This will be a rant, but a rant with roots in the belief that employee experience fosters customer experience.

As it should be well-known by now, Microsoft fired around 9,000 employees in July, after doing some smaller layoff rounds already in 2025, totaling more than 15,000 employees according to the TechCrunch comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs. This continues a trend from 2023 and 2024.

Now, I get it. Companies need to be and stay profitable, reorganize and, if needed, lay off employees. As such, there is nothing wrong with this.

Where things start to get wrong is when at the same time two other things can be observed: strong and successful growth in revenues as well as profits, and very generous payments to the C-suite.

Microsoft is immensely successful. For a long time now, we see record revenue and profits every quarter, which means strong growth. Looking at the most recent Q4/25 numbers, this is poised to continue and made Microsoft the second $4 trillion company after Nvidia.  

Consequently, Satya Nadella as the company CEO, receives an enormous total compensation ($ 79.1M in 2024). To compare this number, the average total compensation of a Microsoft employee is $220k with a median compensation of around $192k. This is a factor of 400. And no, this is not me being jealous.

Microsoft’s written down corporate values are respect, integrity, and accountability.

What triggered this text is the dissonance between all this that is also evident in Satya Nadella’s mail to the employees titled “Recommitting to our why, what, and how” that got published on the corporate blog on July 24, 2024.

So, there are 9,000 people laid off – not let go, a term that Nadella luckily didn’t use this time – while the company and the C-suite enjoy record earnings. If I were one of these 9,000 people, reading this letter, reading about a “seeming incongruence” and about a decision “weighing heavy on me”, I would feel taken for a ride.

There is no “seeming incongruence” but a real one. The incongruence is that top management is increasingly jaded and disconnected from where the success of the company is created: where the median compensation is about a quarter of a per cent of the CEO’s. Yet, these are the people who get sacrificed. Health insurance? Gone. Stock options? Gone. Future? Precarious.

The stock markets – or rather the investors – celebrated this layoff round as another success, bumping up the share price. And here is where the problem lies. The management is not answering to the employees but to investors who hunt short term profits. Employees appear on the liability side of the balance sheet, they are mere “resources”. Mind you, resources get consumed and then disposed of. That this is the thinking comes across in little things. “I want to express my sincere gratitude to those who have left.” Technically, they have left, but not voluntarily. Why not admit it? “Progress isn’t linear. It’s dynamic, sometimes dissonant, and always demanding. But it’s also a new opportunity for us to shape, lead through, and have greater impact than ever before.” Just that there are only few who really benefit from it.

Let’s look a little further.

The why

“When Microsoft is succeeding, the world around us must succeed too as a company it’s how we earn our social permission to operate.” This thinking is inside out. The success of Microsoft should rather be defined by making the world around successful. And Microsoft is undoubtedly successful. However, the success of the “world around us” is not a byproduct of a company’s success but its reason. The social permission to operate is given for its commitment to make the society it is embedded in more successful. I wish that more so-called leaders would accept that. How will the 8 billion people that Nadella talks of be able to “summon a researcher, an analyst or a coding agent at their fingertips” if they, increasingly get disenfranchised and cut of from the “success” of the few?

The what

The priorities are clear: “security, quality, and AI transformation. Security and quality are non-negotiable”. And they are good. But are they followed through? You might remember the disastrous Storm-0558 security breach in 2023 and the 2024 report by the Cyber Safety Review Board. The CSRB “identified a series of Microsoft operational and strategic decisions that collectively pointed to a corporate culture that deprioritized enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management” (highlight by TW). After this incident, Nadella named security a priority. In 2025 we saw a major Sharepoint breach that lasted for two weeks before being disclosed and in between numerous other ones. Yes, Microsoft is probably in the crosshairs of many bad actors, but this string of breaches does not indicate security being a top priority. Who suffers from it? Customers. And employees. Executives? Not so much, although  a part of their performance-based pay is tied to cybersecurity performance and Nadella himself asked for a reduction of is incentive payout – which got agreed to – just that his payout got increased, too.

So, the priorities are clear – and who gets held accountable, too. And it is not the board …

The how

Culture is important. A growth mindset, too. Just that a growth mindset far too often correlates with an elbow mentality and egoism. The interesting part in this section of Nadellas letter is that there is no mention of the written down corporate values, which are respect, integrity, and accountability. Instead, he preaches competition and inside-out thinking “we can go win together, and change the world in the process” instead of winning because of changing the process.

What all this creates is not a culture of “we” and collaboration, it is a culture of fear. Fear of one’s ideas being usurped by a manager or colleague and fear of being the next one to be axed.

I see a great company, great not because of its managers and executives, but because of its people. I also see a company that is its own worst enemy. Microsoft could do better – by living up to its values and not treating employees as resources. This is not integer, nor is it respectful. And on top of it, it would make employees more productive, as they do not need to worry about their future. Employee experience helps improving the customer experience.

End of rant.

What do you think?

The News

On December 17, 2024, Salesforce announced Agentforce 2.0 after introducing Agentforce 1.0 during the company’s Dreamforce event. With it, it repositions Agentforce as a “Digital Labor Platform” that is capable of supplying businesses with an infinite workforce. This way, they shall be able to address internal challenges like labor shortages, fixed capacity, stalled productivity, or burnout. In addition, they increase their ability to work with increasing customer demands like no patience, their wish for personalization and empathy and with a knowledgeable expert, etc.

