Lars Brodersen: Digitalization of CRM - Rethink, entirely!

So, yes, as already mentioned, I work at Taza. I think it's a well known company for, I think Germany, 89% of all Germans, at least no Taza.

And yeah, me as, as a private person, I'm I was born in Berlin. I'm now live in Hamburg since five years. I went over, over here for fat. I'm married, I'm, I'm a father of the greatest son of the world and I'm more or less addicted to sports. And despite all that, I have an, I have own company publishing a company and I'm an author of several books. Yeah.

And let's, as we do not have that much time, I jumped directly in the topic and let's speak about digitalization of CR and why I think we should res rethink entirely. And what I, what I observe or what I see currently is that we quite often follow principles. We often think it's about, and we have people sticking to, they have a system software in place and working with it. And then we have this still rising trend raising trend or customer experience and people follow or work with customer experience and saying, no, we do now customer experience.

We do not anymore doing CR or social serum or customer engagement. And I, I think we, we should not follow those principles or only those principles. I think in the future, we need to see those principles as, as a mixture, something we need to combine to achieve our goals.

And this is very important because all of those principles have a lack of something, wherever, for example, CRM, as, as you maybe all know at focus on customer groups, customer experiences, focusing on individuals and I'm of course, most of the companies do need to analyze customer groups because they don't can care about all individuals. And of course we need customer experience. And of course, sometimes we need to engage our customers a little bit and I think it should be in future mixture of it.

Interesting bacterias, we have so many, so many possibilities, so many ways of, of how we are, how we could go with, but we still struggle with the same things since I don't know, 10, 15 or 20 years, and especially marketing today, they're struggling with a lot of things. I just mentioned some of them here. For example, when you work in marketing, you know what I'm speaking about, you would like to have relief from all the it integration projects.

Whenever you have a new tool, you would like to add to your system, it system landscape, and to combine it with other tools, you have it integration project running for, I don't know, minimum 10 of 20 days, maybe more. And it takes weeks, months, sometimes years, until you can work with the software and more or less, you are never conform to governance and compliance. You struggle with this. You have sometimes enormous quantities of customer data, which you're not able to access or analyze or whatsoever.

And yeah, a couple of more reasons you, lots of companies are still struggling. And the problem here gets more and more and more complicated. And on the other end, we have more principles we could use.

We, we could do customer experience, customer engagement, social CR, but we were never able to solve some of the basic problems we currently have. And the question is how we can solve this. And of course we need to do, but before we come to one possible solution, I would like to mention or highlight some more topics. I think we should be aware about to, to handle our customers ex essay expected. And yeah, just mention here four, four topics. I think we should focus on with customer experience here in Germany.

I think it's a trend not since five years to three years, maybe a little bit more, but it's still a, as I mentioned already, a raising trend, what is totally new for lots of companies is to combine all the personas, to combine all the touchpoints. The moment of truth terms. We know since, since quite a while, and to do all the customer journey mapping, we have to combine personas and touchpoints and channels, but we definitely have a lot of possibilities here. But on the other hand, we need to deal with this raising complexity and it gets more and more and more.

Of course, we now have the possibility to, to take care about individuals more than 20 years before or 15 years go. But the complexity is, is, is even more. And so we have to deal with this complexity and then is wanting more, a lot of companies do some kind of a mistake, I think. And I mentioned here, couple of companies, you know the terms Ghar bad dicks not to. And they're all doing one thing, right? I think a lot of companies are missing and there is something, a lot of companies think they should make it easy for their, for their customers. But I'm pretty sure.

I personally, personally think that this is wrong because it's not about making it easy for customers because it's more important to give them a frictionless experience. And I give an example on this to explain this in detail, because I really would like to highlight this point. And the example is, think about a classic taxi experience. When you take a taxi and you reach your target destination, there are several things that always happens. You need to pay. You sometimes need and get the bill, the received, you, you get your change.

You say, bye-bye step out of the car. You it's always the same process. And it's not about making it easy because there is nothing you can make easy. You need to pay, you get your change. Maybe you get, give a tip. The process is always the same, but the, the question is how you handle those process or how you make it available to the customer.

And if you think about the classic taxi experience, it takes you, maybe let's say two minutes until you are able, when you reach your target destination to step out of the car, but think about free now form of my taxi with the app, it was possible to, I would say to leave the car within 20 seconds, cuz you have the app. You can decide about the tube. You can pay by the app and to leave the car within 20 seconds. Now let's go one step back. What we have here in the down below Uber, it takes you two or three seconds because you reach your target destination.

You just step out and the is doing all the rest. And this is what I mean when, I mean give the customer a frictionless experience because the process for those three examples, that's the same. You cannot make it easier. It's always the same process. The parts are always the same, but you can give a frictionless experience. And I think this is very important. Yeah. Then we have this, let's say old overview on the upper right corner, but it's from May, 2017. It's very interesting because already three years ago we had more than 5,000 marketing technologies you could use.

And I think one thing that is definitely clear and especially guys from marketing know, this is just an example for marketing, but I think we have the same for sales and for service. We have so many possibilities and the problem is you never know what is the best software, maybe, you know, what is the best software today, but you don't know what is the best software tomorrow or a week later or whatsoever. So what you really need is to explore things. You need to license or download a new app, a new software, new tool and integrate it into a it system landscape.

