Beating eParadise – How Cross-Industry Collaboration Must Evolve


Conglomerates with a twist

Cross-industry collaboration must be interpreted in a dramatically different way today. That’s because the most noteworthy competitors in any industry today have among them several non-traditional players. These include upstarts who have started with simple, logical, online models and are now slowly expanding to gobble up adjacent sectors – Amazon, Airbnb, Alibaba, Uber, PayPal, WeChat to name a few. And then […]

Solving Data Silos: The Modern Solution


data silo problem

As AI takes centerstage, data silos are the biggest hurdle that every enterprise architect, CIO, CTO, or business leader wants to solve today. We need access to quality & timely data, which in turn will lead to better analytics and straight through processing of transactions. So far, a solution to solve the problems of data silos has been elusive. In […]

Solving the issue of context to achieve excellent customer engagement


We are making great strides in connecting with customers and consumers in an Omni Channel fashion. A major part of that evolution is about bringing together a seamless experience over mobile, social media, in-store, online etc.. We are already seeing solutions that help the different channels be aware of each other. Some examples are: 1.  For a contact center representative to be […]

Is being customer centric bad for business?


As part of my research for Connected!, I came across an interesting research study titled Effects of Customer-Centric Structure on Firm Performance (1). The study shows that being customer centric can actually decrease financial performance by almost 23%. Wow! This research definitely got my attention. Especially in an age where everyone is singing how wonderful customer centricity is. As I dug deeper, I found that the study brought […]

How To Do A Strategic Content Audit?


strategic content audit

If you are looking to influence revenue from your content marketing, then this blog will be helpful for you. Traditional content audits focus on SEO metrics, traffic, and technical issues. A good guide for this type of audit is here by ahrefs and another good one by SEMRush. For enterprise B2B clients where the sales is complex and transactions are […]

When you first think of CRM, don’t think about a product


Conglomerates with a twist

Customer relationship management software is popular as it helps meets important goals for businesses. Reduction of manual processes, centralized information about customers, reduction of departmental silos, easy access to analytics and the like. Customer experience is dramatically enhanced. In addition, consultants to banks are calling this phenomenon relationship banking as opposed to traditional banking, which I personally think is pretty funny, but that’s the […]

Including personality types into marketing segmentation


Depending on who you are as a person – even after trying to fully align this post with your professional  interests – you may not give this post a read beyond this first sentence. And that’s exactly the point of this post. The content marketing world is heating up. Customers are saturated with an overload of information being thrown at them. […]

Creating a Composable Business Enterprise


Composable Business Enterprise

The idea of creating a composable business enterprise stems from a need for better resiliency to change. It also leads to better customer experiences and business agility. Gartner lays out a framework for organizations to follow the four principles: modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery. At its core, this means a decoupled, more agile organization so that business processes can pivot […]

Is the digital scramble hurting customer engagement?


Businesses have generated innovative products for decades. The evidence is seen everyday in so many blockbuster products whose sales have shot through the roof, and many brands who have acquired legend status. A lot of this is attributable to ingenuity, creativity, primary research and focus groups, lots of analysis of past trends and consumer behavior among many other practices. However there […]

Building the Future of the API Economy


The impact of API economy is across all industries. Because APIs by their very definition are supposed to promote interaction and dialog across multiple companies, often in different industries. In my article on American Banker Don’t Give Away The Store When Enabling APIs, I brought out the focus on ensuring that banks maintain their customer experience front end, while allowing additional channels […]

Practical, simple steps to banking customer engagement N.0


A recent report on The Disruption of Banking by The Economist highlighted that more than half of the banks are either ignoring the Fintech trend, or talking but not doing anything about it. In 2016, we are now seeing banks finally starting to tackle the emerging trends by partnering on many fronts, utilizing application program interfaces (APIs) and experimenting with […]

The dilemma of digital banking is not about tech


I recently had the privilege of speaking at the BAI Beacon conference in Chicago. The topic was about the potential for APIs in financial services. The focus was on customer engagement. Update: A more detailed version of this blog is now on BAI.org as an article titled: Pieces in Place: The Rubik’s Cube Model of APIs This session presented a 3-step model for how […]

Is Your Sales & Marketing Automation Driving Growth?


marketing-automation

This article on sales and marketing automation is for you if you feel that revenue potential is not being addressed and/or one of the following is true: You don’t have an automation platform It’s under-utilized and only used for occasional bulk announcements It’s used for cold sales emails If you are keen to put sales & marketing automation to work […]

3 reasons to choose HubSpot as your CRM and marketing automation platform


CRM and marketing automation

The decision on adopting a CRM and marketing automation system can cause a lot of daily frustrations, loss of revenue, and sales-marketing misalignment. Much of the publicly available advice is too heavily focused on content marketing and product/ticket selling. It doesn’t apply very well to B2B enterprise services. We need an integrated system that brings the strategy together, and doesn’t […]

PayPal USD Stablecoin – What Is It, and Should You Use it?


paypal usd stablecoin

The crypto news was abuzz last week with the news of PayPal launching a USD stablecoin. However, what does it mean? What are the pros and cons? Let’s try to unpack these questions. What Is the PayPal USD Stablecoin? A stablecoin is a way for a crypto currency to stay pegged to the US dollar. The connection to USD provides […]