“Agentforce 2.0 is the newest version of Agentforce and the first digital labor platform for enterprises — a complete AI system for augmenting teams with trusted, autonomous AI agents in the flow of work. This new release introduces a new library of pre-built skills and workflow integrations for rapid customization, the ability to deploy AI agents in Slack, and advancements in agentic reasoning and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) - enabling teams to scale their workforce with a custom Agentforce capable of handling complex, multi-step tasks with even more precision and accuracy.”

Agentforce 2.0 comes with a library of prebuilt skills, which are jobs that digital agents can perform. These skills do not only cover Salesforce software but also cover partner software and, with the help of Mulesoft, any other system. The agent builder, that is part of Agentforce 2.0 enables the building of new agents/skills using natural language. New agents can be built using the skill library or custom logic.

Agentforce 2.0 is live and will get additional capabilities throughout Q1/2025.

The Bigger Picture

AI has hit an inflection point. We came from rule-based chat bots, added assistants and are now focusing on agency. This is possible because technology improved, the ability of grounding inferences into company data improved and furthermore, the ability of technology to show empathy by also employing what I would call world knowledge (after all, this is what an LLM is trained on) can be combined into responses to queries. Add to that the increasing desire of (business) users to not be forced into a machine-enforced user interface but to interact in a human way, and there is something that is very exciting. I am a technologist, after all.

At the same time, there is undoubtedly a need for more automation in business operations. Customer demands are increasing – shareholder demands are, too. So is the pressure on employees. Pretty much every senior manager (and their dog) is talking about a shortage of skilled labor, which is a notion that I do not fully buy into as there is also a still substantial unemployment. Given that, saying that there is a skill shortage is akin to saying that who is unemployed is unskilled or lazy. There are also many lay-off rounds which cause a drain of skills from companies. So, these people cannot be re-skilled as well?

To me, this dichotomy sounds to me like we are in the need of having some deep ethical discussions about the value of (human) labor vs. digital labor.

But back to Agentforce.

My PoV and Analysis

Agentforce 2.0 is BIG. Big not only, because it promises to deliver a whole new level of automation to businesses, but also because it is the way for Salesforce to extend its reach out of the “CRM” niche and to support the whole enterprise. Salesforce wants to achieve this by essentially making Agentforce the user interface to all business applications, not only Salesforce applications. The vehicle to achieve this is Slack, supported by MuleSoft.

At the same time, Salesforce boldly creates a new market category. No other significant company has taken a stance like this before.

This is a significant repositioning, or should I say pivot, including a direct attack on all other enterprise software vendors and I am now waiting to see their responses.

Salesforce itself uses Agentforce to power its customer service and to improve its customer service efficiency. According to its own data, this already now results in an automated handling of more than 80 per cent of all inquiries and into a reduction of escalations to humans by 50 per cent. Zendesk already during its Relate event last May predicted customer service automation rates of 80 per cent and above. Looks llike there is an increasing number of instances where this prediction has become reality.

What neither the article about the success of Agentforce in Salesforce customer service nor Mark Benioff said during the announcement is what happened to the human agents to which cases are no more escalated. Are they tasked with “more valuable” work or did they get replaced by Agentforce. I hope for the former, but my fear is the latter.

Agentforce, undoubtedly, hits a nerve. In the short time since Dreamforce, Salesforce signed up more than 1,000 customers of which several hundred are already live. I’d count this as a huge success although I’d love to hear more about the use cases that these customers deployed, what their success metrics are and how they fare along these metrics.

Let me put this into a bigger context here again. Whether skilled labor shortage is a perceived or a real problem, Agentforce allows businesses to focus on shareholder value by replacing humans with Agents. And I think that they will. The term “Digital Labor Platform” already strongly hints into this direction although Benioff repeatedly emphasized on “humans supported by agents”. Still, the conversation moves into the direction of agency fast. And, the vast majority of the announcement is about efficiency, I did not hear much about businesses being able to do entirely new things, offer entirely new services that they couldn’t offer before.

In summary, it is hard to overestimate the potential impact that a technology like Agentforce has, especially in the light of Agentforce being a work in progress. Why is this? Because Salesforce managed to combine a set of powerful technologies into a coherent whole.

Still, I’d really like to err on the side of caution and would like to see the business metrics and successes used by Agentforce customers.

Lastly, as said above, I see a high need for a strong ethics discussion. Agentforce invites businesses ta automate business processes instead of rethinking them. I strongly urge potential buyers to not fall into this trap. Low hanging fruit are just that: low hanging. Identify where the real value lies in processes and data, and apply AI from there. Remember the adage that a fool with a tool remains a fool.

Congrats to Salesforce for bringing a bold vision to life. It is now up to all of us to use this sensibly.

The News

On June 5, 2024, SAP announced that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire WalkMe. Walkme is a leader in the digital adoption platform (DAP) market. DAPs are about the elimination of digital friction from workflows to turn the business application tech stack into a competitive advantage.

You can read the complete announcement here.

WalkMe’s solutions help organizations navigate constant technology change by providing users with advanced guidance and automation features that enable them to execute workflows seamlessly across any number of applications. This results in higher adoption of the underlying application and as such drives value realization.

