Given this title, you probably wonder what the relationship between a suitcase and customer experience could be.

Well, I don’t know, too, and this story is more about how a suitcase and customer experience are related to each other.

Imagine the following not so uncommon scenario: you are on a multi sector flight, one of the early sectors is delayed. You barely make your last sector – your check-in luggage doesn’t. It takes a detour to your destination airport instead.

Sounds familiar? I would be surprised, if not.

And it shouldn’t be a problem as there are well established procedures to report this and to get a more or less timely delivery of your delayed luggage. Or so you think.

The good news is that the airline (kudos to AA at this point) proactively informed about this situation via text already in flight. With this, there is no lengthy wait at the belt that ends in a disappointment but a direct way to the airline counter to organize the delivery to your hotel. So, you give some details including the hotel that you are going to stay in for the next days. The service person announces the suitcase’s arrival for probably today and likely tomorrow. For the sake of the story, “today” means Monday, so, “tomorrow” is Tuesday.

Not ideal, but fair enough, given that the suitcase will likely be handed to a package delivery service and not transported individually.  Time to happily go on with your day. After all things are sorted and in the capable hands of professionals.

Customer orientation at work and a positive customer experience. All of us can tell stories galore about how bad airline service is – but then we might exaggerate them a little. Maybe, just maybe, airlines are better than their public reputation? But seriously, we tend to tell the juicy stories as they are far more interesting than positive ones. After all, good news is no news.

To cut it short, after the airline’s handover to the delivery service, things went south.

Why? Because the delivery process is optimized on “efficiency” to a fault.

“Efficiency” translates to making it as simple for the delivery service, based on a few assumptions like

• the given address is a residential address,
• there is someone at the address who is eagerly waiting for the package to show up
• there is no need for real-time information about where the package is at any given time
• it is enough that there is a notification that the package was delivered or that the delivery failed
• the first way customers try to approach the service is via phone (that’s why this is made hard)
• and more.

Imagine the following scenario. The delivery address is a hotel. It being a fairly small one, it also doesn’t have a reception – which you didn’t know on booking. As you are on a business trip, you are not sitting in your hotel room the whole day.

In combination with the assumptions above this is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, the next day delivery failed. “Address not found”. Hmmm.

So, you hit the next fast fashion shop. After all, you do not want to wear your clothes another day.

And you peruse the delivery tracker to change the delivery to something more recognizable. Options are: Drop the package at location along with some more details. Drop it off at a neighbor. This option includes a geofence of around 50m – and of course, you do not know anybody in that range. After all, you are on a business trip and not at home. Change the delivery date. Use a parcel shop – this one greyed out, so cannot be selected. The fourth one is choosing another date, which really isn’t helpful.

So, what to do? Have them drop it off in the hotel carport as there really is no better option and as there are no really valuable items in there.

The confirmation comes promptly, confirming your “wish” and desire to have your package dropped off and that you thereby accepted their conditions of assuming no liability at all.

So, the service provider’s unwillingness to provide a decent service is turned into your wish. From a customer perspective, you just chose the least evil option of the ones offered to you.

You swallow hard, inform the landlord about a package being dropped off in his carport and await next day’s delivery.

Just that there is none. Neither on Thursday, nor on Friday. So, you hit the fast fashion store some more …

In the meantime, you found a not so obviously placed support form and a phone number (yes, a real phone number). So, being a good customer, on Friday morning, you use the contact form and create a ticket. The automated response comes immediately. “We will take care of your request and get back to you.” No response time commitment. And no response by Friday evening.

So, you call the hotline on Saturday – amazing that it is even available on a weekend.

You get told that the wait time is more than 10 minutes. And” your call is important to us”. And Really? Sigh.

And then you get exposed to some annoyingly upbeat muzac with interspersed announcements in an excited tone about the great tracking possibility and up-to-the minute information that are provided by the website and app. And do you know that you can easily change the delivery options from there?

Your annoyance mounts.

Half an hour later a clearly overworked call center agent who somewhat speaks the country’s language picks up. Now, keep your composure, she is the one who is least responsible for all of this. She’s merely the poor person who needs to deal with pent-up anger.

So, let’s go ahead and change the delivery address to something that is more promising. Sorry, sir, I cannot do this as it can get changed only once – which happened by providing consent to dropping the package in the car port.

Sigh.

Ok, but when is it scheduled for delivery? Next Tuesday. Ok, time for some more shopping.

And. You are leaving on Wednesday early morning, back overseas. So, what happens if Tuesday’s delivery fails? Oh, can I get that delivery address, please? Sure. So, there is at least a fallback in place – hopefully, given the service performance so far.

Then five automated questions that got announced as quality-of-service questions, but in reality are questions about the quality of the service delivered by the poor agent. And to add insult to injury, the chatbot implementation sucked. Really sucked.

Monday mid-morning you receive an email in response to your ticket. There was confusion about the address. “Your package will usually be delivered within the next 1-3 business days.” Well, that would have been the previous Friday at the latest …

Tuesday mid-morning.

