At the end of a year and the beginning of the following year all kinds of research organizations and pundits make their predictions. So could I but then, this year I choose to have a look at some predictions and comment on them. After all, there are predictions for all sorts of areas, including CX. So, what I’ll do instead is having a look at some them. I’ll analyse their rationale and give brief recommendations on what can be done to help work with them.

This should be far more beneficial for you than me adding my own – probably redundant – predictions for 2023. 

So, here we go! These are my top three, along with some recommendations for enterprise software vendors and their customers.

One in five CX programs will disappear

One of the predictions of Forrester Research is that “one in five CX programs will disappear”. The good news is that at the same time one in ten will get stronger. This is largely, because businesses have not yet embedded CX into their business strategy. A second reason is that CX professionals still struggle with calculating and defending the ROI of a CX initiative.

Sadly, Forrester is right. I agree and am actually a bit more pessimistic. Many business’s haven’t yet managed to tie the outcome of CX initiatives to business results. And at the end of the day, an expense needs to have a monetary consequence. This means, more revenue or less cost, more profitability. Being able to establish and defend this link is even more important in times where general uncertainty tightens budget strings. 

What to do as a vendor?

Be specific. Tell your customers what your solution addresses, how and enable them to calculate possible returns. Do not only offer software but combine them with the services that help customers achieve the goals that they use you for.

What to do as a customer?

The obvious way is to resolve the implementation gap. CX needs to be made part of the business strategy and therefore supported with meaningful and measurable KPIs. This needs to be in combination with good knowledge of what customers actually want and value.

CX practitioners need to build the ability to tie business outcomes, ideally financial ones, to changes done by CX initiatives. Where there are no consistent strategic objectives, cut the elephant into slices, identify pain points while keeping end-to-end processes in mind and set up honest business cases to address these pain points.

The power of automation gets understood

While Engage Customer reduces this to chatbots, we will see more automation. Bots, automations, will increasingly take care of the mundane. This will take the form of process automation where no or little user interface is needed and chatbots or digital assistants, where user or customer interaction is necessary. Both will lead to savings in time effort and money as they take away workloads from humans. In the case of customers, they will also increase the customer satisfaction, if implemented properly. Especially when looking at chatbots, we can see how powerful the underlying systems are when looking at chatGPT. Personally, I am already looking forward to its next iteration.

What to do as a vendor?

Automation is only one part of the game. Automation projects are crying for fast returns that are measured rather in months than in years. Where you use machine learning, make sure that your models are sound and helpful right from the outset. Offer prebuilt conversations for major use cases that can be deployed fast, very fast. 

Too many businesses don’t know enough about their own processes. This makes it important to combine process mining with process automation. Help customers identify processes, identify their shortcomings, and to automate the most pressing ones.

And above all: Don’t sell a panacea. 

What to do as a customer?

Automation always raises the human fear of being made redundant. So, the first three orders of business are communication, communication and, yes, communication.

Or else there is no acceptance.

From there on, identify the jobs that fall into the category of mundane, automate them and show the benefit to your staff. The benefit being that they can concentrate on activities that require humans. 

Don’t fall for the hype that got created around chatGPT. While the results seem amazing, there is still a long way to real world use.

In 2023 and 2024 we will see which of the notions “human helped by the machine” or “human displaced by machine” is closer to reality. 

Trust will become more and more important

This one is actually a combination of each two predictions by mycustomer and Shep Hyken. Trust relates to the transparent and customer benefit orientated use of their data. Additionally, companies going beyond just business by standing in for sustainability showing ethics, standing in for causes, increases trust. I combined them, as they are closely related to each other.

What to do as a vendor?

As a vendor, it becomes more and more important to take a stand to societal questions. Don’t do only lip service but actually walk the talk. Especially, renewable energy or use of recycled materials can also be used as a business advantage by lowering own cost. Have a stance to privacy and exhibit it in how you as a company behave yourself. In other areas this might be child labour along the supply chain or seemingly simple things like immersing into the local economy.

What to do as a customer?

There is always the dichotomy between privacy on one hand and personalization, even individualization, on the other. As a customer of enterprise software, it is paramount to implement the software in a privacy compliant way. Be clear about what data you collect and why, instead of hiding behind a lengthy privacy statement full of legal phrases. Collect only minimal data that helps helping the customer in the right now. That will help you, too. Remember, your success is a consequence of making customers successful. Technology usually allows for more than is allowed. Regarding sustainability and ethics the same as for the vendors apply. Don’t just give lip service.

One more thing

In deviation from what I wrote in the initial paragraph, here is a prediction of my own.

I just couldn’t resist.

