Accelerating Growth with Customer Feedback
The habits of people buying things had shifted in personal shopping decision making and that shift impacted business buying decisions as well. This new learned behavior, conducting your own research online and becoming your own expert, changed what is considered a “trusted” information source and redefined how people make purchase decisions.
Collaborative Incident Management
There’s a process in incident management called “swarming” that has emerged over the past couple of years. The idea seems pretty simple (and maybe just puts a name on something that companies have done in some fashion for a longer time), when there is a critical incident, bring a team together that has the capabilities and skills to find and execute the resolution. This approach eliminates handoffs and puts the spotlight on the issue and the “right” team to sort it out. While the idea is pretty simple, executing it effectively has some complexities and impediments created by the lack of a systematic way to manage the swarming. The process also eliminates the need for the escalation or tiered model in your support organization, creating instead a collaborative support model.
Are Your Customers “Lost”?
Today, for a lot of companies and sales teams, there’s a gap between what they think the buyer wants and does, and how the buyer actually behaves. This gap creates bad or incorrect behaviors for the sellers, and creates friction and poor experiences for buyers.
The Value of an Integrated Marketing Platform
Moving from a complex mix of marketing tools to a single platform solution can provide a great deal of benefit to the whole marketing team. In addition the value of a unified customer data model has a big impact across the whole company. This doesn’t mean that there might be some unique use cases that require a specialized solution, but in the aggregate unifying the team with a robust marketing platform can solve many problems and streamline operations.
Is B2B Sales Broken?
An emerging category of solutions though, called sales acceleration platforms, can create a digital support structure that combines AI, on-demand content and crowd sourced intelligence to improve each customer interaction. Using a sales acceleration platform ensures new reps onboard quickly, come up to speed and meet performance targets sooner and existing reps increase productivity while reducing the ‘friction’ that is creating the low job satisfaction and turnover.
Low Code Collaborative Solution Development; Zoho Releases an Updated Creator Platform
Over the past couple of years low code / no code cloud platforms have become much more available and capable. These platforms can increase the productivity of IT teams and democratize the capability to build some types of applications across the business user community. Empowering end users to customize and build simple applications easily reduces the overall demand on your actual development team, freeing them up to focus on higher value, more complex tasks. User satisfaction, assuming the platform meets expectations, is improved across both teams and end users can quickly solve many business challenges themselves.
Top Tech Trends for 2022
The past two years have created a great deal of change in how businesses use technology and elevated the importance of that technology to the overall business strategy as the pandemic forced more and more business online. The impact of the past two years is driving continued change and the economic uncertainty creates the need for businesses to accelerate their transformation efforts. The next two years will see many technology changes and innovations as companies scramble to be more competitive.
The Agile Enterprise: Automation and Workflow
Agility, flexibility and adaptability are all aspirational traits for a "modern" business. They are, in part at least, the intended outcomes from digital transformation. They are however, a very difficult and complex set of capabilities to achieve. Some of that difficulty is cultural of course, in general people resist change. Beyond the cultural though, getting underlying technologies that enable the ability to be agile, flexible and adapt to changing market conditions is a challenge for most businesses (and systems). Many business technology systems in use today are still built in ways that inhibit the ability too rapidly adapt business strategy and operations to changing market conditions. System constraints often create impediments to a successful transformation.
Building the Best Digital Experiences
With the rapid move online for businesses and consumers over the past 18+ months of the pandemic, "digital experience" has surfaced as one of the most critical factors for business success. Digital experience (DX) is a broad term and can apply to many aspects of managing a business' online presence. In the broadest sense DX encompasses employee or workforce experience (EX), customer experience (CX) and depending on the business, partner experience as well as any other stakeholder interactions. You could also package all that up as user experience (UX), which covers all online business interactions. Cloud communications platforms, automation, intelligent virtual assistants, and any systems that deliver end-to-end business processes are all a part of delivering the desired UX.
Why Context Matters in Software Selection
Analyst firms love to produce reports that compare technology solutions, businesses love to use those reports to support software selection and software suppliers in general love to hate them. Well, maybe that's too harsh, suppliers actually hate the process and only love the reports when it makes them look better than competitors. As a solution buyer, what do these comparison reports really tell you?