The tracking site still locates your luggage in the delivery center.

So, you respond to the email with the unequivocal request to not attempt another delivery at the hotel but to deliver the package to your home address – which is on another continent.

And which is a request that they cannot accommodate for – as the EU GDPR law prohibits it. Or rather their interpretation of it. I call BS on that argument. If they had said that the traveler is not the customer as the airline gave the order, this would be understandable, but privacy? C’mon.

Recommendations for travelers

None of what I write now is an excuse for the poor service delivery of the parcel provider. They deliberately make it easy for themselves. “Efficient” translates to cheap and not customer oriented.

Still, there are some ways to avoid their services. And this should be the objective.

First the obvious one. Layovers of a decent length help with luggage troubles. One hour often cuts logistics time short. The second on is similarly obvious: Have some changes of clothes in your cabin luggage. The third, and most important one is to make sure at the airline counter that they provide as much information as possible to the parcel service as possible. Ideally, provide an address where someone can receive your luggage all day – as unlikely as this is, especially in a business travel setting.

And what about service providers?

There is really no blame to lay on AA apart from them probably having a need to look out for a better logistics partner. Their current one, at least the one they used to help me, damages not only the own but in extension the AA brand.

The logistic service provider’s processes are clearly centered around themselves and not about providing a solution for their customers. There is poor communication, very limited ways to update the information they might require for the delivery and, generally, as listed in the beginning of this article, lots of questionable assumptions. All of these should be addressed in a business process redesign. Chief of what should be addressed is that the current process is designed around what I call the “happy path” – the path that does not encounter any problem. This one creates a smooth customer experience. However, this path has many pieces that need to be in perfect order. If any of these pieces is not, the process fails catastrophically. This causes not only a bad customer experience but incurs significant additional cost for the company. Points to consider here start with a tracking that gives customers an ETA of their delivery – and keeps it up to date. That way, people can plan. No one, and I mean no one, will happily stay bound to one place for a whole day, not talking of several days. This works in other businesses, too. Second, offer several easy ways of communications, supported by a digital agent. Do not assume that people, who may be from abroad, will call in and wait for prolonged times in a queue while paying international roaming fees. Offer messengers on top of this. Have a well-working agent connected to it that actually can answer questions and is not the text or voice equivalent of the good ole phone tree. Do not assume that the first thing people do is pick up the phone. They do this because the other ways you offered truly sucked and didn’t give them the desired result or anything close to it. As a business, you do want to avoid a costly contact center, too. Consequently, invest into scenarios and technologies that customers actually want to use. If you get this done, the load on the call center naturally decreases. Trust me, people do not want to phone in to your call center. In 2025, there are better ways with less friction to come to a result.

Lastly, and that is probably the easiest but not the cheapest one: Ensure proper staffing in your call center and at the very minimum, do not make customers wait listening to music that makes them even angrier while listening to announcements that are blatantly wrong, and/or offer options that already did not work.

Do you feel like your processes can do with an overhaul and are interested in an informal, no-nonsense conversation without any obligations, contact me. I might be able to help you. After all, CRM and customer experience are my business.

My past two column articles on CustomerThink dealt with how to determine the return of agentic investments and whether agentic AI delivers at all.

The question of ability to deliver is particularly interesting for me, as I am researching measurable results other than cost savings in contained business areas for some months now, and regularly find a very strong focus on customer service and marketing, with customer service functions being best able to report measurable results. This is evidenced by the number of success stories I find, supported by the publication of a recent TEI of Zendesk customer service study. 

However, most of this is anecdotal evidence, or vendor sponsored/commissioned. And which vendor likes to speak about failures? Similar for buyers who understandably do not like to be in the spotlight with investments that turned out to be less than successful. There hasn’t been too much in depth research on whether generative and/or agentic AI deliver to promise or not. 

Luckily, there has been at least some research evaluating the capabilities of LLM based AI agents in business environments published this year. CRMArena-Pro by Salesforce Research naturally has a focus on CRM tasks across B2B and B2C scenarios. The authors identified nineteen tasks commonly executed in CRM systems and categorize these tasks in the four business skill categories database querying and numerical computation, information retrieval and reasoning, workflow execution, and policy compliance and includes a confidentiality awareness evaluation. TheAgentCompany on one hand covers a wider area along the business value chain but on the other hand has a narrower focus on software engineering companies. One other main difference between these two studies is that TheAgentCompany has a focus on more complex tasks that require multiple steps for their execution.

Both studies find that LLM-based agents deliver in simpler contexts while they are still failing in more complex ones.

Not that this comes as a surprise.

While this consistent result gives an indication on what scenarios to avoid, there is little help in what actually to do – besides of starting with simple scenarios and to focus on workflows. 

This is where a recent study from the MIT NANDA project gives additional insight. The study, titled “The GenAI Divide – State of AI in Business 2025” starts off with a quite unsettling finding: Only five percent of organizations are extracting value from their integrated AI pilots. The rest – a staggering 95% - doesn’t receive any measurable P&L impact. 

