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4 Examples of Companies That Save Time and Money by Easily Automating Manual Tasks and Processes

January 9, 2021 CRM News and Info

We are experiencing a dizzying rate of technological change. It’s both overwhelming and exciting at the same time. Sometimes we don’t even realize how much innovation is already a part of our daily lives. From restaurant apps for online food ordering to self-checkout at the grocery store to robotic vacuum cleaners, automation helps us function more efficiently and freely.

Software automation is at the top of the list of areas that will bring tremendous opportunity for businesses. When technology is used to improve business processes, you uncover new ways of doing things and free up people for more valuable tasks than those that can be completed by the software.

According to estimates from Accenture, financial services companies in North America alone stand to gain $ 140 billion in productivity yields and cost savings by 2025 by adopting automation technologies.

Whether you are a bank, insurance company or a manufacturer of consumer goods – businesses that embrace a software automation strategy can bring untold efficiencies and cost-savings to the organization.

With software automation, businesses entrust tools and platforms to perform processes according to specified rules and policies. You’ve heard of the, “if this, then that” model.

And the beauty is that automation platforms now empower “citizen developers”, or non-tech users to automate outdated or manually intensive processes. Microsoft’s Power Platform is an example of a platform where people can turn great ideas into impactful solutions.

At Crowe, we are not only innovating on the Power Platform with solutions we’re bringing to market, but we’re also opening customer’s eyes to what’s possible in their own organization.

Some real-world examples of automation in the workplace:

An insurance agency sends automated, but highly personalized reminders to policy holders 90, 60, 30 days in advance of their policy renewal date.
A bank created an automation script that runs at a specific time of the day to archive large files of supporting loan documentation submitted by potential borrowers.
A manufacturer created a chat bot to handle the “night shift” and answer basic product questions. It also expanded their customer service with 24×7 support.
A bank created an automated script that sends a notification to a relationship manager if an online banking customer hasn’t logged into online banking for a period of time.

Instead of getting people to work like robots, software automation does the tasks most people don’t want to do, or are too busy to do, in the first place.

Automation not only allows organizations to achieve operational agility and capture huge cost efficiencies, it also helps them to deliver the digital experiences that customers increasingly demand.

Crowe is helping many companies get started on this journey. We find that most companies need help from outside resources – if anything, just to make sure they are on the right path. The bulk of our support comes from solving an initial problem, and then with some training and mentoring, support can be moved in-house over time.

What do they say, “give a business a fish, and you feed them for a day; teach a business to fish using the Power Platform, and you feed them for a lifetime”?

Crowe can help you use the Microsoft Power Platform along with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to simplify your business.

Contact our team to start the discussion at crminfo@crowe.com or 877-600-2253.

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner www.CroweCRM.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time

December 31, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Did you know Thomas Edison’s assistants proposed putting electric lights on Christmas trees? There’s a long and rich history surrounding holiday trees, in America and around the world. According to the History Channel, symbolic traditions involving evergreen trees in winter began in ancient Egypt and Rome and continue to take on new meaning today.

New Holiday Traditions: Annual Analytics

Here at TIBCO, we’ve started our own holiday tradition involving the classic festive trees: using our data visualization software to understand trends in holiday tree data. Last year, we shared our analysis and “treemap” visualization (quite literally a treemap of trees) via TIBCO Spotfire^®. This year, we dived even deeper into the data, using the new Spotfire Mods functionality to design custom apps for greater interactivity. Here’s what we found:

Top Tree Producing States: All 50 states contribute to the holiday tree industry, but our analysis shows the greatest production occurs in Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Also interesting is that while Oregon and North Carolina are top producers overall, states like Ohio and Michigan definitely over-index for total tree producing counties as a percentage of their total land area.

Visualize 5 Cool Insights on Holiday Tree Trends Over Time — *Immersive, interactive exploration of a bubble “tree-map” visualization Mod alongside county-level Spotfire geoanalytics [*source: USDA census data]*

Artificial vs. Real Tree Sales: As you can see below, artificial tree sales have been on the rise over the last decade, with 162 percent growth between 2004 and 2018. Artificial trees are taking over. Actually, 81 percent of the trees on display, whether in storefronts, businesses, or homes, in 2019 were of the artificial variety. But what does that mean for the global economy when China produces 80 percent of artificial trees worldwide and given that artificial trees cannot be recycled like real trees?

