This document discusses definitions and trends related to customer engagement, customer experience, and CRM. It provides definitions for CRM, CX, and CXM. Key trends discussed include customer engagement, alignment of sales and marketing, omnichannel strategy, personalization, artificial intelligence, and vertical specialization. The role of ecosystems and platforms from various technology companies is also examined.

1. INDUSTRY
PERSPECTIVE
2016 and Beyond

2. DEFINITIONS: CE, CX,
CRM
Related but not the same

3. “CRM is the only science of business that
attempts to reproduce an art of life.”
Source: SkipWalters.net

4. "Customer Relationship Management is a technology
and system that sustains sales, marketing and
customer service activities. It is designed to capture
and interpret customer data, both structured and
unstructured, and to sustain the management of the
business side of customer related operations. CRM
technology automates processes and workflows and
helps organize and interpret data to support a company
in engaging its customers more effectively."
Source: Searchcrm.com

5. “Customer engagement is the ongoing
interactions between company and customer;
offered by the company, chosen by the
customer

6. ""CXM is a business science for determining the
strategy and programs that can make the
customer feel good enough about the
company to want to continue to do business
with the company."

7. "How a customer feels about a
company over time"

8. "The perception that customers have of their
interactions with an organization."
--Source (Bruce Temkin)

9. “If a customer likes you and continues to like
you they will continue to do business with
you. If they don’t…they won’t”

10. TRENDS

11. ■ Customer engagement
• CRM growth
• Customer engagement protoplasm/not a market yet
■ Alignment of sales and marketing
■ Omnichannel strategy/comms
■ Specialization
• Personalization
• AI cutting edge
• Predictive analytics
■ Optimization/enablement/acceleration
■ Verticalization
• Health services
• Public sector
• Other emotional verticals (retail, sports, hospitality, travel, and entertainment)
Trends, 2016

12. Ecosystems and Platforms
• Larger companies are platform and/or ecosystem focused – not necessarily both
• Microsoft – strong ecosystem, weak but improving as platform
• Salesforce – strong platform, organic ecosystem, not thinking ecosystem
• Oracle – some platform, no ecosystem
• SAP – strong ecosystem, weaker platform (complete overfocus on HANA), strong
microservices push
• Adobe – no platform, no ecosystem, intent announced to move to both.

13. Artificial Intelligence: Hype v. Reality
■ We are not at Skynet yet…nor will be for a long time
■ AI isn’t human intelligence – its told what to learn by humans
■ It doesn’t want anything
■ YET
■ It is becoming increasingly important as a step toward:
– The next evolution of business process automation
– Higher degrees of dynamic personalization
– Increasing use of self-service as major avenue of customer service
– An optimization tool for marketing content with maximum return
– A bridge from predictive analytics to proscriptive analytics

14. Artificial Intelligence: Hype v. Reality
■ Market is growing fast but still the subject of a lot of promise/not realization
■ Larger players using it as a:
– Platform piece (Salesforce)
– large scale add on/in for enterprise solutions with customization tools (Oracle)
– Fully integrated/interwoven part of their applications framework (Microsoft)
■ Smaller players are developing niche/specific applications
– Customer service (agent.ai)
– Voice recognition (Cogito)
– Content ROI (Captora)
– Personalized responsiveness (Conversica)

15. Seeking Optimus Prime
■ Big 4.5 going for world domination - #1 among sort
of equals

16. Seeking Optimus Prime
■ Salesforce (1.0) – Platform of choice for
business applications
■ Microsoft (1.0) – Mission critical part of 21st
century business infrastructure
■ Oracle (1.0) – End to end hardware and
software solution
■ SAP (1.0) – Customer-centric front and back
end enterprise technology
■ Adobe (0.5) – Amalgamated solutions
become platform tie to open ecosystem

18. Traditional CRM (1999–2008)

19. Social CRM (2009–2012)

20. CRM again…(2013–2017)

21. Customer Engagement Technology
Matrix
■ CRM functions as the operational capabilities and the system of record or as Louis Tetu CEO of Coveo calls it rather adroitly, the "ecosystem of record" - because it
handles the data from so many internal and external sources out there - (H/T to Louis for this term. It so works.)
■ Sales especially around "social sales" with the ability to communicate with customers and to support the next best action in that communication e.g. Lattice Engines
■ Market intelligence engines which provide the customized information that makes the personalization of communications with the customers that much better. e.g.
InsideView
■ Community platforms that enable communities of practice or interest and support conversations among customers, their peers, subject matter experts and the brand
owning the communities e.g. Jive.
■ Marketing technologies to help drive the first line of engagement with customers This can include digital marketing, email marketing, campaign management, content
marketing (see below) among many other areas. There are dozens of companies in this space. Most prominent at this point are the marketing clouds of Salesforce,
Adobe and Oracle, and independently, Marketo. Marketo, in fact, has changed their messaging from Revenue Performance Management, which made them sound like
they were providing accounting software to a much more timely focus around Engagement Marketing.
■ Customer journey "management" as either the means to create the paths for the ongoing interactions of customers or to track the interactions e.g.Thunderhead,
Salesforce Journey Builder
■ Feedback that goes well beyond just surveys are an important way and valuable way for the customer to interact with the company. Companies like Medallia and Maritz
Consulting (with their acquisition of Allegiance) fulfill this function.
■ Gamification as one kind of system of engagement. See Bunchball for the technology and Mario Herger for some of the thinking.
■ Customer engagement analytics to identify and anticipate customer behaviors. That's an area that NICE, SAS and Verint/Kana play in.

22. Customer Engagement Technology
Matrix
■ Knowledge management in its contemporary form that incorporates not only subject matter expertise, but also elements of customer self-service e.g. Transversal
■ Customer service as a locus for engagement - see Michael Maoz, Gartner's extraordinary analyst and his Customer Engagement Hub for a strong validation of this.
■ Ecommerce - an element of customer engagement (though like CRM in that context, a subsumed piece) in the sense that it is a landing place for customers to interact
and transact a la Amazon. Focused as is CRM around the transactional side. SAP with hybris and Oracle with ATG are among the enterprise level leaders. From the
service side of ecommerce, we have companies like Moxie beginning to gain some notice.
■ Loyalty and advocacy programs - engaging customers by incentivizing them.
■ Customer identity management applications/platforms - engagement through knowledge of who a customer actually is and thus what he/she is doing. These are best
represented by Gigya and Janrain in the technology market.
■ Customer success management solutions and platforms - An evolving area that is being touted by tech companies like Totango and salesforce.com which call
themselves customer success platforms and like Bluenose, Preact and Gainsight who claim to have customer success solutions. The basic idea is that, probably more on
a B2B basis, the more you help your customers succeed the more they remain engaged and thus, customers. This area is showing some signs of life as a technology
category with a market - or in my ecosystem a sub market.
■ Relevant contextual Search - the key to this piece for engagement is not only identifying the best answers to questions but the subject matter expertise that is required
by customers. See Coveo for a great example of this.
■ Content creation, distribution, consumption and analysis systems - The simple concept is that content is now created internally and by users, and once created no longer
just pushed to the market, but is being distributed through a vast network of channels (see Brian Solis's Conversation Prism for a visual glimpse at the distribution
channels out there) and then consumed by the digital customers out there. Now, we even have technologies like Captora which do the ROI of that creation, distribution
and consumption - all which foster engagement.