Why? 

According to the study, the problem is the missing ability of integrated systems to retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.

That’s a big ouch, given that enterprises often invest multi-million dollar budgets into these initiatives.

This is also in stark contrast to what emerged as shadow AI. About 90% of all employees are using privately purchased licenses for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or other tools

Figure 1: The steep drop from pilots to production for task-specific GenAI tools; source The GenAI Divide

And they are happy with how these consumer-grade tools help them in their work environment. So, apparently, employees are convinced that genAI tools can and do help them in their work environments.

So, the important thing is not to cry out failure but to identify what businesses and vendors can do to make investments into generative and agentic AI a success. The GenAI Divide – State of AI in Business 2025 gives plenty of insight for both. 

So, let’s have a look under the hood of this report

What can buyer executives do?

First things first, buy, don’t make. This doubles your chance for success.

• Look at the right problem and use the right KPIs. A lot of budget, around 50% of it, is sunk in sales and marketing. While this seems sexy and results can be showed off with easy to gather (and misattribute) KPIs, the real gains seem to lie in back office automation. To mitigate the still existing weaknesses in the automation of complex, start simple. But think big. This is corrobated by the findings of both earlier studies, TheAgentCompany and CRMArena-Pro.
• Look at the right partners. Do not only rely on artificial benchmarks but on business outcomes. The world of AI is different from traditional SaaS. AI is service as a software, so consider your vendors outsourcing partners instead of software partners. Have them prove that their AI tools can be configured to your needs – and hold them accountable.
• Usability and flexibility are key. One of the core reasons for the success of tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini is the simple user interface plus their ability to be guided through the problem-solving process in conversations. These conversations resemble iterations and are regularly the way humans work. Technologies like RAG and RAC help, but still need improvement. Again, start with the simpler problems and go from there.
• Trust your people. Your employees do know what they need. This is abundantly clear through their use of privately sourced AI tools. Do not centralize AI initiatives but have them driven where they matter while providing a meaningful yet robust set of guidelines.

Plus, here’s a bonus tip: All the above is particularly important for enterprises. As opposed to SMBs, enterprises tend to be more vulnerable to internal politics. For the sake of sustaining success, this should be avoided.

What should vendors do?

Vendors should have a close understanding about what their clients are – and have a hard look at what they actually need and want. GenAI and agentic AI are the shiny new tools, still, they need to solve actual business problems. This means that it is important to not build generic tools but solutions that are capable of embedding themselves into business workflows, improve them. This requires a strong focus. Grow from there. If the big, established vendors don’t do that – there is a startup that is capable of disrupting them and eating their lunch. Start with solutions to problems that are not business critical, and extend from there.

One of the major complaints that users have about the tools at hand is that they do not learn and are too rigid. So, genAI tools need to incorporate learning mechanisms that help them to learn via supervised, or unsupervised, means. They also need to provide a context window that is big enough for the complexity of business challenges that are addressed. Lastly, even if a process looks the same, it often isn’t. As a consequence, build in a deep ability for configuration, maybe even customization.

A bonus tip for startups. Many a buyer does not even consider you. They don’t know you, they don’t trust you. Heck, they don’t even know whether you’ll be around tomorrow. So, your best bet to get into larger accounts is by partnering up with vendors or consultants that your buyers know and trust.

Vendor or buyer. Do you need some help? Give me a call. I am there.

The other day, I got robbed.

Not literally, but figuratively.

Now, you might wonder what this has to do with the main theme of this blog, which is about CRM and customer experience. It has, believe me.

Some of you might know that I just relocated from the Seattle area to the Charleston area, so pretty much once across the country. Moving house is a big endeavor, but not necessarily a complicated one. In its simplest terms it involves packing stuff, potentially storing stuff, transporting stuff, and unpacking stuff. As a family of five tends to have a lot of stuff, it is a good idea to hire the services of a moving company to take care of all the logistics. Moving companies take care of most of the work, normally minus the considerable effort of unpacking a few hundred boxes. But usually, their base services cover the disassembly, packing, and normally also the reassembly of furniture, minus some possible exclusions that normally are explicitly mentioned.

There are roughly two types of moving companies, brokers that act as a main contractor and subcontract the job to third parties, and those who have own operations, either directly or via a network of companies. Regularly used terms of payment are half at packaging and half on delivery, sometimes combined with a more or less substantial downpayment at the time of signing the contract.

As it is with all businesses, it also pays off to do some research.

Which we did, settling on one of the companies with the best reputation. After all, we have done several intercontinental moves before, the last one a few years ago from Germany to the Seattle area. Why is that interesting? Because that move involved transportation not only across the Atlantic, but also across the United States – pretty much what needed to happen now, just in the opposite direction.

The experience

And heck were we in for a ride. The first thing was a sticker shock. At almost $24,500 US, this move was considerably more expensive than the considerably longer one mentioned above – by about a third. But hey, there has been inflation and so on. The salesperson who did the quote made a competent impression though, also highlighting the advantages of using their services as opposed to the considerably cheaper brokers. His main emphasis was on reliable, high-quality service, delivered through own employees, in particular the drivers, instead of random contractors. And premium service has its price, right?