By combining WalkMe with SAP’s earlier acquisitions Signavio and LeanIX, SAP intends to complement its business transformation management portfolio to better help customers through their transformation journeys.

According to the press release, WalkMe helps organizations boost enterprise productivity and lower risk by enabling consistent, effective and efficient use of software and the workflows it enables. Its DAP works on top of an organization’s application landscape, detects where people encounter friction and provides the tailored support and automation they need to complete the job to be done, right in the flow of work, across any application. Importantly, WalkMe will continue to fully support non-SAP applications.

“Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation,” said Christian Klein, CEO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.”

The acquisition is planned to be an all-cash transaction at a valuation of $1.5bn US. This represents a 45 percent premium over the closing share price on June 4, 2024. 

The bigger picture

SAP is pushing customers hard to transition from their ECC environments to adopt S/4HANA, in particular S/4HANA cloud, ideally using its RISE and GROW programs. So far, customers are reacting less than enthusiastically although the demand seems to pick up, which has several reasons, amongst them cost and the general perception of SAP software being clunky and hard to use - whether this perception is right or wrong.

At the same time, this “upgrade” is as much a business transformation as it is a technical one. Users, who migrate from one world to another will appreciate all the help they can get. And they are too often the group that gets involved last. 

On the other hand, users, especially millennials, these days expect a more consumerized and easy-to-use user interface.

It is exactly here that DAPs play out their strengths.

In addition, there is the ongoing or expected shift to conversational user interfaces. While this shift will change the way users interact with enterprise systems, it will neither be abrupt, nor will conversational user interfaces totally replace more traditional ones anytime soon. Users, especially occasional users, will still need a lot of help when navigating through the tasks they want or need to accomplish, even if it happens.

My analysis and point of view

This acquisition certainly makes sense, especially looking at what Signavio and LeanIX are delivering. WalkMe certainly augments SAP’s capabilities in helping customers get more user buy-in during their transition to S/4HANA. Right- or wrongfully, SAP applications have the reputation of being overly complicated and not user friendly. And in all fairness, this is not specific to SAP but true for most, if not all ERP-style applications. These applications are simply not made for occasional users but more for power users. Not that this is an excuse for clunkiness.

With GROW and RISE, this transition to S/4HANA is first of all a business transformation, which is about changing existing or establishing new business processes. Given this, every change will cause friction in their execution, some of it unnecessary. With the combination of Signavio and WalkMe, more of this friction can be identified and addressed. This is also true for projects that do not follow RISE, but any other methodology. In addition, as there is simply not enough capacity available to migrate the great many existing ECC customers to S/HANA fast, it pays off to offer them a method to remove or fix problematic areas of their instances before embarking on the transition journey to S/4HANA. In SAP CEO Christian Klein’s words “Applications, processes, data and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation. By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.” He is exactly right about it. For too long, the users were left behind. Certainly long enough for a new software category - established by WalkMe, got established. It is good to see SAP  finally taking better care of them now. As said, SAP software does not have the reputation of being very usable.

As a side note, apart from “applications” and “data”, SAP needed to acquire the capabilities that it needs to to manage the transformation of businesses. And people came last. But hey - better late than never. And  SAP is the first ERP vendor to actively address this topic as part of an integrated strategy. 

It remains to be seen how SAP integrates the screen-based help that WalkMe offers into its copilot Joule, which is a step into changing the user interface into a conversational one - which should be far easier to “navigate” for the occasional user. I still see  quite some upside here, because the information/data that processes - hence the systems - demand, will not be fully known by non power users. Although the work with the system will appear more natural, the same challenges we have now will remain and these users will need support. And WalkMe has announced WalkMeX in May, which points  towards the support of  conversational user interfaces.

As many other companies that get acquired by major business appllications vendors, WalkMe also has a significant footprint with other vendors’ customers. It would be worthhile to keep these clients, minimally as bridgeheads. What we have learned is that the approach that SAP used with hybris was quite successful in this, until SAP let the brand vanish. WalkMe offers a similar gateway into businesses that are not SAP strongholds, if SAP moves smartly. It will be interesting to see how this evolves with WalkMe being part of SAP or an SAP company.

From a transaction perspective, I can only speculate that either there was another bidder or that SAP put itself in a weak negotiating position - the latter I can hardly believe. In any case, it appears that SAP really wanted exactly the capabilities offered by WalkMe and not the ones of a competitor. Every analyst or consultant, and I mean every single one I talked to, expressed astonishment at this high price that SAP is willing to pay for WalkMe.

All in all, I applaud SAP for taking this step, and am curious about how WalkMe gets integrated into SAP’s offerings.

But man, the price tag.

The News

On April 15 to April 18, 2024, Zendesk held its annual Relate event, including a half day analyst track on April 15. The event was attended by around 1,600 customers, partners and analysts.

It was about Zendesk’s strategy, which revolves around - no surprise here - AI to deliver better customer experiences. As part of this strategy, Zendesk also made clear how the past twelve month’s acquisitions of Klaus, Ultimate, and tymeshift get integrated into Zendesk’s customer service offerings, enriching and rounding them off. The company is betting big on AI, working on the assumption that interaction volumes between customers and companies are continuing to increase very fast. As a conclusion of this, service needs to become AI driven to accommodate this scale. Secondly, Zendesk sees AI as the technology underlying the necessary high degree of personalization. Together, this is estimated to increase the market size available to CX solutions that automate CX labor tremendously.

