aheadCRM

Freshworks has is now officially a fresh (sorry, I really couldn't resist this pun) member of the club of platform players. The company introduced its own flavour of CRM and a platform that they build upon. What is next? Lot's of ground to cover. A CRKKonvo with Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer, Peter Stadlinger, Head of Products CRM and David Krauss, Senior Director Product Marketing at Freshworks. Together with Marshall Lager, Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit they discuss market perspectives, what the value for customers actually is and how the innovations that the team has recently introduced fit in there. Prakash, Peter, and David bring a wealth of knowledge to the conversation, including a pretty interesting dive into how to train an AI based upon the idea that the human who is in front of the machine is still one of the most important trainers, due to tacit knowledge and wisdom that cannot be codified. Which also explains the trifecta of priorities that Freshwork...

In this episode we welcomed Lars Brodersen, author, publisher, and long time CRM expert. Lars is the author of the customer manifesto, which he wrote as a reaction to a series of pretty unsettling customer experiences, starting from soured milk in his Latte Macchiato followed by an I don't care attitude of the waitress via a horribly wrong order confirmation by a car rental agency, a new appliance breaking and the repair service being an awful long time away, or the electrician being available only after various attempts and a long awaited for package finally being lost. It is the story of someone who moved out, just to find traumatic experiences. All in all, nothing that we haven't experienced. Yet, he reacted differently, by writing the customer manifesto, which emphasises on one simple truth: Companies are there to serve the needs of their customers. This is their sole reason of existence. This "earned" Lars a spot in our CRMKonvos, with us talking about this, his ...

A few days ago, together with a group of fellow analysts, I was invited to attend the 2020 Freshworks analyst days that covered a lot of ground from corporate vision through strategy and of course, some announcements for the Freshworks Refresh 2020 Global Virtual Conference . These announcements came shortly after the company appeared in the fourth Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2020 and after being ranked #16 in the 2020 Forbes Cloud 100 list. All this clearly shows some ambition – and success. As you may be aware by now, these announcements included Neo, the new Freshworks platform and the new Freshworks CRM product. These two topics created the most discussion points between the Freshworks executives and the analysts. Of course, these two announcements were supported by statements on the corporate vision, mission and current standing as well as product vision. Impressive customer testimonials were not missing, too. My Take This I need to divide into three sections, one about the event...

It was a Tuesday again. This time Ralf Korb and I greeted  Raj Balasundaram , Senior Vice President of AI at Emarsys as our guest - and had a second one, but more on this special appearance below. Of course we were interested in both sides, Emarsys, the marketing automation company that was recently acquired by SAP, and in his deep experience with the implementation and use of AI based systems. We had lots of questions like: Where is the marketing automation market headed? What is your view on marketing automation tools at the intersection of CDP’s, personalization, RTIM, Customer Journey Orchestration? Will these market segments merge? Will they jointly create another one? What is the difference between Marketing Automation and Marketing Clouds? Is one used rather for B2B purposes and the other one more on the B2C side? Or is it different concepts? What is the role of AI and M/L? What is AI after all? Is it just a vendor generated hype? Why should AI work now, after the prev...

Ralf Korb and I had a special guest in Jesus Hoyos , long time CRM practitioner and analyst who works from Mexico and Florida. Jesus concentrates on the Latin American and North American markets. Apart from being a genuinely great person, he had a lot of interesting topics to cover, starting from how different even the various Latin- and South American markets are to how pricing models should be different, not only to accommodate for a pandemic situation but also for the structures of markets that are dominated by small companies, companies that are far smaller that the enterprises that are usually targeted by the bigger vendors. This also has implications on product development, training schemes and its availability, partner and ecosystem enablement and a lot of of other topics (including kayaking in the Everglades). This is a conversation mostly in English, with some Spanglish and a few German in between. And it is jam-packed with valuable information. Well worthwhile viewing and li...

In this episode Ralf Korb , Marshall Lager and I had two very special guests: Bob Stutz , president of SAP's CX group, who shapes the CRM industry for more than 20 years now and Esteban Kolsky , former analyst, both independently and at Gartner. Esteban has deep roots and a passion for customer service processes and now leads the sales and service products at SAP CX.  And then there was a special star, perhaps the youngest guest who we will ever have. Again, and as usual for our CRMKonvos, we did not stick to one hour. Bob and Esteban actually shared their insights for a full 90 minutes, which is something for which we are deeply grateful. We covered a lot of ground starting with how 22 years of experience in the military services can help in the software industry - and not ending with why it took him and his team that long to publish an SAP CX strategy.  You are interested in the state of AI and machine learning? Ask Esteban - or listen to his statements in this episode. Sa...

  It has been an intense 2 weeks. The CX or CRM or however you want to call it market got a serious makeover. After a long time without a tangible strategy, SAP announced a lot of things, starting with the intended acquisition of Emarsys , followed by an announcement about the release of a customer data platform as part of its SAPCXLIVE event, and then it also conducted its SAPCXLIVE online event in an impressive manner. I wouldn’t proclaim it ‘cineastic’, which is the current mot du jour, but still, it felt very much like a trade show, just virtual. And the week before, SAP president of CX Bob Stutz shook the players during an executive roundtable (very good discussion, intense 2:40 hrs) with representatives of the big 5 held by the CRMPlayaz Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg . He openly questioned the enterprise software vendors pricing policies by asking why the industry does not go for a utility bases billing approach – or should I say utilization based billing approach. Mayb...