Contracting

After we thought that we have found the right partner for our move, the signature process went incredibly fast, using an iPad and digital signatures. Hey, a sign of digitalization in a very analogue industry.

Just that this was used to rush the customer, with the obvious result. Key clauses and formulations, that appear all of the sudden, do not get due attention, the main examples being one that makes the customer expected delivery date the first date of a 3-week window. “Oh yes, if we know in advance, we strive for delivery at that day but cannot guarantee it”. The list of liability exclusions appears straightforward, but upon closer inspection – which happened only later – is basically excluding all liability they could face, for most of the rest the first thing that it is asked for by the team is a liability waiver …

The formulation is around the packaging service excludes unpacking without explicitly saying it. But the firm will not feel liable for damages if the customer unpackages the box. Extra liability insurance is prohibitively expensive, which should have been another red flag. So is the removal of all packaging debris – which now fills a double garage. But hey, in best American manner, I can park my car in the driveway.

The agreed upon plan was packaging our belongings, storing them for a while, transporting them to Charleston and deliver them, with the planned delivery date, i.e., the day of moving into the new house, being communicated as soon as possible. This happened on June 25, after the packaging process, which took place on May 28. The communicated move-in day was July 21.

Packaging

Packing our belongings was supposed to take three days. Ultimately, it took one. Sounds good? Not really, because all of the sudden, there is a need for two hotel rooms for a couple of days. Unplanned, unwanted additional cost. Reliability includes the adherence to agreements, not unilaterally changing them. Else, the team appeared quite meticulous. Everything, well, nearly everything, got disassembled as needed and boxed, including some stuff that shouldn’t have been, which was communicated to the team …

All boxes got stickers with a barcode, so that the total number of boxes can be accounted for at the time of delivery. Another sign of digitalization. Not too bad, one would think.

Do you find the flaw?

There is no evidence of what is in the boxes. Yes, they have a handwritten note that indicates the original room, but who is to tell that this is also what is in the box? Spoiler alert: No one.

An example: I have two scuba regulators. They have been stored next to each other. At the time of writing this, I found only one … unceremoniously and haphazardly dropped into the box. For those who don’t know, a scuba regulator easily costs several thousand dollars.

So, now the house’s contents are loaded into two trucks, and it comes to the next series of signatures on the iPad that the customer gets rushed through. Closer inspection would have revealed that we apparently have two IKEA beds which will not be reassembled. We do not have IKEA beds … Many items are marked as “scratched” without complete evidence. For some, they attached photos, which usually is a good idea to take evidence.

Half of the payment was due now, which I considered fair enough. The credit card process went smoothly.

Transportation

Now, the company knew our expected move-in date, which it obviously treated as the start of the three-week delivery window that we “agreed upon”. Well, formally we did, so our fault. The interesting question is whether it would have been possible to negotiate it away, given that the whole contracting process didn’t show any evidence of the contract being negotiable AT ALL. Even better, when asking for an ETA, there was no possibility to get one before the driver arrived at the warehouse in the Seattle area at some unknown time – at least unknown to us, since we never got any information besides “next week”, shortly before we arrived in Charleston on July 20. Yes, you heard that right. Storage happened 3,500 miles away from the delivery area. From a reliability perspective, this is not the smart move, but it probably removes one need for a second unloading process, as our belongings have not been put into a long-haul transporter at this time. It is simply cheaper.

The cynic in me interpreted “next week” as the last day of that week. Sure enough, the driver arrived even one day later. This was, when we received an email that the things are on route. During delivery he confirmed that he picked our belongings on July 28. However, all of the sudden, the payment on delivery needed to be either cash or a money order. No cheque, no credit card. Payment, of course, is due before unloading.

And yay, the driver will announce himself one day before arrival. Still, black box in between.

Plus, there is the ominous information that the rig is about 75 ft long and needs a stretch of 100 ft in front of our property. We live on a straight road in a residential neighborhood, so no problem.

Or so we thought.

Sure enough, on August 4 we get a call from the driver announcing himself for the next day. Plus announcing an additional surprise fee of $3,000 US as he needs to repack our belongings into two smaller trucks as he claimed impracticability of getting his rig into our street. As if the delivery address hadn’t been known long before. Was there any choice than to swallow this? Plus, there is the looming section in the contract that says that if we do not accept delivery, it will be auctioned 15 days after the announced delivery date.

And yeah, good news, the confirmation that they “will reassemble your furniture and place in your room of choice” along with the remainder that the trash remains on site. They could put it into our trash bin, though … remember, three hundred odd boxes.

Why did the transport that long? Because the truck broke down in Montana, according to the driver, which gave them a two and a half days stopover. Reliability?

So, off to the bank and get $15,000 dollars and change.

