First of all, please tell us something about yourself. We would love to know something more about your private and professional life. What drives you? What is your inspiration?
I've never been particularly inspired by business per se. More so by having a sense of responsibility to be a good person who helps in the world. When I was a little kid (around 7 years old) my mom and dad called me into the living room of our house and told me: "Paul, we brought you into this world, but you don't owe us anything for that. But, because you are in the world, you owe it something. You'll have to figure out what that is." Since then I've been inspired by a sense of justice and always trying to do the right thing. My inspiration has always been that.
You often say that you don't work because you found a job you love. You've majored in journalism, so how come you became CRM expert? Do you find yourself as technology expert also?
The story that got me from a journalism degree to CRM is a long one that I don't think there is time to recount here but let's say that while I was in journalism school at Northwestern University from 1967-71, I was a student activist while the Vietnam War was going on. As a result of my activism, I stayed political for a long time and when I finally left politics in the 1990s, I went into technology. At first, I was hard core business development around Lotus Notes, then SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and then finally in the late 1990s I was hired by a small ($4 million) or so company to be their executive vice president and to help them find a new direction. The new direction that interested me was CRM. It was young then - with Siebel Software being the dominant CRM technology player. I didn't know a lot about it but enough to know that I liked the idea - it seemed to be important because companies were paying attention to how their customers interacted with them. In fact, my very first actual definition of CRM was "CRM is the only science of business that attempts to reproduce an art of life - how humans interact."
At that time, I realized that i had a lot of writing skills - and that I should write a book on CRM as a means to learn more about the subject - and to meet people in the industry - and to fill a big gap on the subject at a strategic level that was out there. So, it was then that the first edition of CRM at the Speed of Light was born. I wrote the book and it became a business best seller and I became a lot better known in the CRM world and at the same time was able to learn from some of the best experts at that time about the strategies, programs and technologies that were driving CRM in 2000-2001 etc.
Am I a technology expert? Well, kind of. I know my technologies and not just CRM, but something about ERP and Supply Chain and consumer technologies. I'm a bit of a tech geek - I love the consumer side of the Internet of Things (IoT) and am in the earlier stages of making my home a smart home. But am I a TECHNICAL expert - meaning can I program etc? Nope. Not at all. I know the technology and what it can do but I'm not the one who can code and create it.
In your book you mentioned "always-confusing subject of technology" and "geekspeak". What do you think about technology today? Does technology ensure a company competitive edge? Is technological awareness necessary for every successful business?
Technology is vital to businesses both at an operational level and at a strategic level - but it only is an enabler of what a business does. Technology by itself is dumb. It knows what to do when human beings tell it what to do. Even with the incredibly exciting evolution and growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it remains dumb. AI learns what humans tell it to learn. If a human tells AI go learn about customer behavior - it will go learn about customer behavior - and doesn't need the human being to tell it about customer behavior. But the human being still has to point it in the direction or it won't learn about customer behavior on its own. Again, its an enabler. But at times having it where someone else doesn't does provide a competitive edge but that is dependent on how human beings use it to enable their work.
Technological awareness is necessary for every business and its hard to compete at all without using technology at some level - the simplest being use of the web to do "stuff" and the most complex using AI to automate activities that humans would have done historically. But being aware isn't enough. You have to make choices about what you want to use, why you want to use it and then how you want to use it.
The problem is that people are often afraid of technology because they don't understand how it works and they think it can replace them. It can sometimes replace a job but it can also create the need for a different type of job. There is nothing to fear about the confusing nature of technology - the idea has to be to understand it.
About your book: CRM at the Speed of Light, last edition was launched in 2010. Will you write another edition?
I wrote 4 editions of CRM at the Speed of Light. Its in 9 languages. It is called the "Bible of CRM" and to be entirely honest, I'm sick of writing that book. I wasn't going to write a 4th edition and even said that I wasn't in the 3rd edition but the changes in the customer landscape were so dramatic, so big, that I had to write the 4th edition. Now I'm writing a book on customer engagement for the Harvard Business Press called "The Commonwealth of Self-Interest: Customer Engagement, Business Benefit" that is coming out in August or September 2018. I'm excited about that and am about halfway through writing it. Lots to go though. But CRM at the Speed of Light is now officially complete.
Do you think that customer behavior is changing continuously?
I do. About 10+ years ago we had a digital communications revolution that transformed how individuals and institutions interacted between and with each other and also transformed expectations of those interactions. The customer - one of those individuals buying something - had their expectations heightened - they could get more from the businesses they were interacting with, they could be understood better, they could go elsewhere if they couldn't get more, - meaning they had a lot of options. Plus they could vent their dislikes or speak about their love for the companies to thousands and even millions of other people via social channels. So they were empowered, though at times this became entitlement - and customers would go take too much advantage of the companies. But even that changed since 10 years ago. Then all I said above was select group of customers who were younger but now its all generations and most customers who have that sense of empowerment. So its all that more difficult for companies to meet the expectations of those customers.
