Hot Topics
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr. These social media sites are the most visited by high school and college students. It’s no surprise, then, to see more universities leveraging the sites as vehicles to respond to students’ questions and issues.
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By Mila D'Antonio
Posted on Jul 26, 2010 in Customer Service
Features
The reality of the sales world is that while customers still needs salespeople, they need them in different ways than they used to. Sales strategy must change. Customers don’t want salespeople to sell them a product. They want them to solve a problem. In order to do this effectively, sales organizations need to be more customer-focused at every point in the sales cycle. Yet for many companies, old habits are hard to break. Continue Reading »
By Elizabeth Glagowski
Posted on Jul 26, 2010 in Sales Effectiveness
Expert Insight
In both good times and bad, most C-level executives typically focus on meeting quarterly earnings targets. It’s easy to understand why: Their companies’ stock performance is graded in large part on their ability to meet earnings-per-share (EPS) estimates crafted by Wall Street analysts. Meanwhile, compensation for many senior executives is heavily weighted toward current-period stock performance. Continue Reading »
By Don Peppers
Posted on Jul 26, 2010 in Customer Experience
Case Studies
“Evolution is not a force, but a process,” 19th century British journalist John Morley once said. The quote rings true at U.K.–based International Hotels Group (IHG), which operates seven global hospitality brands, including Holiday Inn and the InterContinental. Over the past year the company has been busily evolving its marketing structure to align with the way customers conduct business today. Continue Reading »
By Mila D'Antonio
Posted on Jul 12, 2010 in Marketing
Best Practices
Most companies today, 62 percent according to Forrester Research, have a voice of the customer (VOC) program. The real opportunity, however, is adopting a more sophisticated approach to enterprise customer feedback—one that helps translates the customer voice into action.
American Express, CDW, and Dell are three companies doing just that. In fact, these firms are so adept at VOC, they were selected as the winners of the Forrester Research 2010 Voice of the Customer Awards. Judging was based on five criteria: clarity of approach, business results, customer experience results, innovation, and lessons learned (i.e., the ability for other firms to learn from their approach). According to Andrew McInnes, an analyst in Forrester’s customer experience practice, the winning companies stood out for their outstanding ability to tie results directly to their customer feedback efforts, as well as for their innovative VOC practices.
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By Kaitlin O'Brien
Posted on Jul 12, 2010 in Customer Experience
Hot Topics
As mobile grows as a valuable customer interaction channel, some marketers are beginning to explore ways to connect to customers in a hyperlocal way. Social location sharing (SLS) websites like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, and Loopt, for example, are designed to allow users to “announce” where they are via mobile or gain access to information based on their mobile phone’s location. These sites facilitate a real-time, one-to-one connection among consumers, and have started inviting marketers to the party. Continue Reading »
By Elizabeth Glagowski
Posted on Jul 06, 2010 in Marketing
An often overlooked but highly effective way to improve business is to align sales compensation with customer value. In fact, the most effective compensation approach is one that creates the greatest shareholder value by encouraging the right actions from the sales teams.
According to Yücel Ersöz, a partner at Peppers & Rogers Group, aligning sales compensation directly to customer value fits virtually any company. “If the company wants to create a positive economic value add…if it wants to meet and exceed shareholder expectations, this is possible only if costs attributable to a customer are in line with the value of the customer,” Ersöz says. [This approach] is straightforward and aligns everybody in the same direction: creating shareholder value.”
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By Mila D'Antonio
Posted on Jul 06, 2010 in Sales Effectiveness
The advent of new customer touchpoints like social media, live chat, and online communities has amplified the voice of the customer. Instead of only providing structured feedback that fits neatly into surveys and spreadsheets, customers now share their thoughts and feelings about their customer experiences in a variety of open forums. The ability to marry this new unstructured data with traditional structured data allows companies to listen and act on the voice of the customer in a more meaningful way. Continue Reading »
By Elizabeth Glagowski
Posted on Jul 19, 2010 in Data Analytics
Expert Insight
Would you like some outstanding service with your fries? The Trefz Corp. uses employee engagement to ensure that a tasty customer experience is always on the menu at its McDonald’s restaurants. Continue Reading »
By Mila D'Antonio
Posted on Jul 19, 2010 in Customer Experience