Delivery

Sure enough, on August 5, we got a call that the delivery would not happen on this day. The reason? A thunderstorm in North Charleston. Well, there have been thunderstorms around, so in dubio pro reo.

So, August 6, it is. Around a quarter to 12 we get the call, that things are repacked in smaller trucks and that we can expect them to arrive in half an hour.

Which turned into almost two.

As announced the process started with counting a wad of cash, $15,069 US on an open balance of now $15,068.28 US to be precise. Btw, there was no indication of returning the change, which shows a business attitude. Not that 72 ct. hurt me.

The next thing was that there are two “IKEA beds” which will not get reassembled as per the notes in the documentation. Sigh.

The process started. And it appeared to be smooth.

Until.

Until there was the bed frame that was big enough to warrant them to ask for a liability waiver to move it into the room of choice.

Boxes and wrappings piled up in various rooms, some stuff starting to get reassembled. One after another the crew disappeared as “the job has been done”, presumably having been paid their wages by the driver.

Not without asking for a tip, though. And after leaving behind quite some known damage, plus some as per yet unknown damage, as by far not all boxes are unpackages.

Until only the driver and his wife remained. And some less than assembled furniture. An IKEA desk – yeah, there is one remaining piece of IKEA in my house. “We do not do IKEA” is what I got told. A shelf. “We do not do shelves”. A Peloton. “I cannot find the screen”. A garden umbrella. Well, this one is impossible to assemble for one single person. But still: “We will reassemble your furniture and place in your room of choice”.

As an additional complication, they allow to file exactly one claim. And the missing assembly is to be part of this claim. Not all our belongings are unboxed and the crew was good enough to bury some under lots of packaging. Looks like I’ll be without a desk for some time …

The moving industry is broken

So, all in all an utterly unpleasant and very expensive experience. There is very poor communication – actually the dispatch person we emailed with back and forth regarding an ETA consistently sounded like a pre generative AI chatbot. This shows either an unwillingness or an inability, which could be caused by lacking internal communication or by an inability to plan and manage their long haul and feeder networks. This planning can be done, believe me. My wife has a PhD in this topic, and apparently companies in other industries can do this, too. After all, the company should know where its trucks are at all times. Is this perfect? no. Will the customer understand delays if there is regular communication? Of course, they will.

What we have experienced here is a classic overselling combined with what I consider the unwillingness to deliver on promise. The moving industry is not an industry that enjoys a lot of repeat business, on the contrary. Which is exactly at the core of the problem. Combined with a reputation management that focuses on putting the blame on the customer in case of bad reviews, this demonstrates a far less than customer-focused operation, but one that focuses on short term gains, this is not prone to become better.

Let’s see how our claim goes. We can file it only after everything is inspected, which can take some time…

In summary, we went for the provider that, according to our research, is one of the ones with a high reputation. I shiver when I think about how ones with poor reputation work.

This transportation business is a cutthroat business. And it is the customer’s throat that gets cut.

Maybe, it is time for an Uber of moving?

Some lessons

The most important lesson to learn from this is to not get rushed by the sales team or the moving team, especially, if you are planning a long-distance move.

Never ever.

Have the proposals with all clauses, sent to you as a PDF or similar before signing it. This must include all conditions that are only referenced via online T&C documents. Run them through ChatGPT or Gemini, to identify clauses that are problematic for you. Tools like NotebookLM do a good job here, too. Compare and negotiate. If the clauses are similar, the cheaper provider will do. The crews they work with are anyways hired for the day only and not regular employees.

Make sure that the delivery time frame suits you and not them. Or else, you will live in an empty house for weeks and are very likely incurring additional cost to buy household items that you already have. Get penalties for not adhering into these times into the contract. Check the liability exclusions and strike the ones that really do not work for you. You will find plenty to choose from.

Meticulously check the packing list and especially all comments on it. Contest all remarks that indicate any damage that is not supported by evidence. Again, take your time and do not get rushed.

Check the terms of payment. Try to change them to not having paid in full before they even start to unpack your belongings. There will be damage. There will be unfinished business. There is zero leverage if everything is paid for before you can assess this.

Rest in peace, Social Media!

Yes, I know, you have been pronounced dead numerous times already, and that as early as 2011 by the Sillicon Valley Watcher, if not earlier. You lived on. Still, now you really need to admit that you are a dead thing walking.

You had a short, yet exhilarating life. And you, admittedly, developed astonishingly fast and far from your humble beginnings in the early 1970s and the first bulletin board systems around 1980. These have been the glory days of FidoNet, CompuServe, or AOL. SixDegrees.com followed later. The early noughts gave us a flurry of messaging systems, LinkedIn and XING, not to forget the infamous 4chan.

Anno domini 2004 brought us Facebook, 2005 brought us YouTube, Twitter followed in 2006. Google attempted repeatedly to get the hang of you (Orkut, Google+, anyone?) and still has some messaging services up and running.