At the event, Zendesk had three key announcements. They were

• AI agents to improve self service solutions,
• a copilot that helps agents solve incoming tickets faster and provides insight to further optimize the service and
• a workforce engagement solution that helps improve the productivity of digital and human agents as well as the quality of conversations.

Behind all this lies the recognition that customer service is very much conversational.

Customers and partners that I talked with had a keen interest in learning more about AI use cases. Many of them had started to use AI but estimated themselves still in early stages. 

The bigger picture

The customer service software market has become very crowded with players ranging from service specialists to suite players, with classic call-center companies making inroads, too. Additionally, there is a raft of niche companies that are offering specialized add-ons to improve customer service solutions, from connecting them to workforce management or -engagement solutions, to QA solutions and many more. It is quite easy to see a kind of a consolidation going on here.

A good number of these solutions use advanced statistics or machine learning based technologies to increase the overall efficiency of customer service and/or to achieve a higher degree of automation. If not outright embedded into each other, solutions are regularly integrated using APIs, with customers often choosing to work with a small number of vendors in a kind of an ecosystem approach. With service centers being regularly trimmed to efficiency, companies usually follow one of two base strategies: they either look for efficiency, aka cutting cost, or for offering better service without adding cost. The latter is often combined with setting up the service center as a profit center, as opposed to a cost center.

The latter strategy was exemplified by a Zendesk Relate customer that built a continuous improvement strategy around its ticketing system. Three of the main KPIs that are measured and shall be maximized are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and the ratio of automated responses. The company is achieving its goals using generative AI to solve issues, another AI to predict a customer satisfaction score. Human agents are involved if the AI cannot generate a response or if the predicted customer satisfaction for this response is not high enough. In this case, human agents are tasked with improving it. Quite the same happens with agent responses: The agents’ responses are evaluated for predicted customer satisfaction and sent back to the agents for improvement if the predicted customer satisfaction score is not high enough. This is combined with an automated coaching system that agents are encouraged to use to continuously improve their own productivity. The results of implementing this strategy - which admittedly is a bit more complex in terms of systems, metrics, and culture - are quite amazing.

My point of view and analysis

Let’s cover two topics here, the event itself and the content.

Starting with the event.

Looking at it through a customer lens, it was chock-full of information and, more importantly, the ability to talk to experts about the roadmap and to see working software in the exhibition hall. The customer presentations were very interesting.

Keynotes are always an interesting thing. Robert Richman very relevantly and excitingly talked about customer service requiring a service culture. Having Michelle Obama on the first day was certainly interesting. On the other hand, no one I talked to found much relation to Zendesk in her story. This is the eternal challenge that I have also seen at other events. While it is important to work with “luminaries”, it is sometimes difficult for the audience to relate their stories to the story that the vendor tells.

From an analyst perspective, I would have wished to have more access to company executives to dig deeper into information. Still, the ability to speak to customers and partners was valuable. 

Big kudos to the organizing team that mastered the challenge of creating an event that was interesting for customers, partners, and analysts.

Coming to the content.

As said in the beginning, these days every CX strategy involves AI, if it doesn’t outright revolve around it. This includes Zendesk. From a capability as well as a vision capability, Zendesk seems to be positioned better than many of its competitors in the customer service arena. And there are certainly a good number of competitors. Zendesk’s position is a result of a good product mix, the early creation of “ready-to-use” AI models to improve service efficiency as well as of interesting acquisitions. Of course, it is important to deliver this vision fast. These days, most advantages tend to be of temporary nature.

The good number of competitors is not only because the customer service market is crowded. It is also partly attributable to the fact that Zendesk claims to offer a “complete CX solution for the AI era”. This broadens the competitive field significantly, also into areas that Zendesk does not cover or does not cover with a strong product. CX is not limited to customer service.

On the other hand, Zendesk’s mission is to “power exceptional service for every person on the planet”. This focus on service processes somewhat reduces the ambiguity of the terms “CX” and “CX department”. As one of the execs said “we are great when it comes to tickets” - which is true. In short, the company maintains a focus on customer (and employee) service. It is important for customers to keep this in mind.

Having said that, Zendesk also offers a sales solution, Zendesk for sales. It was notably absent throughout the event; yet is important for the complete CX story. The same is true for the Sunshine platform, although in this case there still was a lot of talk about the platform, without naming it. This makes a lot of sense, both in terms of the need and also a need to make the fresh acquisitions part of this platform. 

Talking about these acquisitions, they are important add-ons to the core service functionality. This is especially true for the QA capabilities that come with Klaus and the AI engine that is delivered by Ultimate. Tymeshift as a WFM solution plays out its strengths increasingly with bigger growing service centers.

Service processes will be automated more and more to achieve and maintain high levels of customer and employee satisfaction. This needs a solution that has the necessary intelligence. Zendesk is on a good way to get this job done. It already now solves parts of this problem and has many of the remaining parts of this solution at hand - and is working on combining them to a whole.

What the heck is customer experience, and who is responsible for it? These are two very good questions, for which I, myself, have some very distinct answers.

