CRM blog archives
August 2009 (2)
September 2009 (1)
October 2009 (1)
November 2009 (4)
January 2010 (1)
July 2010 (1)
October 2010 (1)
January 2011 (1)
February 2011 (2)
March 2011 (2)
April 2011 (1)
May 2011 (1)
Thomas Wieberneit
NATIONAL MANAGER CRM PRACTICE
Thomas is an executive with more than 15 years of leadership experience in consulting, software industry and in the armed forces. He is responsible for building and driving the CRM consulting practice for CIBER in New Zealand and Australia. Before joining CIBER Thomas held various leadership positions in SAP’s CRM development organization for more than 10 years where he contributed to shaping and developing SAP’s CRM solution. He is an expert in CRM, in distributed software development and the introduction and application of agile development methods in enterprise scale projects.
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Posts by this author
The future of CRM
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 10 May 2011 / 11:02 AM : 3 
A few days ago @MarkTamis called me with a question: “Where do you think CRM heads to in future?” Uhhm, not that simple a question. It really forced me to think as all those thoughts, observations and discussions needed to be brought into a better structure.
To lay the foundation I need to start with a definition of CRM; as I like it I start off with the one that Wikipedia provides:
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with continue reading 
Posted in CRM on 10 May 2011
Tagged: Collaboration CRM Enterprise 2.0 Mobile Shopping Mobility Multi-Channel Retail Social CRM Social Media Social Networking
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Social CRM needs a CRM system - No, but Yes!
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 11 April 2011 / 3:44 PM : 0
Some days ago Bob Thompson interviewed Graham Hill about his take on Social CRM. The interview covered a lot of topics, most notably the future of Social CRM about which Graham has a particular view and led Bob to ask the question whether it is necessary to have a CRM system to have Social CRM.
On a first glimpse this question sounds simple, but it really isn’t. From a business perspective it only matters that CRM is executed upon, if CRM is a topic. This is totally independent of systems, as are the poss...
Posted in CRM on 11 April 2011
Tagged: Business Value CRM Social CRM Social Networking Strategisk CRM Web 2.0
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Social Shopping = Groupon? Nope, this is only the beginning!
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 28 March 2011 / 3:09 PM : 0
Some time ago my wife Nicole posted a small series of blogs about the topic of Loyalty on ciber.com. In these readable blogs she identified and summarised three main strategies of acquiring loyal customers, which are
To gain and retain loyal customers it is necessary for Retailers (or brands, or …) to get into a mutual engagement with the customers. In order to achieve thi...
Posted in CRM on 28 March 2011
Tagged: CRM Retail Social Networking Web 2.0
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Social Shopping - A Retail Future
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 07 March 2011 / 9:32 AM : 0
A while ago I blogged about threats and solutions in the retail industry that have their origin in rise of social media; with this post I would like to continue on this topic, focusing on possible solutions for retail companies.
This blog also ties in to a recent article by Mark Tamis on Social CRM in Retail. In his article Mark describes an interesting and elaborate scenario that showcases a technology enabled, consumer and network driven decision process, using the example of buying a party dress. This example is int...
Posted in CRM on 07 March 2011
Tagged: CRM Enterprise 2.0 Integration Mobility Retail Social CRM Social Networking Strategisk CRM Web 2.0
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Musings on the KLOUT score
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 28 February 2011 / 4:37 PM : 0
Today I’d like to present some musings about the KLOUT score. Now, mine is not particularly high – actually it is pretty low – as you can see below but the curve is interesting, if set into a context.
So far I only followed my KLOUT score pretty idly, till I started to do some minor experiments on 16.02. You see some immediate effect on 17.02. This is mainly due to me posting a blog entry and communicating this via Twitter and LinkedIn. There also should be a communication via CIBER&r...
Posted in CRM on 28 February 2011
Tagged: CRM Social CRM Social Networking Web 2.0
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Social CRM in Retail - Threats and Solutions
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 16 February 2011 / 1:29 PM : 0
Brick-and-mortar retail businesses face a combination of ever-increasing customer expectations, customers being “educated” to expect and receive promotions, and of course an ever increasing competition in the market place for their customers’ share of mind and share of wallet. On top of all this they need to realize that they do not control the communication to their customers anymore, let alone being capable of controlling the communication in between their customers. As many bloggers, including myself, and analysts already stated, the advent of extremely user friendly and ubiquitous mobile devices and web applications essentially decoupled retailers from comm...
Posted in CRM on 16 February 2011
Tagged: CRM Enterprise 2.0 Kundorientering Kundrelationer Microsoft Dynamics CRM Multi-Channel Retail Social Networking Strategisk CRM Twitter Web 2.0
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Social CRM - a forecast for 2011
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 04 January 2011 / 3:08 PM : 4
Together with some friends I recently conducted a small survey on the adoption and priorities of Social CRM in corporations. The results, of course, cannot be treated as absolute, as the sample size is too small. However, they correlate to research done by Jeremiah Owyang and the Altimeter Group. This especially relates to the modest available budgets and somewhat to the way ahead. The Altimeter group research can be found under http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/12/09/slides-social-business-forecast-2011-the-yea...
