and and gained more than a little marketing experience, looking more at the strategic angle than tactical execution. How to build brands and messaging around brands etc.

Some fascinating questions around these topics are: Who does own customer experience (besides everyone)? Or how to create win-win situations?

Listen to Ginger who opens up her in-depth experience for us.

This was good for a lively and insightful conversation, hopefully not only for us but also for our audience. And it is not only talk, Ginger also has the data.

Ecosystems is all I say - was his post in Linkedin. And as you can imagine, this sparked quite a discussion. Why? Because "he" is SAP's venerable Chief CX Evangelist Esteban Kolsky.

Not that it needs a reason to invite Esteban to a CRMKonvo (because he is always good for a well founded opinion) but this discussion and the topic itself certainly made it highly interesting to cover some ground and Esteban is always good for a lively discussion.

What is an ecosystem - and how does it relate to the word "symbiosis" - if at all? How does one get an ecosystem viable? What is fairness in that context? Is trust a factor? Fairness? Or is that all too fuzzy?

And - spoiler alert - as you can imagine by the title: They do not revolve around the customer. I will not tell you what it is though and leave that to Esteban himself.

Best of all: Some highly interesting insight in the comments as well.

Enjoy the CRMKonvo. We certainly did!

This CRMKonvo was supposed to be with Thomas Verly, a highly experienced Sales- and IT leader. We wanted to learn from his experience how to enable sales operations. What is important, what to measure? Do you really need a CPQ system?

Unluckily he could not participate due to the heavy snow storm in Texas that caused major disruption. The good news is that Thomas and his family are safe

Now, the CRMKonvos team has more than 70 years of CRM experience. We are coming from very different angles. So, we decided to tackle the topic, making some good points.

Enjoy this episode and look forward to another one with Thomas Verly. Coming soon!

Customer Service is changing fast, but is it all for the better? Which changes did the pandemic drive? Does messaging have a value, and if so which? How about the role of agents? What changed for them? Will they see an improvement in their jobs?

The CRMKonvos team had the pleasure of a good discussion with Ian Jacobs, principle analyst at Forrester Research who covers customer service and is one of the most knowledgeable persons around this huge topic.

Shortly before our broadcast Ian and some more of us were involved into an interesting and fiercely led discussion on LinkedIn around the role of emotions in customer service. Opinions clashed, strong arguments were exchanged. Naturally, this discussion made it into our CRMKonvo - and Ian made a couple of good points about the role (or not - no need for a spoiler here) of emotions and data, and how data can be used.

In addition, we of course looked into drivers of the customer service functions, how different industries are able to engage for good experiences and whether happy agents do actually create happy customers - interesting data on that one, I need to say, but then, thinking about it, it is also quite obvious in retrospective.

At the end of the day, we also asked him about his major predictions.

Big thanks to Ian for this highly engaging conversation and his insight.

The CRMKonvos team started into the new year talking with Daniel Renggli, Director Field Marketing North at Oracle. As we all know, Oracle has a vast range of solutions across the whole value chain and is one of the few that can (almost) support a whole enterprise with its solution. Oracle was also known as a cloud laggard - a notion that got vastly changed in the last few years. And Oracle governs the complete hardware and software stack to support businesses, which again is rare in the enterprise applications world. The company's IaaS infrastructure even can extend into the customer data center, which is a very interesting offering.

Last, but not least, Oracle has a strong set of CRM- and CX applications, on premise and in the cloud, with the cloud software being established in the market in the past years.

Oracle is one of the contenders in the #ClashOfTitans.

All the more reason to talk with an Oracle representative about what is great CX and how to get there.

Being confronted with the complete CRMKonvos gang, Daniel took his stand.

And he did well.

We learned a lot. You can, too. Here is the recording of the conversation. It is worthwhile the time. Trust me.

Many CRM systems are still well in the past. They do not do what their users, especially sales people want them to do. They do not see them as helpful. Why not? What can be done to improve the situation? The CRMKonvos team discusses with Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research.

Why do salespersons rather clean the bathroom than use their CRM?

Do you know why a CRM system cannot be "sexy"?

You will not be surprised to learn that technology is only one aspect in this picture.

It’s not just the bathroom. A study that was conducted by Beagle Research found a long list of things salespeople would rather do than work with their CRM systems. For instance, waiting in line at the motor vehicles office, having a fight with your significant other, going to the dentist -- you get the idea--are all ahead of CRM. The question is why? And Denis simple answer is that all the other things are finite and have an endpoint but CRM seems to be forever or at least more long term. That says a lot. Still, people are reluctant to discuss this and it’s no one’s fault, certainly it’s not the fault of the software, the software vendor or incompetence about the purchase process. What this nets out to is that the majority of CRM in use today was designed for another time, for different business processes that have been superseded by the Covid era but that started even before Covid.

Digressing slightly, the same phenomenon could be seen about ten or more years ago. Back then businesses were trying to get CRM to the Web and they also wanted to give customers more control but many took shortcuts. Often they simply put browser front ends on systems that were previously used by customer engagement personnel with the result that regular customers didn’t understand the processes they were working in and many got frustrated and left the engagement and the vendor.

Being an analyst, Denis, of course has a view on trends and on what is right or wrong with pricing.

Enjoy the last CRMKonvo of 2020. It is well worth it.

Thanks to our loyal audience. I wish you a very happy and prosperous 2021. Stay safe!

This time, we welcomed Michael Fauscette in our virtual, distributed studio. With him we discussed what will become 2021 trends, looked at his views on the best and worst buzzwords on the market, the role of CDPs and rather communications platforms and what an actually usable AI could be.

Michael is a renowned analyst and author, with more than 20 years of experience in and around the CRM industry. He is the Chief Research Officer at G2, an analyst firm that bases that serves companies small to enterprise and that is unique in a sense that its analyses are based on customer feedback.

Given that, our discussion of course touched his upcoming book (which sounds like it will be very readable) and the role of analysts — whether they are serving their purpose well and what could be improved. Us being all about CX, the meaning of CX cannot be forgotten.

Did you always want to know what a business communications platform is and never dared to ask? Well, Michael has a good answer for you.

And then there is photography.

As usual - it is a conversation and might lead different directions. Did it? You find out!

Enjoy!

In this episode we welcomed Lars Brodersen, author, publisher, and long time CRM expert.

Lars is the author of the customer manifesto, which he wrote as a reaction to a series of pretty unsettling customer experiences, starting from soured milk in his Latte Macchiato followed by an I don't care attitude of the waitress via a horribly wrong order confirmation by a car rental agency, a new appliance breaking and the repair service being an awful long time away, or the electrician being available only after various attempts and a long awaited for package finally being lost.

It is the story of someone who moved out, just to find traumatic experiences.

All in all, nothing that we haven't experienced.

Yet, he reacted differently, by writing the customer manifesto, which emphasises on one simple truth: Companies are there to serve the needs of their customers. This is their sole reason of existence.

This "earned" Lars a spot in our CRMKonvos, with us talking about this, his books and what CRM is or should be.

Listen in to some worthwhile insight!