Rising Average Price of Real Trees: According to an article in the Hustle, “During the recession in 2008, ailing farmers planted too few trees. As a result, prices have been much higher since 2016.” The article also cites the National Christmas Tree Association as stating that the average retail price for a real tree in 2019 was $ 75. Obviously, this is a huge market, but one that continues to shift with economic and social changes—which makes us wonder just how different our analysis next year will look.

Consumer Demand Lower in 2019: In the area chart visualization above, we see that sales for natural trees still account for a larger share of the market. However, the artificial tree category set new high marks for sales in each year progressively from 2016 to 2018. Why could this be? One hypothesis might be that as Baby Boomers retire as “empty-nesters” and downsize their homes, they are buying fewer trees, but let us know your thoughts on this surprising find.

The More the Merrier? Multiple Trees: According to a survey by the American Christmas Tree Association, the number of households in the United States that display more than one Christmas tree has grown by 10 percent from 2014 to 2019. In 2019, approximately 16 percent of American households display multiple trees. But will this trend continue or, as with the overall tree sales, will the number of trees per household decrease in the coming years?

We’ve started our own holiday tradition involving the classic festive trees: using our data visualization software to understand trends in holiday tree data. Click To Tweet

A New Tradition: Immersive Yourself in Custom Analytics Applications

But this is just one festive story you could tell around data trends. What about shopping trends this year, will there be an increase in small business online sales? What will be the top gifted items in 2020?
You tell us! Join our tradition, and read our whitepaper to learn how the immersive qualities of Hyperconverged Analytics will create new value for your business. For a closer look at all of “What’s New in Spotfire^®” including visualization Mods, watch our 20-minute intro webinar on demand.

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loop execution time difference after Map operation

December 19, 2020 BI News and Info

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3 major signs that indicate it’s time to Automate your Recurring Invoices within Dynamics 365 CRM/Power Apps!

December 19, 2020 CRM News and Info

What’s the one factor common to all businesses and holds the most value? Yes. Money. Majority of businesses are focused on sales and revolve around using their Dynamics 365 CRM to bank in more sales. They want to use it to its full utility to capture their leads, convert them, and continue to service them. However, the same numbers are not reflected when it comes to taking action for optimizing the process of carrying out the sales for their customers. This changes when a simple-to-use and efficient solution like Recurring Billing Manager is introduced.

Recurring Billing Manager, now available on Microsoft AppSource, is an app that makes billing a piece of cake. It is a mix of automated intelligence, bulls-eye accuracy, as well as time and effort saving convenience. How do you know if you really need a solution like this? We’ve identified the top signs that indicate a reason for concern and a demand for change. Have you noticed the below signs?

Sign #1: Multiple Billing Schedules prove to be a burden

The biggest question with multiple clients in your billing pipeline is figuring out and organizing when each of the clients has to pay and exactly when the bill should be scheduled. This can prove to become a management nightmare if payments start to slip. But this is old worries with Recurring Billing Manager. Recurring Billing Manager provides Flexible Billing Schedules that change the way you deal with bills.

Recurring Billing Manager gives you the control of billing schedules: set which invoices should be generated, when they should be generated, how frequently they should be generated and what line of items should be a part of the new Invoice.

That’s not all; you can create multiple Billing Schedules and customize them. You can use the common billing attributes such as billing length, frequency, reminders, delayed charges, and even include multiple products as per your requirement. Using this feature of Recurring Billing Manager, seeing multiple bills will only make you happy.

Sign #2: Payments are delayed

A growing company always has limited attention time. When the workload gets heavy or the company has a major upcoming project that needs more eyes, it’s common to have operations like billing that does not stop work fall behind. With Recurring Billing Manager, Reminder Schedules takes care of this for you by sending payment reminders to your clients. You can set up a schedule for reminders with respect to invoices that are past due or for upcoming renewals. What’s more is that every Reminder Schedule will have Reminder Rule(s). These rules outline when the reminders should be sent, the email templates to be used, to whom it should be sent, etc.

So, you can now channel your focus to more pressing tasks while Recurring Billing Manager automates your reminders for you.

Sign #3: Inaccurate/Zero Compensation for Delayed Payments

Let’s be practical. Receiving a cleared invoice right on time through all clients is seldom the case for many businesses. Along with this being an inconvenient situation, it also adds a time and effort consuming overhead to the team for calculating the penalty charges.

