1to1 Media

Get Invited Into Your Customer’s Network

Book Excerpt: Deliver information and offers that customers deem valuable and they’ll welcome you into their inner circle.

Averting Online Customer Service Backlash

Attention marketing practitioners: Your customers may be ahead of you when pursuing the best ways to get a response from your company’s customer service operation. And, it’s a tactic that you should be monitoring closely. In increasing numbers, customers are taking their frustrations with products and services to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as they realize these social media networks are prompting more rapid attention and responses than dialing into a contact center and speaking with a live agent.

Face to Face: Human Nature on Steroids

As important as our social nature is, within just the past few years technology has injected it with steroids. We are being transformed into a dynamic and robust network of electronically connected people in a worldwide, always-on festival of creating and sharing, collaborating, editing, publishing, uploading, entertaining, critiquing, commenting, helping, learning, and having fun. This has immense implication for how we make technological progress, because progress owes much more to our social nature than to our knowledge or intelligence, per se.

Face to Face: Human Nature on Steroids

The Evolution of Customer Loyalty

As popular as loyalty programs are, they alone are not enough to ensure customer loyalty. Over the past two years, as companies face new challenges involving transparency from social media, inconsistency in delivering customer experiences across channels, and a price-focused economy, customer loyalty has become increasingly tenuous.

Consumers Are Ready for M-Commerce. Are you?

Just as online shopping lured consumers away from brick-and-mortar stores and to the web, the mobile revolution is attracting shoppers to the convenience of buying products via their iPhones, Blackberries, Androids, and a host of other mobile devices.

Reporter's Notebook: Sprint’s Service Goes Proactive

Proactive customer outreach through the mobile channel is becoming more popular as customers interact more and more via their mobile phones. Companies like Sprint are taking advantage of the one-to-one benefits of a mobile interaction with customers.

Putting Digital Data to Work

A smart data strategy is the key to today’s successful direct marketing efforts. It’s necessary in the planning of every campaign and throughout the campaign lifecycle, since results are continually evaluated, interpreted, and acted on. This cycle of learning is critical for addressing two clear objectives: improving business results (the best return) and increasing knowledge (important new insights). Only through continuous learning can subsequent campaigns build upon existing success to improve results.

Putting Digital Data to Work

Rationalizing the Digital Media Budget

Today, digital campaigns are just as important as traditional marketing tactics, and, at many companies, digital media spending may soon exceed the funds allocated towards some traditional media campaigns. In fact, at a number of companies we are starting to see digital media not only delivery a high ROI, but also begin to drive a significant percentage of sales. In addition to digital media working very well for companies, there is a synergistic benefit from executing traditional and digital campaigns in an integrated manner.

Social CRM Is the Next Customer Listening Post

There’s a paradigm shift taking place with the way businesses think about CRM—essentially the concurrent focus on effective technology and on the customers themselves. If you want to build meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers, incorporating social media into your CRM strategy is critical. For global brands, the ability to “listen” to customers as they walk through the “attract, convert, and retain” processes will provide invaluable feedback on the resonance of their brand and the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Home Agents, Happier Customers?

In the call center world, it’s an axiom that happy customer service representatives create happy customers. Now the steady spread of the work-from-home agent model is raising an intriguing new question: Do home agents create happier customers – because they are reportedly happier themselves -- than those in brick-and-mortar facilities?

Improving Partner Collaboration Using Online Channels

Customers have unprecedented ability to research products before committing to buy, and the barriers between supplier and end-user are lower than ever before. Yet channel partners are still enormously important to many companies’ sales efforts. With the right tools and up-to-date knowledge, an informed channel partner can close more—and higher value—deals by becoming a trustworthy consultant.

Swedbank Strengthens Position with SME Customers Via Multiple Delivery Channels

Multichannel banking is no longer an expected service only among consumers. Business customers now expect it, too. Swedbank created a strategy to leverage alternative delivery channels for its small business customers.

Understanding and Appealing to the Consumer Brain

Millions of people in our global economy have jobs that depend, in one capacity or another, on communicating with and appealing to human brains. A trillion dollars is spent worldwide on this effort every year. Yet few engaged in that process truly understand how our brains really work—what is attractive to them, how they decide what they like and don’t like, and how they decide to buy or not buy the daunting variety of products and services presented for their consideration every day.

Five Strategic Success Factors for Linking Customer-Focused Tools

While integrating CRM and UC is ideal for cultivating an existing customer base, adding search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities and analytics goes a step further by helping companies transform prospects into clients. More important, when applied appropriately, it can provide a real time, 360-degree view of the business.

Five Strategic Success Factors for Linking Customer-Focused Tools

Building a Commonality of Purpose Around Customer Data

It’s critical for companies to share data among departments to get a holistic view of the customer and operations. But before taking that step, there must be a consensus among the departments involved about definitions, metrics, and in many cases, budget allocation.

