aheadCRM

The e-commerce industry has been pushing the exact same shopping cart down the exact same digital aisle for the better part of two decades. We have endlessly debated the optimal color for a checkout button. We have deployed massive Customer Data Platforms (to track users across the web. We have implemented traditional Customer Relationship Management tools and a full-on MarTech stack to send personalized emails that usually find a direct way into the spam folder. Yes, despite all this expensive digital plumbing, the average conversion rate stubbornly hovers around a meager two percent. Enter the industry's latest shiny toy: agentic commerce. The vendor pitches are certainly alluring. We are moving away from the tedious "click and wait" era into a frictionless "talk and buy" reality. On the surface, it sounds like a massive leap forward. However, any technology analyst worth a grain of salt must ask the difficult questions. Is this actually revolutionary, or is i...

Episode 13 of the CRMKonvos with Ralf Korb and Thomas Wieberneit revolved around the topic of how to get to a great CRM that truly helps employees and customers alike by making sure that satisfied employees have the means to create and keep happy customers. Our guest Patrick Ganzmann , MD of valantic Customer Engagement and Commerce, is the right person to talk to about this topic.  We were keen to hear his insights and examples from the numerous projects that he and his team completed; how they did it, and what they learned on the way. In brief: Patrick didn't disappoint with the wealth of insight and learnings that he shared with us. Leading into the topic, we briefly discussed the way into offering a search engine that Apple seems to go. Doesn't make sense for you? Follow our brief analysis about this topic. And why Apple to start with?  Because they are all about experience, which is what a good CRM helps offering. Enjoy! This webcast is in German language.

During SAPPhire 2018 SAP announced C/4HANA with quite a fanfare. I covered and analysed this announcement in my post SAPPHIRE 2018 – The Return of the Suite . Sure, C/4HANA marks the return of SAP to the suite, just in another shape than previously known. Instead of combining the pillars of CRM: Marketing, Sales, and Service in one monolithic application it integrates the corresponding clouds into a suite by means of an infrastructure-, service-, and integration layer called SAP Cloud Platform. The SAP Cloud Platform also provides services like IoT and Blockchain, besides numerous additional and less sexy, but necessary ones. C/4HANA Architecture; source: SAP The SAP Cloud Platform also enables extensibility of the clouds, be it in-app (‘in cloud’) or as external extensions via the Extension Framework and the (upcoming) Microservices Ecosystem. The SAP Cloud Platform, as well as a number of in-cloud features enable AI and machine learning, exposed as...

The News On June 13, 2018, during its annual Connections event, Salesforce announced a number of additions to their marketing cloud and their ecommerce and service clouds. The announcement goes into three main directions: 1.      Based on the strategic alliance that Google and Salesforce entered into in November 2017, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud will get a deeper integration with Google Analytics 360. Starting now it will be possible to combine Google Analytics 360 data and Salesforce Marketing Cloud data in a single customer journey dashboard within Marketing Cloud. Conversely, Google Analytics 360 can now leverage Marketing Cloud campaign data to better deliver targeted content to consumers. Both integrations enable a deeper understanding of customers and their behaviours. Later, in Q3 this year, Salesforce plans to offer a beta release of an integration that enables marketers to create audiences in Analytics 360 and to activate these audie...