Let’s start with them, before I dive deeper into that topic with Praval Singh, VP Marketing for Customer Experience at Zoho, who – naturally – has some good answers, too.

You prefer the original? Of course, you can watch the complete conversation, too.

Here it goes.

Re customer experience, I am with Paul Greenberg and Bruce Temkin, who some years ago defined customer experience. Paul defines customer experience as “how the customer feels about a company over time” while Temkin defines it as “the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization”.

Either does it for me. It is the customer’s perception.

This makes it quite easy to answer the second question. Who is responsible?

Answer: The customer!

Why? Because the organization cannot control how I perceive my interactions because it simply doesn’t know enough about my current context, aka situation, at any given time. Organizations regularly do not know enough about my cultural background, my current situation, or my current mood. What they can do, is taking an educated guess, based upon whatever data and algorithm or AI they have at hand. What the organization can control to some extent, is their half of an engagement. This means that the best intended engagements can result in unintended and undesired perceptions.

Customer experience is a function of the customer’s experiences, the expectations towards a brand/product/company and the customer’s mood at the time of the experiences.

Hence also my cringing when I hear something in the lines of “delivering an experience”. An experience is nothing that can be wrapped up like a parcel and be delivered by UPS.

But that’s me. What is Praval’s take?

Praval is, of course, well aware that the term is pretty overused. He goes so far as to say that it even gets misused. He defines customer experience as “what would she talk about you when you're not in the room. That's what the experience is all about.” This experience is what gets established during interactions across a variety of touch points. Many of these touch points are digital. And this is where vendors like Zoho play their role although technology is only a part. Praval says that “the best of software cannot solve for good customer experience”. Additional important parts are people and process, “how you look at engaging with the customer, across all touchpoints sales, marketing, customer service.” Engagement is the crucial part.

But who is in charge then?

Within the company, definitely not a single person, as there are too many moving parts and “it takes a village” to bring a strategy, a framework, and possibly best practices to life. Touch points are very diverse. They range from digital ones “designed by a designer, built by a programmer or a developer” to physical ones like “the person who gets on a phone call or response to a chat to the salesperson who may or may not engage with a prospect. It's everybody put together”. According to Praval, engagement is a part of experience. Even the best software cannot solve the challenge that the customer having a good experience is.

So, we need to look at people, too. And this is where employee experience comes into the picture. Employee experience, though, is oftentimes looked at as disjoint from customer experience, as a separate set of systems and processes.

According to Praval, Zoho has learnt that employee experience and customer experience have a tight connection. He maintains that “we have learned talking to customers, setting these things up internally, we see great employee experience enables excellent customer experience. And with that, what I mean is if you empower your employees with the right set of tools, the right set of authority to sort of engage with customers take decisions on the fly. All that influences how you deliver the customer experience as a company.”

How can Zoho have learnt this, as opposed to many other business software vendors? Because of the breadth and width of Zoho’s integrated offerings.

“And I think we're in a position to say that confidently because we have employee experience platforms and customers for that. We have customer skills platform and customers for that. And they beautifully” into each other.

Of course, AI plays a role in this, not only since the advent of generative AI. “It is already happening” says Praval. There are well defined use cases, where AI already helps although they are not yet overly complex. “It could be letting a salesperson know when is the best time to call someone. So doing simple things straightforward is already in the works. It's happening; or helping a support representative with the right answer. It could be pulled from a knowledge base or could be intelligence based on the previous experience of the customer. But whatever it takes, AI can prompt the touch point, which is a support rep in this case, to have a better answer to a question that comes in”.

Praval sees lots of potential and many open questions, especially in the area of generative AI. It is about decisions, and decisions in context. “But what we're talking about the nuance of it, which is where the next gen of the AI would have to learn the pattern that we're talking about, and then not just have the insight but make inferences from it. And we'll have to see how accurate and how valuable that is. But I think we're talking about a fair few unknown unknowns in that path as of now. But yeah, it truly has it potential. And one thing that I strongly feel is, there's a lot of hype, obviously, about gen AI, and, and it works reasonably well in a consumer setting. I would say if you and I are doing some research, looking in for some answers there. But where gen AI lacks, at least today is having that business context.”

Part of the problem is poor integration. Looking forward, he sees this being mitigated by bringing all relevant signals into one system instead of only integrating different systems. “This whole idea of duct taping different products to to make something deliver, I think more and more companies are realizing that that phase is behind us. So, unification over integration is what delivers the best of context and brings in the best of context. And that in turn delivers the best of experiences.”

My point of view

Praval – and by extension Zoho – is touching some important functional topics here, even without going into the challenging areas of ethics and IP. With current systems, including the hyped generative AI “solutions”, the industry so far tackles only the low-hanging fruit. There are only few gen AI solutions that provide new capabilities beyond making existing ones more efficient.

This is partly because all AI solutions suffer from the same problem: data – or rather data quality. This is a result of the need for integrating far too many applications, which causes too much noise for AI to efficiently – even effectively – work. Unified systems – suites – are one way out of this dilemma. With an as clean as possible data base AI systems have a far better chance to identify underlying patterns and to with that not only present analyses but to also provide better next best actions and explain its “reasoning” or inference. In Zoho speak this is a decision intelligence that can provide value for more than just narrow use cases.

