Thomas Wieberneit
CustomerThink
New Zealand
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Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Thomas:
Salesforce, Slack, Facebook, Kustomer – the big epiphany
In the last few days two really interesting acquisitions caught my eye. The obvious one that hardly could be missed, is Slack being acquired by Salesforce for a whopping $27.7 bn, which, to put it into perspective, is $2.2 bn more than Salesforce forecasts as its revenue for the upcoming fiscal year. The other interesting acquisition is social network behemoth Facebook plucking up Kustomer, a… → Read More
SugarCRM supercharges its AI by acquiring Node.io
The News On Monday, August 24th, 2020 SugarCRM announced the acquisition of node.io. I had the pleasure to get pre-briefed by Craig Charlton, CEO SugarCRM and Rich Green, Chief Product Officer and CTO SugarCRM about this topic. Node was founded in 2014 with significant expertise, including ex-Google personnel and he creator of the Alta-Vista search engine. According to Crunchbase, the company… → Read More
Intercom takes on Zendesk
The News Intercom is a conversational relationship platform that helps businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger based experiences. It’s the only platform that delivers conversational experiences across the customer journey, with solutions for conversational marketing, conversational customer engagement and conversational support. Intercom is bringing a… → Read More
SAP takes Qualtrics public – Surprise, Surprise
The News On July 26, 2020, not two years after announcing the acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP announced its intent to take Qualtrics public. The timeline is yet to be communicated. What the press release basically says is that SAP’s cloud growth, including Qualtics was a ‘great success’. SAP itself wants to remain in control by keeping a majority stake in Qualtrics after the spin-off while… → Read More
Salesforce Q1 FY21 Numbers – Quite Good, eh?
The news It is reporting season – and I am actually already somewhat late to have a look at Salesforce’s Q1 figures of fiscal year 20/21 and to think about some implications. The earnings presentation makes for an interesting overview, more details are in the quarterly filing, the earnings release, and the transcript of the earnings webcast. So, let’s get into it and look at some figures,… → Read More
Quo Vadis SAP?
For quite some time the SAP CX community asks itself where SAP is going, or more precisely, which direction its Customer Experience portfolio is taking. This is a worrisome question, particularly as the larger CRM market is estimated to be the biggest segment of the enterprise software market since 2018; and since SAP is positioned with a number of strong solutions, partly home-grown and partly… → Read More
Customer Experience in Times of Crisis
Many analysts, including myself, have repeatedly written about us having entered a new normal, which is enforced by a so-called green swan event – an event that according to BIS is “extremely disruptive and that could be behind a systemic crisis” (brackets set by Thomas Wieberneit). Supply chains are broken, employees need to work from home, stores were forced to close for prolonged times, and… → Read More
Corona is over! And now? Trust, agility, and relevance are key
Let’s fast forward about 6 months and Imagine that the Corona crisis is over. Well, not really over, but being on a way of economic and especially psychologic recovery. There will be (yet another) new normal, a new equilibrium of life, personal as well as business. Societies, governments, economies and people have learned to deal with an unprecedented situation. How will the situation look like… → Read More
Customer Experience is the way! But where is its value?
These days, everyone, including myself, is talking about a great experience being the new differentiator. About product, and service being less and less of a factor distinguishing businesses. There is talk of customer experience, user experience, brand experience, product experience, consumable experiences, but mostly this is summed up under the umbrella of customer experience. With this, of… → Read More
Sales Reps (Still) Hate CRM. Here’s What to Do About That
Salespeople really love to feed data into their CRM system after a long day, or even during the weekend. They are truly looking forward to their weekly sales call with numbers that every single one of their colleague massaged themselves. They are obsessed with typing all sorts of entries into a quotation and know their product catalogue by heart so that they can provide their customer with the… → Read More
To Fix Customer Service, Solve 3 Challenges to Improve the Agent Experience
This is evident in our everyday experience. Whether we are waiting in a telephone queue, or do not get a meaningful answer to an inquiry or are even brushed off with funny answers relating to GDPR. Who of us didn’t hear the line “Due to exceeding call volume all our agents are currently busy. Your call is important to us. Please hold the line.” One time or another? Or one time and another? In… → Read More
How to Thrive in the Age of the Customer
Returning from an interesting SAP Now event in Berlin with a strong attendee focus on customer experience is the perfect opportunity to start thinking about how to thrive as a company in the age of the customer. Being busy with and at our own valantic booth and an exciting IoT-Chatbot showcase I sincerely could not attend as many presentations as I wanted to. First let’s establish what the age… → Read More
Salesforce adds more Einstein and Quip to the Service Cloud. Is it good for the Experience?
The News Today Salesforce announced the next release of its Service Cloud. It brings together more Einstein AI as part of the Service Cloud and adds Quip to it. This enables more agent empowerment and efficient work. In order to augment the tools with the necessary knowledge and soft skills, Salesforce also just launched Trailblazers for the Future, a program that is targeted towards increasing… → Read More
Salesforce adds more Einstein and Quip to the Service Cloud. Is it good for the Experience?
The News Today Salesforce announced the next release of its Service Cloud. It brings together more Einstein AI as part of the Service Cloud and adds Quip to it. This enables more agent empowerment and efficient work. In order to augment the tools with the necessary knowledge and soft skills, Salesforce also just launched Trailblazers for the Future, a program that is targeted towards increasing… → Read More
There’s a Bot in the Future of CxM
Modern customer relationship management, if I may use this ancient term, is undergoing significant change. It is a change towards achieving customer outcomes. But then, whether we call it Customer Relationship Management, Customer Engagement Management, or Customer Experience Management does hardly matter. What does matter is the profound impact for your business (as well as Enterprise Software… → Read More
Ten questions you always wanted to ask about Customer Experience
This is a slightly enhanced (and translated) transcript of an interview about customer experience I did for valantic. The interview challenge was to stay short and concise, and to keep it within two minutes. In order to not lose the spirit of this 120 second challenge, I kept the transcript short. This might raise a question or two. Happy to discuss, as always. So, interviewer, let’s get going!… → Read More
Ten questions you always wanted to ask about Customer Experience
This is a slightly enhanced (and translated) transcript of an interview about customer experience I did for valantic. The interview challenge was to stay short and concise, and to keep it within two minutes. In order to not lose the spirit of this 120 second challenge, I kept the transcript short. This might raise a question or two. Happy to discuss, as always. So, interviewer, let’s get going!… → Read More
What the heck is Customer Centricity?
Reading the very interesting post Customer Centricity is MORE than Customer Experience by Joseph Michelli I engaged into a discussion about things centricity. The discussion basically is about answering the question “What the heck is customer centricity?” – this elusive thing. And how does it relate to customer experience and other ‘centricities’, like price centricity, product centricity, or… → Read More
Salesforce, Service, AI and
AI, IoT, and CRM, three acronyms. However, these three belong together and should not be treated or looked at separately. One important reason for this is that companies and organizations can provide significantly better service experiences and, more importantly, results, by combining the capabilities behind these acronyms. Good field service not only gets dispatched smartly but also equipped… → Read More
The Return of the Suite
The suite is back. I have said and written that a good number of times in the past few years. And that is a good thing (that the suite is back, not that I said it, of course), because one of the major challenges with a best of breed approach is integration. The suite is back, but it is in an incarnation that vastly differs from what we knew about suites back in the times before cloud computing… → Read More