With Recurring Billing Manager’s Delayed Charge Schedule, the penalties are calculated automatically for you. You can create a schedule for the delayed charges that the customers must pay for their overdue invoices. The UI is made simple to use so you can simply choose parameters like the percentage of penalty, its frequency and from when it should be charged, and you will be given the calculated penalty.

This helps you to be accurate in your calculations every time and ensures that the additional time doesn’t go to waste. This also eliminates any room for bargaining from clients to wiggle out of paying calculated overdue as sales people have a claim that the systematic and automated generation of penalty is out of their control. Compared to manual control, this allows representatives to deal with difficult situations by simply relying on the automated process of penalty generation.

Did you notice any of these signs in your business? If yes, then don’t wait anymore! End the year with a resolution to make your processes more optimized and your time better utilized. Here’s even a free 15 days trial for you on our website or Microsoft AppSource to try it before you buy it. If you would have us assist you in any way, you don’t have to think twice before contacting us at crm@inogic.com.

So, until the next time – try Recurring Billing Manager and make it the last bill you generate manually!

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

“Disruptive” Technology in the Time of Coronavirus

December 15, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This blog was written by TIBCO Director of Digital Strategy Alessandro Chimera and originally published on Italian tech blog Linea EDP.

The current social and economic climate, generated by the global pandemic, has put many companies in crisis which, if they do not rethink their business operations, will have serious problems of survival. Not only companies but also many professionals face a challenge, which places a change in habits at the top of the priorities of the actions to be taken.

Suddenly, we are asked to travel less, attend fewer meetings, and limit business lunches. At the same time, we are streaming more content, participating in virtual meetings, and using eLearning platforms, as well as taking advantage of home delivery services.

A severely affected market sector is travel, which now has to reorganize its offers to optimize the business and restart as quickly as possible. In short, what is needed now is a kind of “business review ”—the new business imperative.

If the current situation and history have taught us anything, it is that when a crisis arises, traditional operating models are no longer valid. Companies need to react quickly and create, validate, and adopt entirely new strategies to keep their business running and generate sufficient margins to overcome the current crisis. It’s not just the travel market that’s impacted: financial services, telecommunications, industry, transportation, retail, healthcare, government, hospitality, and the energy sector are all facing the same challenges in adapting to the new reality.

How to adapt

If we look at the initiatives that financial services should take, the fastest action available to them is to quickly rebalance all their investment lines with event-driven strategies. On the other hand, the telecommunications sector faces the unexpected increase in connections and an increased data load on its networks. Focusing on providing reliable services to an increasing number of people, whose only means of connecting with their communities is private and business, it passes through its own network.

Another heavily impacted sector is the manufacturing industry, as orders are falling sharply or being canceled due to customers focusing their primary needs on other sectors. There are significant delays in the supply chain, commodities purchased internationally are delivered late. New procedures are being implemented which, following the pandemic, must guarantee the safety of workers. Some of these companies may also be forced to consider a temporary reduction in their workforce.

The transport sector was the first to suffer direct impact due to flight cancellations, border closures, reassignment of passengers to new flights, and flight rescheduling and changes with virtually no notice. The IATA (International Air Transport Association) predicts that on a global level and due to a limited contagion scenario, the current measures will cause a loss of turnover on passenger air traffic equal to approximately 63 billion dollars. While, for an extended contagion scenario, the losses could amount to as much as 113 billion dollars.

Travel bans issued by the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia have blocked thousands of flights. With 550 flights canceled per day, the loss in terms of daily passengers is 125,000. There are also cargo flights to consider: it has been calculated that in January, which was not even the peak of the crisis, the air cargo sector lost 3.3%. In the latest IATA report of 1 April, it was found that European airlines recorded a reduction in freight traffic of 4.1%.

Who is ready

Very few players in these market sectors were ready: in reality, in most cases, they were totally unprepared. Let’s see the consequences of the lockdown in Italy, our country: when this measure was first implemented, it generated a 56.8% increase in eCommerce, mobile traffic doubled and systems had to be upgraded to withstand the loads additional to which they were subjected.

In manufacturing, many large manufacturers have begun to optimize their processes and operations, analyzing their data to understand how to cope with the new situation they have found themselves in. A particularly true statement for industrial food processing plants, which have seen remarkable growth in demand, due to the fact that Italians were forced to stay at home. On the other hand, the retailers and the distributors have shown a 12.2% growth in sales resulting from the new demand.