And a decision support engine that works across a wide variety of use cases and that offers explainability is what is needed beyond the hype around generative AI.What t

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers.

Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the company could actually create a triple-win situation, benefitting the employees, customers, and the company. also following the top management’s motto “if you take care of your people, and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself.” The thought behind this is “that providing a mechanism for people to be more efficient, because everybody wants to come to work and do a good job. Nobody wants to do mundane tasks that don't add value. And so, if you can provide a mechanism to do that, it enables our employees to then take better care of our customers.”

Being tasked with implementing it, Melissa started off with a software selection process. This process included integration into CRM, a feature analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. At the end of this process, Tidal Basin selected Zoho Projects “because the cost of the system and the value and the tools that we needed really did win out against the alternative options.”

 The implementation was fairly small and, most of all, painless, although the company chose to implement its own way of doing project management, based on principles that are applicable across different sizes of projects, allowing their tailoring according to the needs of the project by means of templates. Tidal Basin initially saw a limited adoption, as they did not immediately enforce the use but went for an organic approach. Still, since there is some adoption, the company sees better visibility into and tracking of projects. In Melissa’s word, what Tidal Basin also sees is “that our PMs, are spending less time trying to aggregate information when they're having their meetings; they're easily able to go in and kind of follow up on the things that, you know, should have been done between the last meeting and this one. And then the people who are doing those tasks can also be a collaborator. And they're providing those updates. So, you can also eliminate unnecessary meetings, if both parties know that the work has been done; and there's no need for a follow up. There's also the mechanism, being able to tag things and tag people, if you have questions. That kind of helps facilitate communication about a specific task within a project that you don't necessarily have if you, know, you're managing via email, for lack of a better way of saying it.”

The success of the Zoho Projects implementation led to the adoption of additional products, particularly Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk, to fulfill requirements of public programs. An example that Melissa Gordon brings, is “grant programs require a mechanism for the general public to notify the grantee if there is the potential for fraud, waste, and abuse. And so, we were able to take Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk to build out a reporting form for fraud, waste, and abuse, tie it to a help desk, that we were then able to manage the monitoring and review of those reports that were coming in, and then also aggregate and report that back to the client as part of one of our deliverables.”

From here on, it was a natural extension to also use Zoho Desk for employee support. It, since has been rolled out to nearly every department. This, in combination with the embedded analytics provides the visibility that is necessary to improve the employee experience further by not only enabling fast and efficient problem resolution but, moreover, giving the opportunity to identify address areas that can get systematically improved. “You are only as good as your customer remembers” says Ms. Gordon.

And this customer may very well be your own employee! And helping the employee ultimately benefits the customer, is a belief at Tidal Basin.

Being asked what’s next, Ms. Gordon elaborates that Tidal Basin now has a good number of Zoho app in use and people see the value. So, they are preparing for a full-fledged roll out of Zoho One.

Still, a vendor-buyer relationship is comparable to a marriage. There is no eternal honeymoon. Asked for where she sees scope for improvement, she mentions two. Documentation is not always up to the speed of delivery of new functionality. This is something that gets mostly covered by Zoho’s support organization. However, Ms. Gordon regards this as a price to pay for the pace of innovation that she sees. The second one would be the process of becoming a partner. Tidal Basin sees Zoho as an opportunity to provide even more value to their clients and feels that it is somewhat hard to become a partner. Everything else is pretty much business as usual, there is always one or another feature or improvement request, and Tidal Basins regularly sees solutions to them appear in the software.

My point of view

This is an interesting journey of a company that has an outside-in view on its processes and apparently some out-of-the norm values, which I mean in a very positive way. You do not hear statements like “if you take care of your people and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself” or “you are only as good as your customer remembers” – and that they are not lip service.

It also shows the power of a highly integrated suite of independent applications that can get bundled. It enables the implementation of various applications to improve employee- and customer experience at the customers’ own pace. And this, even though not every piece of the software seems to work seamlessly with the other ones.

Still, companies see the value offered by being able to flexibly choose what they need and want and to add on when they realize the value of their current implementation.

May more vendors pursue this path.

The past 9 months have seen quite a rollercoaster in the tech industry. We have seen staggering profits, we continue to see stock buybacks, we have seen consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – and we have seen mass layoffs. Few of them were well handled or communicated. Even fewer showed any sign of executives taking accountability besides stating that they made mistakes during the pandemic and that they feel sorry for what they need to do now. They had simply over-hired and now need to take corrective action to stay on a ‘growth path’. One of these executives arguably took the prized company culture of regarding the employees as family to grave.

What do these layoffs have in common? They were initiated to please the capital markets, i.e. shareholders and venture capitalists. The idea behind this is that layoffs is the fastest way to solve or avoid impending financial problems. However, there is mounting scientific evidence that this idea is a myth, as e.g., expressed here, here or here as summaries. There is often no financial benefit, even not after 3 years; instead, some scientists look at these layoffs as “the result of imitative behaviour  not particularly evidence based” and that there are other, better ways that businesses can pursue.

But, as Raju Vegesna says “customers are inherently loyal, employees are inherently loyal, investors are not. Yet, businesses are most loyal to this least loyal group of stakeholders”.

Ouch!

One of these better ways

And, indeed, one company that pursues other avenues is Zoho. Zoho CEO and co-founder Sridhar Vembu pledged that there will be no layoffs for economic reasons, no matter what.

