As Salesforce continues to expand beyond its sales and marketing roots, there are ample questions about how it will move into the next era and beyond its initial CRM beginnings. After a spate of Salesforce acquisitions over the past year, the company has extended well beyond CRM into e-commerce and customer experience, artificial intelligence and new collaboration tools.

The question going forward is how effectively the company will integrate its billion-dollar acquisitions into the Customer Success Platform and whether its efforts will make Salesforce wide-ranging enough to truly extend beyond sales and marketing into the more wide-ranging domain of customer experience.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives regarding how Salesforce intends to overcome these challenges and capitalize on the growing demand for Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions in SearchSalesforce.com.

As increasing digitization overtakes commerce (and virtually all industries), companies need to adjust with new technologies and new approaches.

Customers want to be able to research and make purchases on various devices and platforms (from online to in store). Companies are enlisting mobile devices, social platforms, live chat capabilities, communities, location-based technologies and e-commerce applications to create new capabilities in this digital commerce era. Creating an anytime, anywhere, omnichannel strategy has become critical for the e-commerce market.

Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) and the e-commerce market have been converging for some time. Although Amazon hasn’t explicitly stated that it intends to use its new Amazon Go retail service as the vehicle to offer its own CRM solution, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision the company finally entering the market.

Click here to read why THINKstrategies believes Amazon may be getting ready to move into … Read More »

As the Cloud continues to gather steam as the go-to model for many companies, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are also gaining credence.

PaaS allows companies greater flexibility once they are in the cloud. PaaS enables customers to develop new applications and services on their existing portfolios of technology to enable new capabilities. With PaaS, companies can develop new mobile applications quickly, automate processes or streamline operations.

For software companies like SAP, PaaS can also unlock new doorways of modernization as well. At the SAP TechEd conference in Barcelona, the company repositioned some core products to reflect its PaaS-oriented strategy. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives about SAP’s latest PaaS offerings and strategies in SearchCRM.

SAP’s Beyond CRM initiative and Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud are going after customer data silos and trying to create a truly omnichannel picture. While most companies know they need to bring data silos together to improve customer experience, they are struggling with how to do so.

In response, some of the largest technology vendors are creating technologies that can bring together disparate pockets of customer data and give companies a more holistic view of their customers.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ views in SearchCRM about the escalating e-commerce battle that is reshaping the CRM marketplace and how marketing units operate.

I recently had the privilege of attending SAP’s Customer Days 2015 conference in Ft. Worth where I was asked to provide my views about the changing nature of the customer engagement process in the age of the Cloud. Here’s a recording of that interview.

You can also click here to read my views in SearchCRM regarding SAP hybris’ approach to meeting the escalating needs of today’s customers.

While cloud-based CRM tools are making inroads in bridging data silos, CRM systems on their own can’t bridge the gap and meet the challenge of pulling all the pieces together from various data sources to create a 360-degree view of the customer.

Despite the promise of cloud-based CRM tools, maximizing their value in an increasingly fragmented market has become a daunting task. A new generation of niche tools are becoming more necessary to solve data management challenges.

Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspectives in SearchCRM regarding these issues and learn how Azuqua is positioning itself to be the latest company to attack this problem.

THINKstrategies is pleased to now be contributing its industry perspectives to TechTarget’s SearchCRM website.

Our first guest blogpost examines Salesforce’s foray into IoT extends personalized CRM, and our second commentary discusses how SAP’s customer engagement strategy could trump CRM.

I hope you find these columns valuable and welcome your feedback.

Today’s rejuvenated Cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions are nothing more than glorified Web-based customer records management systems unless they are properly integrated with back-end systems to ensure that customers get the products and services they expect.

This is especially critical in a brave new world in which the Internet of Things (IoT)  will expand exponentially the ways companies are expected to engage with their customers.

In an era in which customer loyalty is a fleeting commodity and customer churn is intolerable, it isn’t too soon to think about the next Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) wave.

THINKstrategies believes Customer Lifetime Value Management (CLVM) in the Cloud inevitably will supplant the market focus on CRM to ensure a seamless customer journey.

Click here to read our views in E-Commerce Times about why it is imperative for corporate decision-makers to take a more holistic approach … Read More »

Last month’s announcement of a “major” strategic alliance between Salesforce.com and Oracle attracted plenty of industry attention; but it holds more meaning for enterprise decision makers about how a new pragmatism is overtaking the polemics of the past in dealing with the realities of moving to the cCloud in a hybrid environment. Click here to read THINKstrategies’ perspective regarding the implications of this alliance for enterprise decision-makers on Sandhill.com.

A pivotal principle that sets Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apart from the on-premises, legacy applications of the past is the shift of the vendors’ priorities so they better align with their customers. Rather than placing the burden of deploying and managing the software on the customer, SaaS vendors have to ensure customer satisfaction, minimize churn and maximize the lifetime value of their customers.

Achieving this objective requires the right combination of staff skills, business processes and support systems. Although every successful SaaS company has been committed to the idea of customer success, capturing the right data to gain a holistic view of the customer to better serve their needs has been a significant challenge.

Click here to read why, how the Pulse2013 conference hosted by Gainsight brought attention to this issue, and how THINKstrategies sees a new generation of Cloud-based ‘Customer Success Management’ solutions is addressing … Read More »