But in this case really easy and what you really need is some kind of plug and play solution or some kind of plug and play because it's simply not possible to wait for 20 days or, or more until you have the tool downloaded or licensed and integrated to get to know or to explore. If this tool provides the functionalities you need to serve your customers. Well. Okay. And point number four, I would like to highlight is, and I took here an example out of a book out of my books.

We, we analyzed a couple of studies from political institutions here in Germany, from software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle SAP, from world leading consulting companies and what, what we try to find out and what are the digital initiatives they are suggesting you should follow, or you should do. And you interesting factors and you ask 10 people, you get 12 opinions. As you know, we always have this problem, but still here cuz digital is digital initiatives. And the problem is that you have a lot of deals to handle with us. You need to deal with complexity.

You should, for my personal assumption, provide affection as experience. You need to have plug and plug and play possibilities, but you simply do not know for what you are doing all this. And I think what is very important is that you in future that every company in future achieve some kind of digital maturity combined with a well working customer relationship management. And I don't mean the software.

I, I mean the relationship management, but you are simp. You cannot simply not be aware what, what will be the right initiative for you? And maybe if it's, if you know it today, you don't know it in, I don't know in one year. So in general you should be aware about all those topics to achieve the most important thing. There are customers out there with all their concerns and what you really would like to know is what are they concerned about?

What, what do they like? What do do they don't like, and you are asking all those questions.

Why, when, how, what, and you, you need to get this outset in perspective. And despite it, you need to handle all those topics and what is now what could be now a possible solution? The first thing I already mentioned is I think we should not stick anymore to principles. It could be ceramic. It could be customer experience. It could be a mixture of both. It could be definitely social ceramic, which is somehow settled. So we know what we get. There could be some kind of customer engagement, whatever it is.

I think you need to define this on your own and yeah, let's, let's see what could be a possible solution out of 10, 2000. And I think one possible solution for example, is a, a customer data platform that provides, or that allows you to have a mixture of it. And the next slide, I will skip this one because it's provides a lot of details. And as we are soon running out of time, I will not highlight everything yet. But I think what is very important, a customer data customer data platform could be a solution for this.

And I just in a couple of seconds, try to explain or show you how it could be set up. The most important question is, do you make one on your own or do you buy one? And it's up to every company I cannot, I don't know. I cannot advise you to, to make it or to buy it. The only thing I could man, I say is you should do it with experience. You should know what you do.

And sometimes it's, it's a good way to make some kind of customer data platform on your own to be experienced and then to buy one of the functionalities you really need, because it's depends on every company and here I provide you or I give you an insight on what we started at Taylor. And I just don't go into any detail here. But in general, I just, I describe what we are doing. What you see on the right side is how a customer can interact with us or with a company in general. And the idea is that whatever kind of interaction we have, we can categorize it or we can put it into parts.

Or as I mentioned it here in the middle, we can put it into profiles, name it, however you like it doesn't matter. Just give an example on, on what I would like to point out, for example, that's sick, generic example. Yeah. A person watches a specific product video on the company website. And what you see is this is a common interaction and you can split it up in several parts. It's a question. Where does the interaction took place? Who's the owner of the maybe existing profile.

Maybe he's not known so far, but with cookies we know also in future, who was, who was watching our product videos in the past, why is the customer interacting with us? And how did the interaction take place? You're able to, to put all those information into, into profiles. And what you're able to do is you can monitor and describe those interactions. And then you get more into the details.

You start to evaluate what kind of interaction is it really, for example, does the customer watch the video for more than 90% of total links and maybe in a specific timeframe because you are currently, I don't know, running a campaign, you rate this with 10 points later on and this is the engage part, or can be the part where you engage your customer. You define, for example, with this knowledge to content of a specific newsletter.

And what I would like of what I'm describing is what I'm describing here is on the right hand side, you see what you could maybe describe as customer experience because what you really see is what is the customer doing when and when he has the best experience, you're able to describe why, for example, I dunno, product video didn't start or didn't provide the information needed. And you see, there is some kind of engagement part that not necessarily a newsletter, it could be something else. And in the middle is the serum part because this is what we set up in CRM solution.

And what you see on the left side is a possible digital initiatives. You could start future and CR could be a possible solution to put the data in a structure you are able to learn from in future.

So, and I think this is one possible solution to combine, for example, customer experience, customer engagement, CRM, social CRM, and future initiatives with one software solution. But as mentioned, this is only a suggestion, one possible solution, but the most important part, I, I would like to highlight this and it, this is described on below whatever you do. It's about learning. It's about learning from the customers. And if you're doing it with, it's fine, if you're doing it, I don't know. Yeah. Sticking to a principle like customer experience. It's also fine.

The most important thing is that we start to learn from our customers and that it is some kind of social learning because we need to learn from each other lot of companies made failures in the past. Like we were just spreading our knowledge out regarding products and our services and don't care about, and don't care about what, what the customer is thinking about it. So this was just a rough overview because we are somewhat limited of time. But I think there is a session later on that we could speak about it. Yeah. So this is my point where I started and when I finish.