All of these platforms have in common that they started up with the claim, some of them even with the objective, to make the Internet more social, to foster user generated content and to, ultimately, shift the power balance from corporations to their customers. Who does not remember the war cry “the customer is in control”. This referred to the idea that the customer could get more information that is not controlled by brands, so that they can be better informed, instead of being forced to rely on corporate broadcasts.

This should have been achieved by giving customers a voice that is as strong as the corporate one, albeit without the (marketing) budget behind. In line with the definition of social, it enabled the tendency “to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others” – mainly other people.

Your power skyrocketed with the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and the subsequent flurry of smartphones and other mobile devices. With mobile devices, you have fully become a ubiquitous set of “forms of electronic communication through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)”.

At the same time, the advent of mobile devices was your undoing – the begin of your end.

You have been truly social, in the sense of the word, as you enabled the formation of cooperative and interdependent relationships with each other.

But only for a short period.

Why?

Because, of course, the potential of reach created a caste of broadcasters, who were not interested in interdependent relationships or even interaction. Instead they were interested in reach and in creating their own brand identity … i.e. in broadcasting. Naturally, this led to some voices being louder than others. Also naturally, this led to brands becoming interested in these persons. The social media influencer was born. Of course, brands learned to leverage your power as well.

Poly-directional discussions with many equal participants got reduced to a unidirectional model with creators – broadcasters – addressing their audience. This audience has largely turned into consumers. The bullhorn that we knew from analogue times had returned.

Even worse, the platforms that called themselves social media platforms collected increasingly more data to help their paying customers – the brands – to target their customers – the social media users – even better than any time before.

The users have ultimately become the product. The excessive “use” of this “product” has led to an increasingly restrictive regulation, as the power balance between users, platforms, and brands is strongly against the users.

RIP Social Media!

The Social Media resurrection

To quote Martin Luther King, Jr., “I have a dream”. This dream is that social media resurrect, but in a better way, based more on consent and respect.

To be clear, it is by no means illegitimate for both, the social media platform, as well as brands, to be have profit objectives. The same holds true for influencers.

The secret sauce lies in setting this up in a way that maintains the user as a participant on eye-to-eye level.

The way to achieve this is making the platform instead of its users the product. The goal is to create a community again, a community that connects users with users, users with brands, and brands with brands, while equally serving everyone’s interest.

Communication between brands and users strictly happens based on explicit interest and consent expressed by the users. Longer term interests, like hobbies, affiliations, etc., are either made part of their profile or explicitly expressed during an interaction.

If users wants to interact with a brand, they subscribe to its communications, if they don’t – they don’t, and the brand does not have the ability to reach these users. Imagine this like tuning in to a radio station, or, to use a better image, joining an interest based chat room. Basically, relationships are consciously initiated by the users who also decide how much to share with which brand. Relationships can be ended by both parties.

This was also the core idea behind my former venture EpiKonic (the website is still up as a blog platform), a mobile social media and engagement platform. Some of these ideas are also part of Ephanti, a startup that I am currently working with. There are more ideas behind Ephanti, of course.

For the users, the advantages of this model are obvious. Relationships are initiated and built by them. These relationships are based on their expectations, needs and, last but not least, trust.

But what is in it for brands? After all, this approach turns the traditional social media norms and conventions upside down.

Quite simply: Precise targeting! As the user initiates the conversation and explicitly shares immediate and longer term interests, nearly all guesswork is taken out of the equation. The brand can offer journeys that the user can choose from and solutions with minimum own effort. The better the journeys and solutions are, the more trustworthy the brand becomes. The more trustworthy the brand is, the more likely it is that the user stays in contact and hires more solutions that the brand has to offer. In essence, the user becomes loyal – not captive. Ideally, the brand is even able to turn the user into an advocate, then using their own influence to convince other users.

This way, the brand can extend its business by looking at its own success as being a consequence of its customers’ successes.

The same holds true for influencers.

The platform becomes the trusted matchmaker, but more in a broker model. It needs to be fully trusted by all parties. To earn and maintain this trust, it enables the users to interact with each other, and to find brands based on their needs and interests. In addition, the platform makes sure that there is no surreptitious advertising.

The business model sounds almost the same as the one of current platforms. The service delivery is different.

The technology is there. The need and the opportunity, too.

Long live social media.

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.

During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Graham Dallas, business development manager of the ABL Group. Graham was responsible for the implementation of ABL Group's new CRM system.

ABL Group is the result of a 2020 merger of AqualisBraemar ASA and the LOC Group. It is a 400+ person global energy and marine consultancy that helps companies around the world transition toward offshore renewable energy sources, clean shipping, and sustainable marine practices.

Formerly Microsoft Dynamics users, ABL Group first began working with Zoho in 2021 via an implementation partner, and they collaborated on a design and build of a customized CRM solution for their business. Soon, the second phase of implementation will begin, which then includes integration with Oracle NetSuite. One of the main challenges facing ABL Group was the integration of two different businesses, one of them already using a "chunky" CRM solution and the other one not having a system.

if you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here.

The challenge to address was that ABL Group, also because of the recent merger has a lot of differing business structures that shall be supported via one single system. Luckily, the structures weren't necessarily complex - the business just has a lot of different requirements due to the different regions and lines of business.

