Today’s interview is with Paul Greenberg, the founder & Managing Principal of The 56 Group, LLC, an advisory firm, focused on customer-facing strategic services, including CRM, customer experience and customer engagement strategies. He is also an author, considered a thought leader in CRM and often called “The Godfather of CRM” (that’s the industry’s name for him not his. His is “CRM Grandfather” because he’s OLD [His words, not mine 😂]). Paul is also one of the contributors to Punk XL. He joins me on the podcast to catch up and talk about the state of the CRM market, what’s exciting him about the customer technology market, Playaz Production Networks, and to get his view on the emergence of ChatGPT, amongst other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – We can’t be digital-first, we have to be customer-first – Interview with Sue Duris of M4 Comms – and is number 460 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Paul:

• Paul and Brent Leary have been running CRM Playaz for 14 years now.
• Core CRM technology from the standpoint of operational maturity works fine.
• It has issues (glitches, integration etc) but generally, the technology is pretty mature now.
• Now we are seeing them integrate with the back end now, and that’s actually kind of a big deal.
• CRM is beginning to evolve from a solution to a platform and ecosystem play.
• I have problems with anyone calling any technology CX because I don’t think you can enable how a customer feels with technology.
• ChiefMartec dot com, which maps the Martech landscape, has with 10,000+ apps unfortunately become a disservice to everything really.
• If you don’t view things from a Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) viewpoint and then pick a technology to achieve that, then you will be confused.
• What’s exciting right now is the fact that we do have actual working platforms that you can build on so that you can build according to your need.
• There’s still crap out there, and lots of it. But I’m seeing a lot of companies really build out some things that are excellent.
• Support Logic is doing some really interesting stuff analyzing customer service interactions and sentiment in real-time and then offering ‘best next action’ recommendations.
• Real-time analysis and guidance is only just emerging into the mainstream.
• However, some people/brands are just not there yet. They haven’t got to that point where they’re actually thinking forward or thinking in real-time in terms of the agent experience.
• Clarabridge (acquired by Qualtrics) was one of the first ones that could do sentiment analysis at scale in multiple languages. But, the trick wasn’t the languages but that they understood the cultures that were behind each of those languages.
• ChatGPT is being treated as a giant toy.
• It’s following a parallel to how social CRM developed, and when the use cases get established, it’ll become a tool.
• At that point, the level of impact it will have is huge.
• The real use cases where you can see general value as opposed to highly specific super narrow use cases have yet to be fully established.
• The problem is companies that commit to the idea of “we are here to support all our stakeholders” end up being “we are here to commit to support all our shareholders.”
• So, don’t make the claim if you can’t sustain it or support it.
• Zoho is one of those companies that make the claim and live by it. They were founded 27 years ago by Sridhar Vembu, and he said that he will never, as long as he is at the helm of Zoho, ever lay anyone off. And he’s literally stuck to that. They’re a billion-dollar company, and the most profitable company in India, with an operating margin of 28%.
• They operate a sustainable and holistic kind of business model, which includes farms, schools and hospitals.
• Big shout out to Zoho for hosting Paul and a bunch of other analysts on a recent trip to their headquarters.
• Paul’s latest venture, with long-time pal and collaborator Brent Leary, is Playaz Production Networks, an influencer-focused digital broadcasting network. that aims at both innovative content distribution & business humanization.
• It’s a response to the changing patterns of media consumption by millennials, Gen Z’ers and others.
• It’s also a highly experimental network, and the idea is to experiment with new forms of creation and distribution and then, of course, drive consumption.
• As people, we don’t need personalization, we need humanization.
• We are aiming to show that people are much more rounded, and rather than talking about just business stuff all day and night, we are also talking about other things like their interests, music and art and literature and food and so on.
• Business is still human. It’s built on relationships, and we get to know people who we spend time with. Through that, you understand them, and those relationships then last for a long time.
• The network then is an effort to shine a light on that and say, hey, look, you should talk to people about other things.

About Paul

Paul Greenberg is founder & Managing Principal of The 56 Group, LLC, an advisory firm, focused on customer-facing strategic services, including CRM, customer experience and customer engagement strategies.

His book, CRM at the Speed of Light now in its 4th edition, is in 9 languages and been called “the bible of the CRM industry”. It has been used by more than 70 universities as a primary text.

Currently, Paul sits on the Global Advisory Board of the SEAT Consortium as the only non-sports professional of a sports business professionals organization. Prior to this, Paul has been the EVP of the CRM Association, the Chairman of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management CRM Centre of Excellence Board of Advisors, a Board of Advisors member of the Baylor University MBA Program for CRM majors, & co-chairman of Rutgers University’s CRM Research Center. He is also an Executive Advisory Board member for Powerfluence.

Paul is considered a thought leader in CRM and often called “The Godfather of CRM.” He has been published in numerous industry and business publications over the years. He was elected to CRM magazine’s CRM Hall of Fame in 2010 – the first non-vendor related thought leader in its history. He wrote for 13 years on customer-facing matters for ZDNet and currently writes for MyCustomer.com. He has won dozens of industry awards over the years in CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service as an influencer and thought leader.

In 2019 he released a book on customer engagement entitled “The Commonwealth of Self-Interest: Business Success through Customer Engagement”.

Paul currently lives in Manassas, Virginia with his wife of more than 40 years and 6 cats – and to be entirely clear – is a HUGE New York Yankees fan.

Check out Playaz Production Networks and feel free to connect with Paul on LinkedIn here.

Image by Luisella Planeta LOVE PEACE 💛💙 from Pixabay