The on-demand media services and entertainment streaming have also begun to suffer additional load: sudden growth of customers with the most extensive mode of use that has dealt a blow to providers, bringing close to saturation their networks. For example, Netflix and YouTube have accepted the European Union’s request to take action to avoid saturating the available bandwidth by lowering the definition quality.

But not everyone has seen demand grow: the entire hospitality market has had to stop abruptly. Major events have been canceled or postponed, corporate travel restrictions have caused hotels to empty, and major hotel chains are canceling cancellation fees for current and upcoming bookings to at least secure future business while avoiding losing potential customers.

Complete turnaround

We often talk about the evolution of business and business transformation and how it must happen quickly. However, no one could have imagined the speed with which the pandemic hit the world. At the time of writing this article, only a few countries had decided to close all non-essential activities (lockdown). Today, however, all countries have decided to implement the lockdown, and some (including Italy) have already exited or are exiting the so-called Phase 1 of tight lockdown.

With the exit from the lockdown it is necessary to increase your efforts to completely reinvent your go-to-market strategy.

Unfortunately, many companies have never invested in the tools they need to analyze their business data more deeply, and without sound supportive analysis, it is not possible for them to make correct strategic choices to decide whether the new processes or business models they want implement can really work.

The spotlight is therefore on all companies to act quickly to integrate and unify the various data sources and extract their potential value thanks to Advanced Analytics tools to apply Machine Learning or AI on their data so that they can explore new sales channels and seize new revenue opportunities.

It is a lesson to understand and adapt your business strategies to what customers really want, monitoring their behavior to understand how quickly you can adapt your business to new customer requests. If the term reinvention was ever relevant, it certainly happens today, in the business climate we live in. The key is to understand that decision-making processes must be supported by analyzing your own data, which provides the know-how on how to optimize your execution models to make the alternative business models you are exploring work.

If the current situation and history have taught us anything, it is that when a crisis arises, traditional operating models are no longer valid. Companies need to react quickly to keep their business running. Click To Tweet

Failure is not contemplated. Strategies must be tested quickly and digitally to predict the outcome. Last but not least, you need to be closer to your customers. Understanding that their purchasing power has shifted online, that they are more selective, more frugal, and more insightful, and that this customer intimacy called customer intimacy is today a primarily digital concept. If you get this mix right and when the world returns to the new normal, their loyalty will make them return as your customers more than ever.

Visit tibco.com to see how we can help you begin your digital transformation today.

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Google updates COVID-19 forecasting models with longer time horizons and new regions

November 17, 2020 Big Data

In August, in partnership with the Harvard Global Health Institute, Google launched a set of models — the COVID-19 Public Forecasts — that provide projections of COVID-19 cases, deaths, ICU utilization, ventilator availability, and other metrics for U.S. counties and states. Today, the two organizations released what they claim are significantly improved models — trained on public data from Johns Hopkins University, Descartes Labs, the United States Census Bureau, and elsewhere — that expand beyond the U.S.

The COVID-19 Public Forecasts are intended to serve as a resource for first responders in health care, the public sector, and other affected organizations, Google says. The forecasts allow for targeted testing and public health interventions on a county-by-county basis, in theory enhancing users’ ability to respond to the rapidly evolving pandemic. For example, health care providers could incorporate the forecasted number of cases as a datapoint in resource planning for PPE, staffing, and scheduling. Meanwhile, state and county health departments could use the forecast of infections to inform testing strategies and identify areas at risk of an outbreak.

When initially launched, the COVID-19 Public Forecasts included regional predictions for 14 days into the future. The model, which learns from epidemiological human prior knowledge, as well as data, is now roughly 50% more accurate and includes projections for a 28-day horizon with confidence intervals to account for uncertainty.

Google says it is investigating support for other countries as it introduces the COVID-19 Public Forecasts for Japan. As in the U.S., the forecasts are free and based on public data, such as the COVID-19 Situation Report in Japan. The daily-retrained model predicts confirmed cases, deaths, recoveries, and hospitalizations each day and can look 28 days into the future for every prefecture.