But this isn’t all. Vembu’s pledge is rooted in a deep belief that permeates the corporate culture. The belief is that doing good to the communities that surround a business does not harm business. On the contrary, it is good for business. As a company, one cannot only sell to people, one also needs to buy from them. Else, the selling will no more be possible over time. Zoho does this by setting up presence in rural areas that are underserved, underserved with education and opportunity. Why opportunity? Because people in rural areas usually are at the beginning of the value chain, which is where least of the profits of the value chain remain. The starting idea is two-fold: Firstly, bring education to where the people are, which is in rural areas, instead of making people move into metropolitan areas. Secondly, cut out the middle men, so that people at the beginning of the value chain are able to make a living. Cutting out middle men works in business operations and services, too. It means insourcing instead of outsourcing.

Doing all this is a job that businesses can and should do, as they benefit from it.

I really like this thought, having been brought up in Germany.

Why does this matter, you might ask. It matters, because this belief is also rooted in the German constitution.

Article 14 paragraph 2 of the German constitution says: ‘Property is an obligation. Using it should serve the public good at the same time.‘ This is a very good commandment and far from being socialistic.

Unless you want to consider Germany a socialist country, that is.

Zoho invited me as a member of a group of fellow analysts to a week-long immersion into its corporate culture, Truly Zoho, to show us that this is not lip service. 

The proof is in the pudding

Now, what did we see? Let me briefly describe three of our experiences.

Loyalty is bi-directional

I want to start with an extremely moving story about fierce corporate loyalty to employees. As part of its strive for independence, Zoho has an inhouse group of highly talented artists. About four years ago, one of these artists drew a portrait of analyst Brent Leary. Shortly after, the artist was involved in a car accident that was near-fatal for him. He barely survived and was told that it was highly unlikely that he would ever again be able to use his talent and passion. Luckily, after three years of rehabilitation and physical therapy, he is able to draw again. And this is, where the fierce loyalty of Zoho to its employees becomes exemplified. Throughout his suffering, Zoho kept him on the payroll and also covered the medical expenses. He was kept involved. This culminates in his hand being made the logo for Truly Zoho.

Corporate loyalty like this shows employees that they matter, that they are not mere ‘resources’. This creates employee the loyalty that is evidenced by Zoho’s very low attrition rate of six percent. The talent, skill, knowledge and experience that stay inside the company this way, and the attractiveness to prospective employees, are invaluable.

Investment in education benefits all parties

The next example is Zoho Schools. For about a decade now, Zoho is running an education program in its headquarters. It started with business, arts and technology for college aged teenagers. This program is extending into other locations. The teenagers are not enrolled here for their previous academical achievements but for their drive and passion. The enrolment process is set up accordingly. As it is the most ‘visual’, we had the chance to see some of the work that these students create. Suffice it to say, it was truly amazing (pun definitely intended).

Whoever graduates from this school has a good education for their future life, with great employment perspectives. Not only at Zoho but in other companies, too, as the reputation of Zoho School is very high. And this investment is also good for Zoho itself. Not only will many of these students become Zoho employees after not only having gained valuable education in the course of which they already did some contribution to Zoho, but they also have learned about the workings of Zoho itself, know the culture and are ready to run. 

This way, Zoho identifies and builds its own talent, thus staying independent, shaping its own destiny instead of being reliant on external parties.

Even, if the students end up working for another company, there is a wider benefit. The Indian per capita GDPof 2022 was around $2,500 US. If the investment into a student is about ten thousand dollar over four years, they will conservatively contribute with around $15,000 US to the Indian GDP – per annum. This helps building the Indian economy and to generate wealth for the people. It is also part of what Vembu thinks of as a regenerative economy by giving back to the communities that surround any business. He answers the question whether there is a social contract between a business and the communities with a solid yes.

Think global – act local

Last, but not least, there is the Zoho farm and the school Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam in Tenkasi. It is a part of the endeavour of setting up Zoho locations in underdeveloped areas. The school tends to children from preschool through highschool age. It started off the idea that education must be available where the people are instead of making people move to where education is available. The school follows a Montessori concept and enables the children who complete it to visit a college – or Zoho School. Some of them choose to not attend a college but to be more ‘hands-on’, e.g. repairing machines. This developed into a thriving repair workshop for vehicles and will lead to the creation of a factory for electric tuk-tuks on the farm. This is another example for how Zoho ingrains itself into the rural economy, not by focusing on the core business but by developing and using opportunities. Skills are built in a region where it has high impact.

The farm itself is another example for this concept. Being an organic farm, it is quite labour intensive. At retail prices, organic produce is fairly expensive, yet normally the biggest part of the retail price and the profits remain at the retail and wholesale stages. Consequently, the farm sells its produce directly, to Zoho, for use in the Zoho canteens. This way, Zoho shapes its own destiny, Zoho employees are served with quality food, the farm workers get paid a better salary and have a perspective. Finally, the money spent on food pays for the farm. 

My analysis and point of view

Capitalism and caring for a greater good are not mutually exclusive.