The amount of buzzword-bingo will increase

Year over year we see the rise and fall of new buzzwords, created by analysts and businesses alike, in an attempt to become differentiable from the rest of companies around. They mainly get “invented” to create hyperbole and in the hope of becoming a signal in the noise that fills all communications channels. Prefixes will go beyond “hyper”. Different positively connotated terms will be connected to existing terminology. Recent examples include hyperpersonalization, hyperautomation or intelligent RPA. 

What to do as a vendor?

Resist the temptation. Differentiate yourself not by inventing a new shiny term for something that is not that shiny but convince with data and results.

What to do as a customer?

Don’t get fooled by hyperbole. Look under the hood and understand what is actually behind the term. That way, it is easier to compare different vendors. 

In this sense, let’s get moving into 2023!

The CRM Playaz asked me about my take on CRM for 2023. Of course, I happily supplied an answer …

So, here we are. CRM in terms of concept and software is quite mature, after all it is around for quite some time. It went through some iterations and spun out into other areas, being more transactionally focused, instead of engagement focused. This led to the creation of more software categories, termed customer engagement management or, more recently, customer experience management. This had the potential to create misconceptions and ambiguities, especially when all three categories, customer relationship management, customer engagement and customer experience are looked at. There is confusion across these terms – as there are no generally accepted definitions around – and there is even confusion when looking at the terms individually. 

That made me express three wishes and advice, one for customer relationship management, one for customer experience, and one for customer engagement.

TL;DR – if you do not want to read, here is the video that I created.

Let’s start with CRM

CRM stands for customer relationship management. I do not want to dive into the discussion about whether there is too much focus on the M and not enough on the R. This is certainly worth a discussion of its own. Instead, let me share the observation that, sadly, CRM is far too often used when actually SFA – sales force automation is meant. This is a limited view on CRM that has been introduced mainly by vendors that focus on enabling sales forces and that has gained far too much traction.

Customer relationship management, as a strategy, as a discipline, supported by technology, covers all aspects of marketing, sales, and service. In brief, it supports and enables all customer facing functions. It is therefore so much more than just SFA, sales force automation. This is true, even if only a sales oriented implementation is done. Limiting one’s thinking of CRM to sales force automation is a surefire approach to missing out on a lot of possibilities to improve the life of non-sales customer facing staff.

My wish is to not limit customer relationship management to SFA to enable us to be able to leverage all the possibilities that CRM offers.

Continuing with CX

CX stands for customer experience. It is also the acronym that is used to name a software category. Let us be clear: there is at most one person on the planet – in the universe – who is in charge of their own experience. Yes, the person that actually has an experience. In terms of businesses, this is the customer. The actual experience will differ with the person, with gender, cultural background, education, etc. And for any person, this experience may also very well be different day by day, it might even differ with the time of the day. There is so much context involved in this.

A software system cannot deliver an experience. There is no system of experience whatsoever. A software system can only enable an experience, by being used to engage with the customer with the intent of the customer having a desired experience.

My wish is for both, software vendors and -buyers to not talk of creating experiences but to think about how to successfully use software systems for what they are intended: customer engagement.

Which brings me to CE – customer engagement

Customer engagement is a bi-directional process. And as a company or an organization you have only one side under a semblance of control: your own side. You cannot control how the customer acts or reacts and how the customer engages with you. You as a business can only offer the ways and means, from which the customer does choose. This choice that your organization offers has an impact on how the customer experience’s the interaction with your organization, btw. 

As customer engagement is bi-directional with one half of the process being out of a business’ control, businesses must not consider their own objectives as the reason for the engagement. Instead, they rather need to look at achieving their own objectives as a consequence of the customers achieving theirs. The reason for every engagement, every step in it, is fulfilling a customer need, thereby making the customer successful. A customer who consistently fulfils their needs successfully with the help of a company is a happy customer. Happy customers return.

My wish is that businesses, their managers and employees, understand their success as being a consequence of the success of their customers. Creating happy, satisfied customers is the objective, not the means to become successful oneself.

In this sense I wish everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous year 2023.

It is time for a stake in the ground again.

Of late, every vendor who used to play in the CRM arena positions itself as a „customer experience“ player and claims that its software “delivers customer experiences”. This is quite a claim. It also raises a lot of important questions.

What is “customer experience”? And who is responsible for it? How does “customer experience” differ from “customer experiences”? What is the difference to customer engagement? How do they relate to customer expectations? And then there is “customer success”, too. What about customer satisfaction? Finally, how does CRM fit into the picture?

As you can see, there is a lot of scope for confusion. And this confusion has definitely materialized.

So, let’s start with some definitions

Friend and industry luminary Paul Greenberg has ventured here already back in 2015 (and before). Still, as time moves, the industry evolves, and things tend to get forgotten, let me take another stab at it. The more fundamental concepts are perhaps engagement, followed by customer expectation and customer success.

You can also watch my take on customer engagement vs. customer experience in this 90 second video.