Beyond these improvements, Google says it has made the initial forecasting models customizable to new problems and datasets. The company is also developing an AI-driven “what-if” model to be used for decision-making around COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

“We partnered with a handful of early testers, including HCA Healthcare, to help us understand how the forecasts should be formatted, what they should forecast, and even test early versions of the forecasts,” Google Cloud AI research head Tomas Pfister wrote in a blog post. “These efforts helped improve the forecasts before they went to the general public. We also exposed the work to significant scientific scrutiny inside Google, having statistical and epidemiological experts vet the work to make sure it was following the highest scientific standards. We designed a responsible daily forecast launch process that first runs over 100 sanity checks looking for any abnormalities, and we required a human to do a qualitative analysis to check for issues. Every day our model training searches over hundreds of hyperparameter options, and the team works to ensure the best models reach our users.”

Pfister says Google also worked with fairness and ethics experts internally to run a fairness analysis, looking at how both relative and absolute errors differ across demographic groups (particularly Black and Latinx populations) and interpreting the results.

Over 100 employees across Google parent company Alphabet contributed to the development of the COVID-19 Public Forecasts.

Best practices for a successful AI Center of Excellence:

A guide for both CoEs and business units Access here

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It’s the Perfect Time to Reimagine Your Business Productivity

October 4, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

If you’re doing the very best you can to keep your business thriving during a tumultuous 2020, some of this might sound familiar… You’re doing all you can to manage your organization. You have one team member managing the day-to-day financials while working from home full-time. You have another calling on sales contacts while venturing into the office from time to time.

Source

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CRM is Failing: It’s Time to Transition to CXM

September 1, 2020 CRM News and Info

By Jack M. Germain

Sep 1, 2020 4:30 AM PT

CRM and CEM/CXM are essential tools for maintaining business flow with customers. Although similar, they have distinct differences. To choose the right one, organizations need to go beyond the alphabet soup of these hi-tech business applications.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software tracks interactions with sales prospects and customers. CRM systems can provide many benefits, but not every business needs one.

Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) is a more extensive information collection process to track, oversee and organize every interaction between a customer and the organization throughout the customer lifecycle. It goes deeper into the customer experience and focuses on insight from their unique perspective by listening to customers, analyzing their feedback, and understanding their viewpoint to optimize the customer experience.

In short, both tools optimize customer relationships. How they do this makes all the difference. CRM facilitates relationship building for the organization. CXM focuses on monitoring and improving the experience for the customer.

A Different View

Centralizing all tools and customer-impacting services into one system delivers great efficiencies for the business. However, enabling your customers to have the same experience with you in real time is the difference between a CRM and CXM, according to Ryan Cantor, vice president of product and marketing at Thryv.

The CRM market is growing every day with new entrants. Centralizing hordes of data for all the employees of the business to view in real time is not a new concept. But few enable the end customer to partake directly in this journey, he noted.

Siebel Systems first pioneered CRM software in 1997. The goal was to create a single, centralized location for all customer information. This would enable employees to access the CRM and become more productive, efficient, and able to answer questions more accurately, based on real-time information.

In many companies that opted for quick adoption, the software created little more than a glorified centralized spreadsheet. Its original premise went beyond employee efficiency. It was supposed to automate marketing efforts and sales functions to improve the customer’s experience.

Cantor believes CRM for many companies perpetuates a missed opportunity to grow the customer experience. To fix that, he believes it’s time for companies to transition to CXM software. One option is his company’s CXM platform.

CRM Buyer pursued the potential transition process — and the impact of both CRM and CXM products — in a conversation with Cantor.

CRM Buyer: Why is CRM a failure for users?

Ryan Cantor: Being able to login, update their information, communicate with the business, schedule, pay, share. Often this is a complex integration or custom web development work needed that is outside the capabilities of most small businesses.

Centralizing the data speaks to efficiencies you can get as a business. It’s valuable, and it has the “potential” to improve the customer’s experience. This can be demonstrated when a customer calls two different employees, and each employee is operating with the same real-time set of facts.

However, in most businesses this potential is never truly realized, because it is limited to these personal interactions and not extended to the electronic or technology-enabled experience the customer gets. The companies who have done this part well include Amazon, Dominos and Apple. They have done this with millions upon millions of development, code, and integrations to deliver what ultimately appears as a seamless customer experience online.

CRM Buyer: How do you do this with CXM?

Cantor: When customers have the ability to book appointments on your website, login to reschedule, ask questions, make payments, download historical receipts, read and share documents and more, only then have you moved toward actually improving your customer’s experience.