Posted in CRM on 04 January 2011
Tagged: Collaboration Consolidation CRM Enterprise 2.0 Social Networking Strategisk CRM Web 2.0
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On demand CRM
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 15 October 2010 / 9:05 AM : 3
A while ago I stumbled over an interesting blog by Lauren Carlson. It is inspired by the 2010 Oracle OpenWorld conference and discusses the leadership in on demand CRM. Although I am now wearing this blue tattoo that identifies me as a former SAP person I would not think that SAP is doing too well in the on demand space; particularly since SAP CRM OnDemand never really took off. This is in spite of a compelling story, a great user interface and a code base that is widely identical to the one of their CRM Enterprise product. The latter of course is onl...
Posted in CRM on 15 October 2010
Tagged: CRM IT Strategy Oracle
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CRM vs Social CRM – What is the difference?
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 09 July 2010 / 12:09 PM : 2
Just looking at the terms, Customer Relationship Management and Social Customer Relationship Management are sharing the same roots; Social CRM is either a limitation to or an enhancement of (traditional) CRM – or is it something entirely different?
Let me take a brief view at what CRM and Social CRM are and are not and then come to a conclusion.
CRM – Customer Relationship Management – is a business strategy. If you do research on the web you will find many definitions with their own tweaks. What most of them have in common is that they all say that the strategy is about the customer and about how to engage a customer...
Posted in CRM on 09 July 2010
Tagged: CRM Multi-Channel Retail Social Networking
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A Way towards Nirvana - Embracing Social CRM is Key
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 30 November 2009 / 11:46 AM : 0
We trust those sources most, who are like us.
“A company like me”, as Paul Greenberg dubbed it last year in an article for destinationCRM, is a vision that depicts a trustworthy, almost human, company; maybe this vision is not an achievable one, but it still is a very good one since easily related to and understood. It clearly shows the path to the ultimate goal of each company: To get more loyal customers by being trustworthy.
Having more loyal customers directly translates into an improved bottom line sinc...
Posted in CRM on 30 November 2009
Tagged: CPG CRM Multi-Channel Retail Social Networking Twitter
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CRM Done Right
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 16 November 2009 / 4:37 PM : 0
After some blogs on the buzzing topic of social CRM I recently came to thinking about the way to make CRM projects successful.
An initiator to this thinking was the opportunity to speak at an SAP user group meeting.
As a part of this thought process I came across the most recent Chaos Report of the Standish Group, which got released in April 2009. It shows that the success of projects is on the decline again with the project failure rate soaring since 2004.
While the project success criteria used by the Standish...
Posted in CRM on 16 November 2009
Tagged: Agile CRM IT to Business Alignment Project Management Project Methodology Risk management
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Social media help support enter the next level
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 27 October 2009 / 8:24 AM : 4
Customers are increasingly voicing their troubles with products and companies in the web, using social media sites and communities to get answers to issues they have; sometimes they just launch a rant.
The good news for customers is that they regularly get solutions for their problems from within their enhanced social networks.
The good news for companies is that these sites and this behavioural pattern of their customers open up the opportunity to improve customer satisfaction and with that ultimately customer loyalty by offering innovative customer service. This happens by following the principle of being where the customers ar...
Posted in CRM on 27 October 2009
Tagged: Business Architecture Business Intelligence Business Modeling Business Value CRM IT Strategy Social Networking Twitter
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Social CRM is good for your top- and bottomline
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 21 September 2009 / 11:17 AM : 0
Today’s customer is better informed than ever. People – customers – are informing themselves about products they are interested in everywhere, not only on the web site of its producer. As in the “real world” our customers get their information from trusted sources – their social network. Social networks extend into the internet, most notably with platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace but also via opinion sites like Epinions and many more. As a matter of fact people trust their networks, more than they trust statements voiced by companies.
For a while now companies are taking first steps into social networking by providing social networking tools li...
Posted in CRM on 21 September 2009
Tagged: Business Architecture CPG CRM Multi-Channel Social Networking Twitter
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Developing the business's most valuable asset
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 28 August 2009 / 11:29 AM : 3 
For the reasons brought forward before, building a valuable customer relationship and developing customer loyalty is a top priority in business today — but it is a priority that can be difficult to execute without the right approach.
Perceptions of businesses are created, positive or negative, during every interaction the customer has with the business.
Leading businesses therefore collect and analyse relevant information about all interactions very effectively and apply this knowledge about their customers to develop and improve each customer’s experience. These businesses concentrate on their most valuable customers – the customer...
Posted in CRM on 28 August 2009
Tagged: CIO CRM Retail Social Networking
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There Is No Better Time Than Now to Focus on Your CRM Strategy!
Thomas Wieberneit, National Manager CRM Practice : 17 August 2009 / 8:46 AM : 0
There is no doubt that the global economy is in a serious downturn. New Zealand in particular is officially in a state of recession that has lasted now for more than 5 quarters.
Across all industries, particularly within retail, companies have experienced lower sales due to customers spending less. This requires cost cuts, leading to a reduction of available funds for ongoing or planned projects.
What has been observed in the majority of companies is that in order to maintain a positive bottom line in a reduced revenue environment, cost cuts have been introduced across the board which lead to a reduction of funding for ongoing or...
Posted in CRM on 17 August 2009
Tagged: Business Intelligence CIO CRM Multi-Channel Retail
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