Customer engagement

According to Merriam-Webster, engagement is “the act of engaging” or “the state of being engaged”. Well, let’s look at the verb, then. Amongst some other meanings, engage is defined as “attract and hold by influence or power” or “induce to participate”. So, engagement is essentially about interacting with each other. This is usually mutual, but mandatorily involves communication, reaching out, by the company. Importantly, this engagement can also happen the product or service itself, for instance by unpacking or using it. Customer engagement is an input. One needs to engage in order to achieve any result, whether it is the desired one or not. Of course, any engagement targets at a specific output. Some of these outputs are relevant for the customer, mainly whether the engagement solves the customer’s problem and how the customer feels in the process. I have written about this already some years ago in my article there’s no customer experience without customer engagement.

Of course, there are outcomes of an engagement that are relevant for the vendor as well. Think of advertisements, which may increase the share of mind or even lead to a purchase transaction.

Customer success

The dictionary defines success as “the degree or measure of succeeding” or “a favorable or desired outcome”. In a business context, customer success is whether applying the solution that the customer hired from the vendor leads to solving the customer’s problem. Of course, there is a little more to it, like the level of effort it requires to come to the solution. Or, spoken in terms of money, the price of hiring and applying the solution. There are lots of facets. Usually, there are a number of KPIs that help determine the level of customer success. Of course, these KPIs are somewhat influenced by expectations. If there are low expectations, the bar for achieving success is quite low, and conversely, high expectations can lead to the KPI values being set very high. As a rule of thumb, however, success can be measured on a quite objective scale.

The important part is, that customer success is one of the important outputs to the input that customer engagement is. Customer success is also one ingredient to customer satisfaction. If the customer’s problem isn’t solved there is obviously not much satisfaction. How you can address customer success is something that I have recently addressed in my post about the customer success movement.

Customer expectations

Whenever we interact with someone or something, we have a number of formulated and a set of unconscious expectations about what is to happen, and how it is about to happen. Or, in the words of Merriam Webster: We “anticipate or look forward to the coming or occurrence of” something.

Customers’ expectations are a key input to customer experience. Our expectations heavily influence our perception of how adequate an engagement is. Expectations also, and more importantly, shape how customers perceive the experience that we have during and after the engagement. Lastly, to some extent, the customers’ expectations determine what they consider a success.

Customer experience and customer experiences

First, let’s again have at a good look at the dictionary. Merriam Webster defines experience as “the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality”. So far, so generic.

Looking at customer experience itself, it is a good idea to look at two persons who are deep into this business.

According to Paul Greenberg, “customer experience is how a customer feels about a company over time”.

Bruce Temkin defines it in a bit more transactional context as the “perception that customers have of their interactions with your organization”.

In other words, customer experience is the result of a sequence of engagements or interactions. These engagements use services and goods and are designed toward achieving an individual experience as the desired outcome. In so far, I disagree with Pine and Gilmore who position an experience as an offering.

Regardless of that, customer experience is the result of individual customer experiences (note the plural) – good or bad – that the customer had with a company. It is formed by interacting – engaging – with the company.

This makes it clear who is responsible for the experience: The customer. The experience is solely in his or her realm, or as Temkin says, it “is in the eyes of the beholder”. No vendor, let alone a piece of software, can deliver an experience. Delivering an experience requires being in control of the customer’s complete context. How likely is that?

This is why both, customer experiences and customer experience, are an outcome.

However, both, customer experiences and customer experience feed back into shaping the customer expectation. This is why it is so dangerous to strive for “consistently exceed customer expectations”. The expectations will simply rise to a level that makes it impossible to meet them. This has an obvious negative result on the customer experience and customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the third output. It is mainly determined by customer success and the customer experience. It will not be high if the successful resolution is there, but the experience is poor. It will be even lower if there is no success. It will be highest if both, success, and experience meet or exceed expectations. And yes, satisfaction feeds back to expectation, too and it influences the overall customer experience. A happy customer is more likely to disregard a poor individual experience or not achieving success than an already unhappy customer.

Customer relationship management

What does the software do instead? It creates and delivers the event or the reality that gets perceived by the customer. These systems are systems of engagement and not systems of experience.

As Merriam Webster says it: They engage, attract, and hold by influence.

And here, we have the role of CRM and CRM systems. By common understanding, they have become systems to manage the business operations related to the customer. They are the foundation for good engagements and good customer experiences across all interactions. Engagements and experiences then can feed back data to the CRM systems that enable a virtuous circle via positive engagements. And the only part that can be controlled by the offering company is the engagement. All other parts are solely in the eyes of the beholder, the customer.

Figure 1: The relationships between engagement, expectation, success, experience and satisfaction

So, let’s be honest: All CX vendors actually sell engagement software. But then experience sounds cooler than engagement. And the term CX has a bit more of mystery attached to it.