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Thryv VP Ryan Cantor

Every aspect of Thryv has two views. The business view and the customer view. We constantly ask ourselves, “how does the customer engage with the business?” Let’s say a new piece of functionality is added, such as our “packages,” for example. (Packages allow Thryv customers to sell services in multi-packs — like yoga classes.)

Yes, it is important for the business to track package assignment, package usage, etc. But it is also important that a consumer can buy a package, track their usage, know when their package expires, and visually see every time they book a service online, that their package was used as payment and what their balance is.

It takes a discipline to do this, and some would argue it requires twice as much work. Technology not just built for one audience (the business owners), but for two, (the company and its customers).

The experiences aren’t the same. They don’t have the same permissions or capabilities, and often you need to simplify and get to the root of the use cases and desires of both groups to determine how to design the system and what to prioritize.

CRM Buyer: How is automated customer experience different from CXM, which I’m guessing is a hybrid of CRM and ACX?

Cantor: Marketing automation is a form of automating the client experience. To further exemplify the difference, it is really about whether you want a one-way dialog pushing customers through a path, or whether this experience was designed to be fully interactive — beyond whether someone opened an email or clicked to a website.

CXM really speaks to all of the bespoke and fully connected touchpoints in a customer’s experience. A trigger-based workflow to nurture, follow-up, or invite back is nothing new.

CXM speaks more to being easy to do business with at all times. It ensures that your customers can easily download their payment receipts around tax time next year without jumping through hoops. It means that when you ask for HOA approvals for a construction process, you have made it easy for the consumer to upload them to you, and that they are organized properly on the back-end to prevent asking for them again, or misplacing them.

CRM Buyer: How can companies transition to CXM?

Cantor: The first step is an audit to acknowledge the gaps in your current platform, or lack thereof. Have a close friend secretly shop your business, go to your website, browse, schedule and submit a form. Track follow-up time. Track the buying experience. Is there friction? How long until you get your estimate? How easy to schedule? How was the follow-up? Professional? Did the emails go to spam?

Until people recognize and appreciate there is a problem, it’s hard to fix it.

The second is evaluation of tools and systems in the marketplace. Doing the first step will make a small business owner more informed during the demo and the testing phase. If you know the gaps and the problems, you know what to look out for and what to test in any new solution.

Lastly is the switch. Is it a flash cut on a future date? Do you migrate data? Do you live in two systems for the next 30 days while your old jobs finish up? This one is personal preference We’ve seen it go both ways.

CRM Buyer: Is the move to CXM an all-or-nothing strategy, or can companies adopt some parts and ignore others?

Cantor: Going from zero to 100 is probably too much for any small business owner or their teams to digest. The important part is to start someplace and pick a platform with future planning in mind. You don’t want to pick a platform only to find out it won’t do automated review generation. You may not be ready yet to jump to that, but you should have a vision of where you want to be three, six, nine, 12 months from now. The platform shouldn’t be the barrier to get there.

We’ve seen some success with integrating a bunch of platforms together, but ultimately what we’ve found is every email looks different, comes from a different sender, and ultimately creates a disjointed experience for end consumers.

An invoice from one platform, payment receipt from another, and a booking confirmation from a third. This gets out of control pretty quickly, and we’ve found it also tends to be more expensive.

So start with the end in mind, then eat the elephant one bite at a time, incrementally improving the customer’s experience, expanding usage of the platform until you’re covered end-to-end. Then start over with testing improvements, changes, and tweaks.

Lastly, all good software should keep getting better. So just when you think you’re done, there should be something new to learn, adopt, and start using to help your customers even more.

CRM Buyer: How budget-friendly is the transition process?

Cantor: It shouldn’t break the bank at the small business level. Be wary of providers who charge you hundreds of dollars for the software and then thousands of dollars on training or professional services to get started.

This is a true partnership, and a partnership means mutual support and assistance. For a true end-to-end platform, depending on the size of your business and logins needed, it should be all-in, less than US$ 1,000 a month.

CRM Buyer: Is the CXM strategy a complete rip and replace process, or can both models co-exist to suit various departmental needs?

Cantor: I think you’ll find the implementation can happen over time, but in the end, customer-facing functions adopt the CXM platform, and other departments that aren’t customer facing can continue to use platforms that integrate with it.

For example, the accounting team will need to use accounting software. It’s not important for the customers to have access directly to the accounting software (probably better if they don’t). But it is important that the customer-facing actions like an invoice, estimate, payment, installment plan, or subscription all synchronize with the accounting software automatically.