What customers expect now is not just good products and services but in addition to that, the tools they need to operate digitally (e.g. plan your vacation online rather than with a travel agent) and a great experience with the company. They not only want quality products but they want to feel good about their interactions with the company - and feel valued as customers. That means their behavior is far more aggressive and much more picky than it has been in the past. If you don't give a customer what they need to complete the interactions and transactions and end up feeling good about it, they will move on.
This will change even more going forward, as we start using artificial intelligence and machine learning embedded in systems of engagement so that the systems are more personally responsive to individual customers - even without human intervention. Additionally, we are seeing more and more customer data being gathered - not just transactional and demographic, but social and behavioral - and that information is being stored in CRM systems of record and then interpreted via analytics tools and then insights are being uncovered - all in near real time. So not only is customer behavior changing but how a customer behaves or will behave is being anticipated and then steps taken to respond in the right way to that anticipated individual customer behavior.
CRM is changing as customers change their behavior. So, can you tell me what is CRM today? Is it technology/software? Can you tell me whether today every CRM software is also SCRM?
CRM has changed a lot over the last ten years and even over the last five. The earliest versions of CRM technology were sales, marketing and customer service systems that handled operational basic CRM requirements and dealt with stored transactional data. About 2008-2009, we saw what we then called Social CRM emerge which differed from the traditional versions because it integrated social communications which meant that you could act on or communicate with customers from the SCRM system. By 2011, we stopped calling it SCRM because all CRM systems had this integration and it went back to CRM only. I wrote a long piece on "Dropping the S from Social CRM". Now we are seeing much more advanced systems that go well beyond CRM but also use CRM beginning to emerge around systems of engagement.
Customer engagement technology is now in an early stage. CRM is its operational core and ecommerce systems the transactional core of the larger customer engagement technology matrix. CRM is still robust and still has a lot going on with the addition of analytics and artificial intelligence which are value adds to especially sales force automation - one of CRM's pillars. But what CRM is NOT recognized as in most places, despite all my and other efforts to make it more, is a philosophy or strategy. It tends to be recognized as a technology system. Which is fine. But customer facing strategies especially around engagement are still top of mind in the boardrooms of major companies all across the world. CRM is now the operational "must have", technological core of all the customer facing departments at a given company.
CRM Evolution - that happened when CRM evolved into SCRM. But is that evolution still going on?
I answered that above. There is no longer a distinct CRM and SCRM All CRM systems have social communication baked in as a foundational piece of the technology. The first of them was 2008 when Pivotal (now called Aptean) a Canadian long time CRM technology company came out with a product they called Social CRM. They were unique. Now no company doesn't have the integration with social networks and other social media.
"Customer Engagement- offered by the company, chosen by the customer". Can you explain this. How is Customer Engagement going to look in in the future?
The full definition that I've created for customer engagement is "The ongoing interactions between company and customer. Offered by the company, chosen by the customer."
What I mean by that: The key to the first sentence is the word "ongoing". For engagement to be successful the customer has to want to continue to interact with the company because the value they are deriving from the company is good enough to make them want to continue. That doesn't mean delight all the time. It means good enough. What that means is that they get what they need to from the company and feel that the customer values them. They don't need to be thrilled to death all the time. That would be ridiculous - and expensive. Delight is an exceptional event, not an expectation. Good enough is, well, good enough.
"Offered by the company" - Think about it this way. Companies start their lives as companies and live their lives as companies with constraints. They have financial, labor, time and regulatory constraints they have to deal with every day. Those constraints limit what they can do. But they also have a lot of those empowered customers who are self-interested (not selfish - just interested in being happy in their lives) who are looking for something from that company and don't care about the constraints that the company lives under nor do they care about any of the other customers either. They want what they need from that company.
"Chosen by the customer" - The company thus has to figure out how to satisfy the expectations of those individual customers while operating under all those constraints. What they can do is offer an array of choices to a customer (can be goods or services or tools or just selections) so that the customer feels as if they control their interaction. So for example, if you have only one option provided - the customer may or may not like that option. But if you give the customer 4 options - he or she is likely to pick one that he or she likes. Thus the customer feels in control and at the same time you've got a new data point on what the customer likes. The various options might have been decided (offered by the company) based on data about a group of customers that were likely to like those four options as their choices and thus the 4 options were offered. So the options were offered by the company and chosen by the customer. That is the foundation for successful customer engagement.
What we do know for the next 10 years which is the most anyone in my universe will look out is that with the rise of the Internet of Things and the proliferation of sensors that measure our health, motion, activities, and measure varying attributes of cars, and other devices AND our ability to control this or at least see the results via our mobile devices AND the insertion of intelligence across all this that we are going to have a lot smarter devices to measure, learn and deal with us as humans and thus engagement will become much more personalized, much more under control of the customer and much more automated though never entirely.
And now, at the end. I know that you have visited Croatia in 2005. Do you have any plans for coming back again?
I loved and love Croatia. A beautiful country, with wonderful people - and I might add great fresh fish and good local wine. I am also close friends with another CRM influencer who was born in Croatia and has a summer home there though she now lives in Spain. I have EVERY INTENTION of coming back to Croatia - possibly as early as next summer when my wife and I join my friend and her husband at their summer home. OR if I can find a business reason. One way or the other I will be back. That much I can promise.