Schools, universities and other educational institutions have one challenge in common. They need to constantly communicate with their students and often the parents as well.

Obviously, the students and their parents are different generations; and guess what, that means they have different communication styles, prefer different communications channels and are on different timeframes. They also have different information needs.

What they have in common is that they do have a smartphone and do not necessarily want to see yet another app on their phones’ home screens, or anywhere at all on their phones. They want and need timely information and an easy and simple way to supply information or, in the case of the students, work results. It is a valid assumption that the members of both stakeholder groups also have and use services like text and one or more messengers. Naturally, they all have email addresses. An increasing number of people also use unified communications software like MS Teams or Slack.

And, let us not forget about the personnel on the other side, the teachers, assistants, or members of the school boards.

Outbound use cases include attracting new students, ongoing information on offers and events to parents and students alike, requests for information, work assignments to students, notifications about upcoming deadlines for pending work, and many more.

On the inbound side we have requests for information, submission of information and work results, again amongst many other use cases.

And then, there is collaboration; virtual “classroom” education, townhall meetings, briefings, etc.

Given all this, how can an educational institution effectively and efficiently communicate with its two main external stakeholder groups, the students and their parents?

Without spilling the beans, the solution lies in using a CRM type of system in combination with a communications platform that can combine CTI, SMS, and other channels. There are a number of CRM systems that address education needs, but with Salesforce being the best known, let me use their education cloud as an example to start with. From here most, if not all, communication needs with the stakeholders can get organized and maintained. This provides staff with a single consolidated view on communications and interactions that happened with parents and students.

Which leaves the communications channels open, although Salesforce owns with Slack one of the prime unified communication tools. But as said, not everyone has Slack on the smartphone, so the ability to communicate by text and voice via phone that is directly integrated with and embedded into Salesforce is important. This is where ecosystem partners like Fastcall come into the picture to add the missing pieces. 

Fastcall is a communications solution that is natively built on and exclusively available for Salesforce. Fastcall allows to actively call or text stakeholders from within Salesforce as well as enabling video conferencing and screen sharing.

Incoming calls can be routed to the right recipients and callers are immediately identified. Inbound as well as outbound calls are captured by the built-in interaction logging. 

The combination of Salesforce and Fastcall allows the educational institution to reach out to registered prospects for follow-up purposes and “close the deal” by taking advantage of Salesforce’s segmentation, marketing and sales functionality and Fastcall’s communication abilities. Parents of students can be supplied with current information, reminders and status updates as these become available while students can be informed about assignments and reminded about approaching deadlines.

Classes, parent groups, meetings, events and so on could still be implemented using Salesforce owned functionality like Slack, or alternatively other tools like MS Teams or even Zoom.

Still, this way it is possible to accommodate many of the communications needs and wants of all three involved parties, the educational institution, the students and their parents, without forcing anyone to install an additional app on their smartphones. 

Data breaches, ransomware, stolen identities, collecting of data for no benefit of the customer, are only some of the things that we do see every day. There does not seem to be any privacy anymore. This makes privacy and data protection hot topics not only for customers, but also for software vendors - or at least should make it hot topics.

Apple put in some privacy controls and got chided for it by Facebook and the rest of the adtech industry. Google, with FLOC, tried to establish a technology that aimed at being able to track users in a post cookie world.

To adapt a quote of the Asterix books: The whole world tracks users and customers. The whole world? No, there is one brave company that doesn't.

All this is reason enough to have a #CRMKonvo with one of the most accomplished and outspoken protagonists of privacy in the enterprise software arena and we were very excited about the opportunity to have an intense and interactive discussion with Raju Vegesna of Zoho

The Covid crisis had a profound impact on customer service centers, on sales and marketing processes. Personnel needed to be sent to home offices with infrastructure for this not being really in place. Coordination became more difficult, especially in environments that did not base on trust already before. Morale was affected, too.

What did companies do to address the challenges that came up? With what success? Did leadership behaviour change?

We talked to one of the foremost analysts who cover the customer service and customer engagement arena: Kate Leggett of Forrester Research.

Lots of ground to cover in a mere hour. But Kate knows her stuff.

Be informed and listen to what she has to say. It is worth the time.

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!

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.

• Reach and Audience
• Contributors (who TikTok calls the Creators)
• Algorithms
• Data

Reach and Audience

Contributors

Algorithms

Data

Oracle

Walmart

Microsoft

The 7 P of Planning

• Who is part of the buying center?
• Who decides?
• Who influences who?
• Who has the money?
• What are their likes and dislikes?
• What are their interests?
• What do they want to achieve?
• What do they expect to see?
• How can I surprise/wow them?
• Who is my friend?

How to make your demo a success?

To sum it up

• Know your customer
• Know your stuff
• Get the right intelligence
• Prepare
• Tell a story
• Perform