The first week of May Zoho had its user conference at its US headquarters in Austin. They invited a number of analyst to attend an analyst program as well, and of course there were a number of interesting announcements. Hidden in those announcements is a set of new offerings currently in beta, designed to extend Zoho’s reach down to solopreneurs and also bridge the gap to startup creation and growth (and the rest of the Zoho solution portfolio). The proposition of engaging with a customer as they launch their solo business and providing a series of offerings to help them grow and scale along the way is a long view on gaining and retaining customers, something that is in character for Zoho.

Your customers’ want what they want, when and how they choose. That’s not a revolutionary concept, but needs repeating from time to time. It is easy, apparently, for you to project your desires on your prospect or customer. It doesn’t work now…maybe (with a few exceptions) it never worked. I’ve made these statements about sales, about how prospects buy, about your customer journey map, service and support and probably a few other topics. Let’s look at one of the most fundamental issues though, consumers care about how you interact with them, and on what channel for each specific online activity.

I’ve had numerous conversations recently, including a couple of web shows (CRM Playaz Roundtable, In the Hot Seat) about the biggest trends in 2023+ for CRM and customer experience (CX). I believe we’re approaching an inflection point that will create some radical departures from our current approach to CRM and CX solutions in the near future. I believe this in part because of these factors:

• The growing seller - buyer gap

• The potential for moving to real time streaming data.

• The rapid evolution of AI tools including the use of large language models like ChatGPT.

• Consumer fatigue with contextually irrelevant personalization.

• Lower engagement with several communication channels caused by overuse.

• Growing dissatisfaction with the poor experience created by outdated tiered support models.

And we went to India… Sometimes the only way to really understand a thing, is to see it in its most natural context. I’ve known Zoho and (at least part of) its unusual culture and business approach for many years. The narrative; Indian startup, no outside investments so completely bootstrapped, private, a wide variety of SaaS products that work across the whole business and are very attractively priced, employee focused and dedicated to giving back to the communities in which it operates. It’s an interesting story and just on its face, unique in a tech world that is funded by venture capital and private equity, obsessed with growth over anything else and with an ultimate goal of entering the public markets or another “big money” exit. As I would eventually learn, what I didn’t know (or maybe the word is “understand”) about Zoho was fairly significant. The event, Truly Zoho, is aptly named, and brought ~15 analysts who have covered Zoho for many years to its Chennai HQ, with a short visit to Tenkasi at the end of the week.

Automation is applied to all sorts of systems and business problems. RPA can provide a great deal of value relieving humans from the routine process actions and increasing productivity and outcomes by giving the humans the space to handle exception and higher level tasks. IA goes much further than simple RPA, and add the capabilities to work outside the program framework, inferring, predicting and taking actions based on the unstructured. It also learns and improves its performance over time. IA then, is essentially the next generation RPA, supercharged by applying AI technologies.

The tech industry has been enamoured with the subscription business model since the late 1990’s as Netsuite and Salesforce first began offering applications as a service over the Internet. The “Great Recession” of 2007-2009 accelerated the adoption of software as a service (SaaS) across a variety of businesses as capital investment dried up and companies that wanted to be competitive moved software acquisition to SaaS and subscription (and their operating budget versus capital budget). Since 2009 SaaS and cloud computing has rapidly expanded to include all types of technology from infrastructure (IaaS) to hardware and is the default business model for most tech companies. Over the past 10 years that expansion of the model has moved into a rapidly growing list of industries including consumer goods, automotive, manufacturing, media, entertainment, and many others.

At Dreamforce last week there were two announcements that overshadowed the rest in my opinion, Salesforce Genie, which I already covered here; and Slack Canvas. I guess I shouldn’t just discuss Slack Canvas though, there were several Slack enhancements of interest and also a tie back into the Genie announcement. Slack and Salesforce customers are clearly benefiting from the acquisition, the investment of resources and linkage to the overall strategy really show.

Salesforce Genie is a real-time data platform that enables the delivery of personalized and individualized experiences across sales, marketing, service and commerce. Genie, which runs on Hyperforce, leverages Salesforce Flow and Einstein AI to maximize the effective use of all your customer data in real-time or near real-time.

Building relationships and trust online can be difficult and the ongoing relationship can be fragile. The more online interactions the greater the opportunity to increase trust through positive experiences, but the dark side of that opportunity is the risk of exposure to poor interactions and the damage they can do to trust. Subscription based products and services, which are more prevalent now than ever before in a wide variety of industries, are particularly exposed to experience risks since long term company success is tied to renewals and relationships. Customer service (and customer success) takes on significantly increased importance to those experiences and the health of the customer relationships.

Yesterday subscription management provider Zuora announced that it plans to acquire Zephr, a provider of a subscription experience platform. The London based Zephr, which focuses on the digital publishing and media industry vertical, already integrates with the Zuora application suite “out of the box” with several joint customers in production. In general the two sets of applications are complimentary with little overlap. The overall subscriber experience is business critical in both new customer acquisition and long term customer retention, so it’s easy to see the opportunity for the combined solution.

In the recently published report on subscriber experience, we examined a number of topics including the factors that are important in making a subscription purchase decision. The report is based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394) and focused on business to business (B2B) subscriptions. There were two questions related to the selection and purchase, one looked at influence on the purchase decision and the other at selection of the service provider.

We recently published a report on subscriber experience based on a survey conducted in May of 2022 (N=394). The survey collected data on a number of subscription topics, including trying to understand why customers upgrade from a free version. Free versions and free trials are important tools in building a product led growth (PLG) business and conversion to paid is always a hot topic in a PLG company. There are many factors that can influence the customer’s decision to convert, but there is a core set of levers that can be manipulated.

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.