CRM Buyer: Is CRM bound to fail for all companies? What are the warning signs that it is time for a transition?

Cantor: I think for the most part, yes. The warning signs can be found in two simple words: So what?

We track this piece of information about our customers in this drop down menu…So what?

We know precisely when a customer opens one of our emails and clicks on it…So what?

What happens next? What is the business actually doing with this information? Not what they could do, or want to do, or even plan to do. What is the business actually doing with it?

CRM Buyer: Any closing thoughts on your view of the lack of CRM’s sustainability?

Cantor: You’ve seen a push in the last 12 to 18 months to bolster the database-in-the-sky problem with artificial intelligence. Since the employees aren’t using the CRM to affect change, drive efficiencies or increase revenue, that CRM companies are starting to integrate and build elaborate AI components to drive the recommended outcomes and automation needed to extract value.

That’s a step in the right direction for some businesses, but most AI requires significant data to be effective, so at a small business level, they are either combining data across multiple businesses to get a large enough sample, or simply serving up highly obvious outcomes/recommendations. The part that generally is still lost is the end customer involvement in the process.

One of the key differentiators for small businesses is maintaining a local personal touch and experience. Adopting technology to improve efficiencies and support growth shouldn’t force them to give up those competitive advantages.

Jack%20M.%20Germain CRM is Failing: Its Time to Transition to CXM
Jack M. Germain has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His main areas of focus are enterprise IT, Linux and open-source technologies. He is an esteemed reviewer of Linux distros and other open-source software. In addition, Jack extensively covers business technology and privacy issues, as well as developments in e-commerce and consumer electronics. Email Jack.

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Returning to Normal and Our Economy in the Time of COVID-19

July 22, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 5 minutes

As many countries and US states are in the beginning stages of reopening, COVID-19 cases continue to trend. After nearly three months of stringent social distancing efforts, some areas began to reopen at the end of May with the hope that the arrival of summer might mean the virus was slowing down. But while we are all eager to get the economy back on its feet and get back to our daily routines, the areas that have been the most liberal with reopenings are already experiencing a daily increase in new cases.

Returning to Normal and Our Economy in the Time of COVID 19 — *TIBCO Spotfire dashboard showing an increase in cases in the southeast United States*

This poses an interesting challenge in terms of how best to mitigate the spread of disease while also restoring society and the economy. Data and analytics can help guide our community actions.

“The pandemic has highlighted the need for sound data science, visual analytics and data management methods, and the infusion of these skills and literacy into broader groups of users—in companies and the population at large,” says Michael O’Connell, TIBCO Chief Analytics Officer.

Data science and analytics have become a focal point for business leaders to find out what’s going on right now, how to best tune the business in this new order of demand and supply, and how to forecast what lies ahead.

To this end, TIBCO has applied data science, visual analytics, and data management methods to a wide range of COVID-19 data, and this is available to the public via our COVID-19 Visual Analysis Hub. The Spotfire Live Report Application, uses data from 15 public sources that we ingest and refresh regularly. Some key components of the Live Report analysis are:

Modeling the virus’ Reproduction number (Re/Rt). This provides insights into the virus spread, highlighting problem areas ahead of time.
SuperSmoother analysis of the reported cases and fatalities. This removes inconsistencies and errors and provides summaries and projections of case velocities at local and regional levels.
Analysis of testing and mobility data in context of business reopenings.
Assessing the effects of local government interventions, with a collated dataset from local public health department sources, categorized to match prominent scientific papers and work from leading epidemiology institutions. These data are used to annotate case, fatality and hospitalization data, and the SuperSmoother estimates, to show the impact of local intervention efforts.

Our findings so far have provided clear evidence that social distancing interventions dramatically lowered the spread of local epidemics, and that the uptick in cases that have occurred over the past month is related to the relaxation of these efforts.

TIBCO’s COVID-19 Visual Analytics Hub has found that social distancing interventions dramatically lowered the spread of epidemics, and the uptick in cases over the past month is related to the relaxation of these efforts. Click To Tweet

Helping Industries Better Understand COVID-19 Trends

The TIBCO Data Science team is collaborating with industry partners on specialized applications in the areas of healthcare, pharmaceutical, consumer goods, retail, and insurance and below, we examine some of these use cases.