ABL Group started with a small team of experienced persons who went into this implementation projects with open eyes and some ideas. They assembled a list of 6 candidates that they narrowed down into three with Zoho being the winner after a series of in-depth conversations and discovery sessions with the vendors and their implementation partners. The team members independently assessed the vendors and came to the same conclusion.

The main reasons for this decision have obviously been functional fit and a commercially very competitive offer. But, as importantly, ABL had a good feeling about Zoho's company culture and was able to quickly build a trust-based relationship with the implementation partner.

Although coming in with a clear understanding of how they do their business, this level led to taking a good look at how processes are modeled in Zoho to challenge the own understanding. Consequently, the implementation did not just force existing processes and procedures into the system but instead think about the "why". Why is ABL Group doing things as they are done? Are there better ways? Normally, there are.

The result was an adaptation on both sides, processes changed and the system itself was enhanced to fulfil all requirements. That way, and in constant exchange with the business users, a system that has a high adoption rate was stood up quickly, in spite of push-back from users with bad previous experiences. Key was the ability to easily and quickly adapt the system to requirements, with the ability to prove that things work for the users - and that better than what they are doing at the moment.

It is noteworthy that ABL Group concentrated on the users first, not on management!

 If you can measure it, you can improve it 

The next step then was reporting. Once the data was in the system and the system in use, it became possible to create meaningful reports, reports that actually help the users to track their opportunities and to be able to improve their status. This is what gives users that the system is working for them and is not just a tool to control them and to take "their" contacts and "their" connections away. Instead, it helps the users to perform sales as the team sport that it is.

Of course, management needs data for decision-making, too. This is achieved with real-time dashboards, something that wasn't possible with the old solutions. Instead of being confronted with PowerPoint presentations or spreadsheets, managers now have the ability to see live KPIs at a fingertip and to drill into the live data, to get the answers that they need.

 The biggest challenge? 

Introduction - or replacement of a CRM software is always a challenge, but what is the biggest one? Is it the remodeling of the processes, containing the implementation effort, or something else?

Consistent with what I hear from many other Zoho customers, it is the people. Graham says "I guess it's just people don't like change, I understand. The new way isn't like the way they do things. Another thing that I've seen before in previous companies when we've got integrated CRM systems is that there is a little bit of 'these are my contacts and these are my connections and these are the people I deal with' whereas a CRM system in its core is a collaborative effort and there's no secrets and everybody is open".

 So, what is next? 

After the project is before the project. This is particularly true in an agile project environment. Obviously, there is some continuous improvement. But then in general, it is about integrating Zoho with more business systems, in particular the Netsuite ERP and the web site for lead generation, which requires the activation of some marketing tools. An implementation of Zoho Desk will help streamlining the internal support. And having a Zoho CRM + subscription, there are many more apps that Graham is "dying to try".

 Anything Zoho doesn't deliver? 

We clearly see a raving customer. But is there anything that is amiss? The answer is clear: "I struggle to come up with anything that we haven't managed to get. We've come up with some crazy ideas. Can we do this, this and this? And the answer is usually yes. Or it's let's go have a think about it. And we'll consult with Zoho, have a chat and then usually a couple of days later we've got some suggestions what we can do. We haven't had to really compromise on anything and we've been quite demanding".

 My PoV and analysis 

Of course, ABL Group, like all the other customers I talked to during Zohoday 2022, have been reference customers. The replies to this question are amazingly similar, and need to be taken with a grain of salt. All the customers I talked to extended their implementation out from an existing scope and did not tap too deep into the ERP arena, if at all. Still, this is testament to the breadth and width of the functionality that is offered by Zoho. And this is even more interesting as Zoho's churn rate continues to fall from an already low level, while the number of used Zoho apps is going up. This means that Zoho managed to nail its target market pretty well. Add to that, that the customers chose Zoho after executing a software selection process that often included tier one vendors.

The combination of functional fit, knowledgeable implementation partners, very competitive pricing and a unique corporate culture is hard to beat.

During ZohoDay 2022, I had the chance to have a longer conversation with Adi Mula, founder and CEO of Foodhub.

If you do not want to read too much but prefer watching the edited interview, you can do so here.

Similar to GrubHub and DoorDash, Foodhub allows residents of the UK, India, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia, the US and some more countries to order food to be delivered from a variety of local restaurants; unlike those other sites, Foodhub does not charge service fees. Foodhub currently has about 1,100 employees. Most of them are using Zoho products in one way or another and many use multiple Zoho products.

Foodhub started its Zoho journey with the goal of simplifying processes and to be able to provide every team with simple and easy to use tools that will help them do their jobs.  Originally, Foodhub worked with a set of interconnected, yet overly complicated applications. This journey started with implementing Zoho CRM because this was where the pain was biggest in this area. 

