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These days, customer experience is one of the biggest topics. Many, if not most, vendors have restructured, reshaped, or just renamed their portfolios to reflect customer experience one way or the other. Customer experience is great, customer experience is valuable . Now, what is customer experience? According to Paul Greenberg’s definition , “customer experience is how a customer feels about a company over time”. Bruce Temkin defines customer experience as “the perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization.” Similarly, the Gartner Group defines customer experience as “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings cause by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.” What all these definitions have in common is that they are talking about something that is not in the realm of the business and quite abstract. I often say that good customer experience (CX) is the new differentiator as produ...

This is the third part of my return of the undead series. The first two parts dealt with identifying what components or building blocks a metaverse ecosystem needs to consist of . These components basically define how metaverse can work and serve as a model for the identification of how/where participants in an ecosystem could earn their revenues.  Figure 1: The metaverse ecosystem These building blocks are mainly independent of the notion of a(n open) metaverse, as described by Tony Parisi in his article The seven Rules of the Metaverse . They also apply to a more multiverse type world of a collection of closed metaverses – something that I really do not want to call metaverse. The openness, that is necessary for a “metaverse” to thrive can be achieved either by common consent or via regulation – or more likely by a combination thereof. In any case, I believe that some amount of regulation is necessary in order to create and maintain a level playing field and to avoid one or few c...

There are a couple of lessons that the pandemic taught us, apart from that there are different opinions about whether Bill Gates makes us all drones via the vaccines … The most important one is that there is a need to not only look at the demand side but to also look at the supply chain when one wants to improve the customer experience, especially when the customer intention is a purchase. You now might say that the experience happens at the touch point, which is for example the e-commerce site. However, this is only partly true. It is important to make sure that the front end provides the right information, with good performance and without too much distraction, and to have a smooth and comfortable checkout process. In other words, provide a great e-commerce site. Still, this is only half of the story. And this is, where the supply chain comes into the picture. Detour – what does the customer expect? On the base level, a customer expects that things just work,...

The News On March 3, 2022  Zoho   released the new version of its Creator  no-code/low-code platform. It offers a unified development platform to empower both IT teams and business users.  The new release is targeted at building end-to-end solutions in an easy way. It combines integration, process automation and analytics/business intelligence with the ability to build applications and offers application management capabilities needed to manage security, compliance and governance. Along with the built-in collaboration features it allows for a tight collaboration between business- and IT users. The bigger picture About a year ago I wrote a first  article on no-code and low-code  platforms, based upon the realization that the ongoing digitalization and necessity for business agility in fast changing environments require more than traditional developer support. At that time I cautioned that business users should not just be allowed to do everything without gov...

In the first part of this article, I explained why there is no metaverse (yet), although the idea is around for quite some years. Despite the current hype, it is just a re-emerging topic. Foundational technologies like  VR are around since as long as the 50s  although VR really entered our minds only in the 90s. The Virtual Reality Modeling Language  VRML  got standardized in 1994 and its successor  X3D  in 2004.  Half Life  with the first highly immersive world was released in 1998. I went into some definition and laid out a framework for a kind of an architecture that can support whatever this idea evolves into, with some emphasis on common standards and some governance. These are necessary, because the metaverse is nothing more than a platform of platforms, which means that at the end of the day it is a kind of a protocol.  Or else we will see a collection of (competing) multiverses. I closed with some questions that need to be answered. ·...

There. Is. No. Metaverse. I am sorry to be a party pooper but read me out. It doesn’t exist. At least not yet. And not for quite some years to come. I am talking of a decade or more. Perhaps not ever. And whence it comes, it probably looks different from what we see now, and we will likely call it by a different name. Does this statement surprise you? I mean, many people, companies and investors are looking at metaverse as being the next big thing. Crunchbase already in November 2021  reported more than $10.6bn being invested  into metaverse related startups. According to a Galaxy  report quoted by Institutional Investor , crypto and blockchain startups alone collected more than $32bn in 2021.  Microsoft just invested a whopping $70bn in Activision Blizzard , which is clearly a metaverse play. So much money cannot be wrong, right? Google trends also suggests that there is quite some interest in these topics that came up quite recently and quite suddenly, which means ...