Syntellis is using TIBCO Spotfire with their hospital customers to track local hospital utilization rates, including beds, ICU beds, ventilators and equipment. Hospitals are updating these analyses, often in real-time, to ensure there are enough PPE for staff, enough beds for patients, and even to predict the number of beds expected to be available in the future. By looking at the trends in cases, along with the statistics on case severity and average stay, hospitals can anticipate bed availability beforehand.

PerkinElmer is using Spotfire to study the bioinformatics and cheminformatics around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and treatments in development. They have studied 60,000 SAS-CoV-2 genome sequences and this community has tracked mutations that correlate with COVID-19 severity. Several studies are starting to elucidate the interplay between human genetics and COVID-19. SARS-CoV-2 is evolving rapidly—the original strain is almost gone and new strains are showing some different behaviors. Some recent results suggest that the O blood type may afford some protection. The Washington University (St. Louis) is also using Spotfire to study how human (host) genetic variation affects the virus’ ability to enter the cell and trigger immune response.

The consumer goods and retail industries are also relying on data science for insights into reopening. Forecasting and nearcasting demand and reconfiguration of supply chain and distribution is helping optimize patterns such as BOPIS (buy online, pickup in store). Data Science is also crucial in predicting revenues from eCommerce and stores as they reopen. Instore sales have been minimal, and traditional same store revenue forecasts have not been possible. It’s a new world and new methods of revenue generation and analysis are needed.

Using Data Science to Make Sure You Have a Safe Place to Work

But what does this mean for ‘reopening’? As we move forward, we will likely be continuing to focus on reducing transmission rates, including better hygiene practices—such as mask-wearing and hand washing—and increased testing rates, both for the virus as well as for antibodies.

We may be looking at a to-and-fro in virus cases; from local jurisdiction orders to reopen, along with people’s changing behavior and perceptions; followed by cycles of increased social distancing as fear of infection returns. To help ease the return to work, companies and government officials are turning to data science to help mitigate risks.

Technologies are emerging to help businesses reopen safely, such as the new TIBCO Gathersmart^TM offering. TIBCO Gathersmart^TM enables employers and schools to create surveys for employees and students that can be used to implement work from home or office policies, and to monitor and manage employees through a centralized dashboard. Leadership teams can visualize hotspots and evolve policy and response for personnel.

TIBCO GathersmartTM enables employers and schools to create surveys for employees and students that can be used to implement work from home or office policies, and to monitor and manage employees through a centralized dashboard. Click To Tweet

For further insights into data science methods for pandemic analytics and reopening strategies from TIBCO’s Chief Analytics Officer Michael O’Connell and the TIBCO Data Science team, visit the COVID-19 Visual Analysis Hub and TIBCO Community blog. O’Connell and the team are hosting regular webinars where they discuss their most recent findings and explain the meaning behind the data science. To learn how we are addressing COVID-19 challenges from a data science perspective, watch the on-demand webinar today.

We hope you continue to stay safe and healthy as we move toward recovery.

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Nick Cannon “Taking Time Away” From Syndicated Radio Show

July 16, 2020 Humor

Nick Cannon has announced that he will be “taking time away” from his radio show, after he issued an apology online for anti-Semitic comments he made on a podcast.

In a series of tweets, Cannon said that he made the decision in order to “commit (himself) to deeper, more thorough reflection and education.” Cannon said in his apology, posted Wednesday evening, that he is speaking with “Rabbis, community leaders and institutions” within the Jewish community.

I will use this time to establish an action plan towards real, impactful change and advocacy aimed at bringing people together,” added Cannon via Twitter. “I continue to express my gratitude to the Rabbis, community leaders and institutions who have reached out to me to help enlighten me. “Their input and friendship will help me as I further commit myself to more profound learning and towards strengthening the bond between the Black and Jewish cultures every day going forward.”

The companies who work with Cannon have had differing responses to his comments. ViacomCBS, with which Cannon has had a long-term relationship, terminated its work with the star, including his long-running sketch comedy series “Nick Cannon’s Wild ‘n Out.” Whereas Fox decided to keep Cannon as the host of “The Masked Singer,” with a spokesperson for the company saying that “this moment calls for dialogue.”

The controversy stems from the June 30 episode of Cannon’s podcast “Cannon’s Class,” which featured former Public Enemy member Professor Griff. At one point in the episode, Cannon said Black people are the “true Hebrews” and talked about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild family.

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