The sales teams in the various countries have different needs, yet the business needs them use a common foundation. The old solution did not support this. One of the problems that were caused by this was that Foodhub used huge Excel sheets to support its sales process. Besides the obvious complexity, this also caused a GDPR risk, as these sheets contained lots of personal data that could have easily be shared online.

Moving to Zoho CRM immediately solved this problem by enabling model processes that solved the needs of the different regions while implementing an adequate security and permission model.

Migrating to Zoho has caused Foodhub surprisingly few issues. The main reasons for this are that there is always good enough out of the box functionality that supports the business, in combination with a now rush implementation approach that rolls out new functionality in a gradual way instead of going for a big bang. Foodhub moves fast, yet in an iterative way, refining the implementation until it is in a shape that is good enough to take the next steps. In doing so, the team was able to overcome the natural change management challenge that every company faces: People do not want change.

This also helps Foodhub cover all bases. No one can think of everything beforehand, and then one can find needful features in the applications, too. Adi observes that "about the time you get to a certain stage halfway or even more through the implementation, you've covered most of the essential things". 

The third success factor is that Zoho is easy to implement and that, whenever there is a need for support, Zoho itself and a good implementation partner are very beneficial in the rare cases the internal team gets stuck or when speed needed to be prioritized higher.

Case in point is Foodhub's migration of all its 1,100 employees from GMail to Zoho Mail. This is an endeavor that is daunting at best and has the potential of seriously disrupting any business. Adi says "I worried about that. I thought it was going to go horribly wrong because it was a big task to move 1,100 people over. I was concerned, to day the least".

In the end, the migration went very smoothly, with the help of Zoho and the implementation partner. The biggest problem was making sure that all employees remembered their passwords. In Adi's assessment Zoho mail is not far from GMail; it essentially does everything that Google does, and he sees GMail as a leader. In his eyes, this migration pays certainly off for a bigger company that already has a Zoho subscription. Mail is also part of an integrated ecosystem. He doesn't need to leave mail to accomplish tasks in this ecosystem. Like, approving an expense report. That works right out of the mail. 

Similarly, Cliq, which in his eyes combines the best from Slack and Whatsapp.

All this sounds almost too good to be true. Foodhub is obviously a demanding, yet very happy client.

That means, I really needed to dig hard to learn about things that do not work for Foodhub. 

At the end of the day, there are a few topics - need to be. This is not surprising, as every software is a continuous work in progress and Zoho cannot be the one-for-all for everyone (yet?), even with the objective of becoming the operating system for businesses. And Zoho's core market is not the enterprise although the company certainly moves upmarket.

Adis biggest functional concern is currently the finance module. This is where he sees most upside for his own business. Currently looking at Zoho's subscription and invoicing functionalities, he sees that he "could do a lot more on the finance side". The modules are there, but in his opinion not yet mature enough to support a business with Foodhub's international footprint. But then again, Adi maintains that "they seem to be doing good on what they plan to release". The calendar. Same thing. In his eyes, "it needs a bit of work" but then this is already in progress with him getting a preview soon. 

Another bug bear is actually Zoho's conference solution. Why? Because Foodhub is a very distributed organization. And because it is not as good as Zoom This is quite a tall order to achieve. After all, Zoom is the industry gold standard. 

Lastly, Adi wishes to have more opportunities to talk to developers, product managers and fellow customers to learn and exchange information. While there are such events, they are still too far in between. 

I wouldn't be surprised if this topic is already on the roadmap, too.

During this episode we talked with Mitch Lieberman who has quite some experience in the CRM industry, on the vendor- and analyst side. He was with Epiphany, Sugar, and with G2, to name but a few.
He has the insight and the sharp mind that makes this conversation particularly interesting, without me diminishing the other ones, though.
Mitch certainly got our grey matter into high gear during our conversation that started with CX, went into a solid discussion of the value (what is it?) of Customer Data Platforms, CDP, on to conversational systems - and back. Btw, what is a CDP? Let Mitch provide his interesting view.
We learned a lot.
You can, too.
This conversation is in English, apart from a few minutes at the beginning and the end.

Expectations are high, competition is cut throat, and promises are bold

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The Experience

Build your processes from the customers’ point of view

1. Make it effective Design your processes with the customer, not with internal or operational priorities, in mind. Look through the lens of the customer while designing them. This means building your processes so that customers do get the specific relevant offers through the right channel at the right time, or the answers they want. Make sure customers get products that they want, which includes the avoidance of much fine print. What do you think of a waitress being in the need to say to a kid with a beverage package that asks for a soft drink: ‘Sorry I need to charge you here but if you go to the board restaurant next door you will get it for free’.
2. Make it efficient Pay attention to details. Being available, meticulous and accurate is the foundation of creating consistent experiences. This includes making sure that customer expectations are met across channels. This doesn’t mean serving all channels, but the ones that are important to your customers - and that lie within the limits of your budgets … as frictionless as possible. Make it simple for the customer!
3. Make it enjoyable Think of and create little ‘Wow Moments‘ that convey human appreciation to the guest. These moments add up to a lasting great experience. They are also easier to achieve than big experiences.

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