A Digital First Strategy
The behaviors and expectations of customers changed to meet the changing conditions of the past 18+ months. Those behaviors are, in my opinion, irrevocably different. That means that in this aspect anyway, you have to ensure the new workflows, processes and employee behaviors put in place during the pandemic response continue to be improved and remain in place. Intentional digital transformation projects historically proved themselves as complex, difficult and often did not deliver the intended results. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study from October 2020, 70% of digital transformation projects fall short of their objectives. BCG also found that digital leaders see earnings growth of 1.8 times higher than digital laggards. There are a lot of reasons from a customer and business perspective then, to assess your progress and work to improve all the changes you've already implemented. From a workforce perspective the transformation efforts need to continue as well, no matter what direction your post pandemic remote work policies take.
Delivering a "Good" Subscriber Experience
I've written quite a bit about subscriber experience already, so I won't go back through the definition. If you want to read more background you can check out this post I wrote for subscription management supplier Zuora. I will focus more on the why and how in this post. It may seem obvious, but providing a good subscriber experience has many benefits to your company. What does providing a good subscriber experience do for your business?
Why I Broke Up with Evernote After 13 Years
As subscription business models continue to expand I believe it’s time to pay more attention to the subscriber’s experience. Buyer behavior has changed and continues to evolve, but one of the consistent areas that buyers look for is advice on purchase decisions from peers. Since you as a subscription business don’t control that peer channel at all, you have to think through how you can try to leverage that influence channel. A successful subscription business survives long term on renewals, not just new business. Create experiences that encourage customers to advocate for you, or at least have a positive opinion of your brand. Or, said another way, the way you treat your subscribers has a direct impact on your business, positive or negative.
Walmart Chases Amazon...again
The retail business, especially in the world of massive eCommerce and brick and mortar giants, is hard. Margins are thin and competing on price, in addition to selection and convenience, makes growing those margins a challenge. In fact, it's not really any easier for the giants to grow margins either. Amazon's most profitable business isn't retail, it's technology. Building the world's largest eCommerce site required cloud based commerce and supply chain services that did not exist at the time Amazon was scaling, so they built them.
Digital Experiences: Cloud Communication
Most communication tools and access to channels show up in the business’ existing business applications like customer service, marketing automation, etc. The problem with that though, is that in general the communications are siloed to the specific function of the application and can’t be extended across the business. Silo’ed applications with silo’ed commutation capabilities hinder or prevent consistent messaging, consistent channel availability and internal collaboration around a specific issue. The same is true of single communication channel tools as well. When it comes to communications with customers, silos are inherently “bad”.
AI Enabled Analytics? - Zoho Announces New Version of Its BI Platform
Zoho has provided a self-serve analytics solution since 2009, making incremental improvements and enhancements along the way. Yesterday they announced a new version of the BI platform that adds some significant new and enhanced capabilities. The platform is made up of four elements:
Self-Serve data preparation and management
Augmented analytics
Data stories
Marketplace apps
Digital Experiences: 3D eCommerce
The intersection of two hot technologies is creating an exciting new category of solution and experience for online shoppers (which after nearly 18 months of Covid lockdown is a great percentage of the population, in the developed world anyway). Both trends, 3D modeling and augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR), have been around for some time. 3D modeling is used across product design, architecture, engineering and construction, building management, game design and animation very successfully. AR is seeing a broad range of business applications in warehouse management / logistics and other areas. VR is somewhat less widely used, mostly seen in video gaming, although other applications are starting to emerge as well.
Agile Software Implementations
Complex software implementations have always been a challenge for most businesses. The systems are complicated, they touch people, processes and other systems across the company and have a low rate of success. There are many reports published on implementation failure rates, for example the 2020 Standish Group Chaos Report shows only 31% of the studied projects were successful, while 50% were challenged and 19% outright failed. This is not a new topic, the low success rates have plagued implementations for years. The numbers do seem to be improving though. One of the reasons for that improvement is the growing use of agile methodologies for complex implementations.
Finding the "Right" Digital Solutions
Last year businesses realized that digital transformation wasn’t just a tech industry buzzword but something necessary for them to rapidly respond to the growing Covid-19 crisis. For companies that could do business with a remote workforce, getting the tools, systems and processes in place to enable work from home, eCommerce and digital customer connections was chaos, at least for those that were not already properly outfitted. Looking back now, it's easy to spot three distinct phases of the transformation. Phase one was basically reactionary, get anything in place that will keep the business operating, particularly focused on the newly remote workforce and in communicating with customers and prospects. Phase two was focused on eCommerce (for businesses that had that opportunity), cleanup of work processes and tools, and a growing concern over digital experiences for customers. Phase three, which seems to have started late last year, is broader, and focused on optimizing tools, processes and experiences. This phase will likely continue for the next 18-24 months as workforce policies and new ways to be competitive are explored and implemented.