aheadCRM

Just on may way back from CRM evolution 2017 it is time for a little recap. The conference, once more chaired by CRM Grandmaster Paul Greenberg, was again co-located with sister conferences Customer Service Experience and Speechtek. Why there is a separate – and smaller – conference for Customer Services co-located with a CRM conference is beyond me, as Customer Service is an integral part of CRM. But be it as it is. CRM Evolution attracted around 500 professionals, being second to Speechtek. The main topics this year seemed to be Customer Engagement, Customer Experience, and AI, nothing of this coming as a surprise. The size ratio of the conferences and the topics were also confirmed by the exhibitors in the Customer Solutions Expo. We saw an abundance of little booths with AI- and bot-vendors. The mainstays of CRM had fairly small presences, notably SugarCRM, which had a big presence last year. Both keynotes dealt with delivering to maximize customer experience and to measure ...

I just had the pleasure of getting a few family days in the Club Med Bali resort and, being me, working and writing about customer engagement and customer experience, somehow cannot not observe. On top of this, Chef de Village Jeremie Gonzalez and his 280-strong team certainly deliver something that is worth writing about. Jeremy also agreed to having a chat with me about his resort and customer experience. So here we go. The Impressions We were traveling with 9 persons, 2 families, 4 adults, 5 kids from 7 to 11, coming from New Zealand, with another friend arriving from Germany. Right from the beginning on Denpasar airport we have been in good hands. As one can imagine, in a holiday destination like this there are plenty of hotels and resorts receiving customers. Club Med was very easily spotted and their man took us under his wings with a warm greeting, guiding us to the van that was waiting for us to bring us to the 20 minutes away resort. Where we received another warm...

Customers dump Companies due to bad experiences. Source: Rightnow Customer Experience Report Customer experience and customer experience management is all about technology and its right use. This is what many of the articles that one could read on various platforms can make one think. Just that it isn’t. I guess I contributed my share to this misconception, too. My excuse is that I am a techie by trade and at heart. Sure, technology is a part of delivering a good customer experience but there is much more to it. Technology enables the digital presence of a business and helps its employees delivering better experiences – if available and used. But delivering a good customer experience first and foremost involves people, then policy and process. Technology is the last priority contributing, it is an enabler, a means to an end – not the end itself. On the other hand there are reports over reports saying that customers stop doing business with a company after bad...