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In the course of the last year or three, I have written a few times about the supply chain and how it affects the customer experience, sometimes badly so. In my last article ‘ the impact of the supply chain on the customer experience ’, I explained some of the issues and laid out a couple of high level solutions. Let me elaborate a little on what I wrote then. Of course, there are challenges in two main areas: ·   The demand side ·   The supply side The customer expectations are quite simple: A customer expects that things just work, that the vendor, and information given by the vendor, is reliable, accurate and comes timely; that deliveries after order are coming reasonably fast and that there is transparency about the order and delivery status. This is all quite abstract, so let us fill this with life. An example to the contrary goes as follows: You buy something, e.g., some whiteware, from a brand with a very high reputation; you are asked for upfront payment (several ...

These days, Customer Data Platforms, or in brief CDPs, are one of the most discussed topics in the CX industry. Last time I looked, the CDP Institute counted more than 150 CDPs of different flavors that target different business challenges. This raises a lot of questions, chiefly: What is a CDP? Which business challenges do companies solve with a CDP and how do they approach the solution, i.e. how do they proceed implementing one? Let’s start at the beginning. According to the CDP Institute, a CDP is “ packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems ”. Figure 1: A simple model of CDP functionalities Functionalities offered by CDPs reach from simple data gathering and unification to the activation and even active usage of information derived from customer data. This already shows the different business challenges that can be addressed with a CDP. It also shows, that the business challenges can be addressed in a way that provid...

  The News On May 10, 2022, Zoho released Zoho Marketing Plus , its suite of marketing solutions. You can read the complete press release here . The suite combines multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. It shall provide digital marketers with a unified platform of integrated capabilities that help them achieve their objectives more easily through a combination of simplification, integration and embedded collaboration capabilities. Zoho Marketing Plus brings together marketing activities throughout the whole campaign life cycle from ideation through creation, execution to measurement. This allows to manage campaigns and provides the whole marketing organization with a single shared view of information. " Consumers and digital marketing continue to evolve at warp-speed, and marketers are struggling to keep up. It's becoming increasingly difficult to properly manage multiple...

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...