Make no mistake, Zoho is a for-profit company and not a charity. This means, capitalism is behind most of what the company does, although there are charitable parts, too. Still, the company has developed a quite unique form capitalism. This form is based upon the conviction that extracting from the surrounding environment is not sustainable. Instead, a business needs to buy of the local community as well as sell to it. A second conviction is that it is important to be able to shape one’s own destiny. A third one is that it is not necessary to maximize the own revenue or profitability. This is, indeed, a corollary of the first one. A fourth one that is worthwhile mentioning is decentralization – decisions need to be taken as close to where they need to be implemented as possible. 

All this, along with the firm belief that employees are not a commodity, forms a unique culture that is enriched by the combination of Indian and US/European education that many members of the leadership team have. 

Zoho and its leaders have a far wider notion of capital than commonly used. Capital also includes intellectual property, assets, environment and last, but not least, people and their skills.

This position, and a dogged view of innovating as a series of small experiments has made the company one of the most prolific and innovative business applications vendors. Zoho offers a breadth, width and depth of functionality that is unrivalled, barring a few far bigger companies. A good example to support this is: Zoho recently managed to increase the performance of Postgres, the database underlying its applications, by a factor of fifty. This astounding achievement is thanks to one single engineer who spent five years solving the problem of how to leverage the power of GPUs for the database engine. It is the result of passion work, giving this employee the space for an experiment, and not the result of pouring nine digits of dollars into it. 

The consequence of the Zoho philosophy has tangible positive results for customers. Customers can work with a company that is viable, because it is profitable, a company that offers rich solutions, a company that is innovative, a company that can and does offer these solutions at highly competitive prices, a company that cares.

Truly, Zoho: be loyal to employees and customers; more companies should read and apply a few (or more) pages of the Zoho playbook.

In full disclosure, at the time of writing this, Zoho is a customer of mine. In addition, Zoho paid for my trip to, accommodation and expenses at Truly Zoho. Zoho did not influence me nor expected me to write this post. All opinions are mine and mine only

Smaller enterprise software vendors today operate in a world where their fortunes may rise and fall on their ability to integrate with one or more cloud computing platforms. In many cases, having a connector or API for multiple platforms is a great means to survive and thrive. But it’s not the only way.

Versatility has always been one of the watch words of cloud computing. The ease of adding and updating functions, or of moving to a new platform entirely, created an incentive for vendors to embrace that versatility. The CEO or CFO who is looking out for their company’s future would thus rarely be faulted for trusting vendors whose products work on as many platforms as possible.

The CTO, on the other hand, might not share that view. While that role has to allow for future moves their company might make, they are also the person who is most responsible for choosing the best tools for the job and making sure they keep working. For the CTO, a vendor’s ability to serve across multiple platforms is far less relevant than the quality, usability, and robustness of their product for the platform being used right now.

Disclosure: The inspiration for this article comes from working with FastCall (www.fastcall.com), a business communications system vendor that works exclusively with Salesforce. FastCall is my client; the words and thoughts presented here are my own. 

Is This A Game?

Think of it this way: Let’s say you have a Playstation gaming console. Does it matter if your favorite game is also available for XBox, Nintendo Switch, and PC? You can only use one system at a time, and you might not even own any of the others. A game developer that has to patch and create new content on multiple platforms will probably have a longer release schedule, introduce relatively more bugs with each update, and might not focus on issues specific to the Playstation if the XBox is a squeakier wheel.

A multiplatform business software vendor, likewise, has to retain staff for support and updates for every version of the product. This, when added to development and marketing of new products for those platforms, means greater overhead, and probably higher prices passed to the customer. Specialist vendors like FastCall can run very lean and still deliver an excellent product for their chosen environment.

The video game analogy maps well to enterprise software, but here’s another one to consider: mobile apps. When you browse for apps to add to your phone (as opposed to looking for a specific one), you are presented with a list of possibilities that can be very hard to distinguish. The main differentiator is their rating, and those are known to be skewed toward the extreme ends of the scale. It can be hard to tell, and somewhat time consuming, to figure out which of them have been updated regularly—or ever. Is the app that hasn’t been touched since 2014 flawless, or did the developer stick it on the list because it was good enough and would earn some money without intervention? You might—might—be able to filter by most recently added, but newness is no guarantee of maintenance.

Users run into the same issue with third-party applications that run alongside their cloud business software. The app marketplaces are geared to show the best rated and the newest applications, not the ones that are most thoroughly maintained. Yet maintenance is an important sign of quality, because it means the developer is still listening, still actively updating their apps, doing more than the minimum required to stay listed. 

The Updates Must Flow

Large vendors will have the resources to keep the updates flowing, but if a small vendor is doing it, that’s a sign of commitment. Their app isn’t an ancillary revenue stream, it’s their livelihood. FastCall is its product. A company that exists to create high quality apps for a software platform will cease to exist if it stops making apps, but also if it stops delivering quality.
It makes perfect sense to engage a big software brand to provide your business computing platform—the bigger the platform, the more it can hold. What you put on that platform doesn’t have to come from big vendors. For major, mission-critical applications, sure, go with a top seller. But for all the things those products don’t do, and for anything new you want to try, bigger isn’t always better. For specific functions, your best bet is often a small vendor that only develops for this one platform. They will put in the work, and they will be there for their customers, because their existence literally depends on it.

• Stress management
• Creation of a community of co-workers
• Creating a sense of meaningful work

My Take