Kate Leggett

Customer experience (CX) is still king in 2020. Modern customer relationship management (CRM) must be used as a foundational technology for customer engagement in order to deliver experiences that keep your customers coming back for more. Here are our top five trends for CRM in 2020: Self-service for end-to-end customer journey support increases. More customers […]

What is CRM? It’s not SFA (sales force automation) and it’s not marketing automation — although many use CRM to reference these two technologies. Forrester defines CRM as: “The business processes and supporting technologies that support the key activities of targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding, and collaborating with customers.” . . . that is, to support […]

As AI and automation move deeper into customer service, new areas will be impacted including staffing, processes, and culture.

AI and automation are already reshaping call centers. Get your customer service organization prepared with these talent acquisition tips.

Customer service organizations use robotic process automation (RPA) as a tactical and short-term approach to digitize common agent tasks. There are two forms of RPA: unattended and attended RPA. A task can start with an agent and be supported by attended automation, which can kick off unattended RPA to complete the process. Customer service leaders […]

Bob Stutz and CRM have always been synonymous. Stutz started his CRM career at Siebel in 1998, in the early days of IT-driven, on-premises CRM. Siebel was a powerhouse in its time, peaking at 45% market share in 2002. Stutz’s tenure ended after it was acquired by Oracle (2005), and he moved to SAP to […]

Customer service organizations turn to robotic process automation (RPA) to provide tactical and short-term fixes to digitize common, reproducible agent tasks. There are two forms of RPA: Attended mode RPA. These bots target the front office. They are invoked by agents in the flow of their work. In the case of an exception, the bot […]

Salesforce continues its fast and furious acquisition spree by picking up ClickSoftware for $1.53 billion to beef up its field service capabilities. Field service is a rapidly growing area in CRM. Growth is fueled by the demand for: 1) differentiated customer experiences, which extends to a field worker showing up at a customer or a […]

Not all customer service vendor solutions are a good fit for your organization, and choosing the right one depends on the number of agents you have, your growth projections, your business model, the type of industry you are in, and whether you are looking for a standalone customer service solution or one that is part […]

Salesforce announced today its intent to acquire Tableau Software. This move adds a robust data visualization and insights solution to its customer engagement portfolio. Unlike other acquisitions, Tableau will operate under its own brand post-acquisition. Tableau Software offers an enterprise business insights (BI) solution to access, combine, and cleanse data from disparate sources. It allows […]

Your customers have more choice over what products to buy, where to buy them, and how to buy them. What they don’t have is time. In fact, Forrester finds that two-thirds of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service. Customer service organizations […]

Happy customer service agents mean happy customers — and happy shareholders. Engaged agents also have better job performance, are more productive, and stay in their jobs longer — which is one of the costlier factors in managing customer service operations. Customer service leaders have to balance their job demands with technology and training. They also […]

Automation and AI increasingly handle routine tasks. Customer service agents already focus on escalations and exceptions. They need a powerful workspace to empower them to understand their customer, their journey, and their context. They also need to be armed with the right knowledge and data to help solve hard problems. They need to be focused on […]

Modern CRM is delivered as software-as-a-service and microservices, is modular, and offers APIs for easy access to enterprise applications. It empowers customer-facing personnel with the right data about their customers at the right time, in context, so that they can focus on nurturing relationships across journeys even as they cross channels and devices. Today: Modern CRM supports […]

As AI Eats Jobs, Agents Are More Valued Great customer service is not just about cutting costs or making operations more efficient. Instead, it’s a systematic reinvention of established technology, data, and operations — leveraging automation, data, and agents together to exploit each of their unique strengths. Trend 1: AI upends customer service operations. Automation and AI […]

Automation and AI now impact every job — including every customer service job. AI handles, with increased confidence, repetitive work, allowing customer service agents to focus on tasks of greater value to the company. And customer service robots — which we define as semi- or fully autonomous physical machines that perform services to augment humans or automate tasks — […]

In my last post, I highlighted the top five ways that CRM suites are evolving today. CRM suites today (1) support different business models and organizational sizes; (2) operationalize intelligence to impact outcomes; (3) offer vertical editions; (4) expose platform services; and (5) invest in ecosystems of value (AKA, application exchanges). Read more about this […]

Even though core CRM products are mature, CRM vendors are still evolving their products. Technologies like AI introduce new efficiencies into CRM processes, and acquisitions such as configure-price-quote (CPQ) and eCommerce expand the footprint of CRM. We find that CRM suites are evolving across five dimensions. They now: Support select business models and organizational sizes. The […]

Automation and AI are changing the nature of work. Every company job — including every front-office job — will be impacted. Always-available commerce and intelligent guided-selling solutions erode field sales teams. Automated self-service obsoletes generalists and Tier 1 customer service agents. This means that inside sales teams are now handling more highly considered purchases. Customer service agents […]