Charter Embraces Customers’ Demand for Mobile

Charter Communications is on a mission to provide more value to its customers. One way the cable behemoth is doing this is to interact with customers in their preferred channel. Increasingly, that means using mobile as a key touchpoint. Jim Gallagher, director of online and e-commerce at Charter, says that the company now supports iPhone and Blackberry, and has launched a mobile-friendly website.

Voice of the Customer Isn’t All Talk

Many organizations ask customers for their feedback. CDW is one of the few that actually takes action on what it learns. Doing so has bolstered customer loyalty, increased satisfaction, and added hundreds of millions in revenue in 2009 alone.

Standing out in a 24/7 Marketing Environment

In a world where mergers are prevalent, businesses expand divisions, and franchises continue to multiply, corporations are being required to seek solutions to improve their communication, gain control of their marketing supply chain, and reduce costs. Advancing presence and brand impact within this current retail environment involves ensuring a consistent image of the brand is being portrayed across multiple channels and geographies. While catering to the needs of local salespeople is important, there is always the risk of compromising a brand companies have spent millions of dollars preserving, as well as potentially putting a company in legal jeopardy.

Wi-Fi, Eye-Spy and the Unintended Consequences of New Technology

Imagine taking a trip cross country or across the globe, only to lose your camera or have it stolen miles from home. Once the usual channels of recovery are exhausted, you'd probably never expect to hear about it again. Not so for privacy professional Fran Maier of TRUSTe, who received an unexpected message after the disappearance of her camera in Germany announcing her new pictures were available online.

Customer Value Measurement and Optimization

The customer portfolio is a firm’s most important asset, yet most companies don’t have an effective way of measuring the value of their customers. Many marketing executives see the need for measuring customer value but usually give up on the idea because of the operational and organizational challenges associated with creating a value metric with universal buy-in across the enterprise. Others waste months debating how to come up with a perfect statistical methodology that will enable them to create a customer value score.

Making the Most of your Email Marketing

In today’s marketing landscape, the power of email is undeniable. It is a quick and effective way to reach a large audience, it is a green alternative to traditional direct mail, and it’s free… seemingly. Although there is no fiscal cost associated with pressing “send,” email campaigns can be risky territory if they are not approached smartly. Often, marketers overuse the email channel without giving it a second thought. If there’s no cost to the company, why not email the entire customer base with every offer, right? Wrong.

McDonald's Franchise Shares Employee Engagement Secret Sauce

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. The Bridgeport, CT-based company, which operates 43 McDonald's restaurants throughout New York and Connecticut, recently received the highest honor franchisees can receive from McDonald's: the coveted Golden Arch Award. The award, given to only 1 percent of McDonald's owners worldwide, is presented once every two years to restaurants that perform exceptionally well.

Experts Sound Off About Beating Customer Survey Fatigue

Many consumers are getting tired of constantly being asked to provide feedback, ratings, or other comments. Consumer survey fatigue is growing. So how can marketers gather rich customer insight without annoying their customers? Industry insiders provide their advice.

The Dallas Cowboys Create a New Service Playbook

The NFL saw its third largest stadium open last year when the Dallas Cowboys debuted Cowboys Stadium—a $1.3 billion, 80,000 seat facility. With a state-of-the-art stadium, fans will expect service to match.

The Engaged User: Bridging Your Website and Social Networks

Incorporating social media into marketing strategy is becoming standard practice, but many organizations still struggle with how to make the most of opportunities social media creates. It has been well documented that just having a Facebook page or sending the occasional tweet are not enough to have a significant, sustainable impact on business results. The good news is that there are multiple ways to take advantage of the social media space, and one of the most effective places to start is actually from your own website.

Business Life in the Changing World

Few companies are aware that employees, candidates, and alumni are the core element of their marketing plans, the coefficient of brand value, and their reputation warriors. Companies working to overcome today’s challenges should rethink classical techniques of human resource management like performance management, career planning, and balanced score cards.

How to Change Your CEO's Perception of the Channel to Grow Your Bottom Line

In every sector of the market, the most successful companies are those that make it a priority to effectively leverage their multichannel go-to-market strategy. Ironically, many CEOs still lack understanding of the crucial role that the vice president of channel sales can play within the organization.

Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Data Integration

As companies increasingly look to integrate customer data and create centralized systems, they realize technology alone is not the answer. A combined effort to align, people, processes, and technology is required. In fact, one of the biggest barriers to breaking down silos of internal information is company culture. Wolters Kluwer and Belgacom share how they overcame cultural challenges when integrating data across the enterprise.

Overcoming Cultural Barriers to Data Integration

White Glove Service Is the Hot New Retention Strategy

With customer loyalty on the wane today, many organizations are leveraging concierge-type service to retain high-value customers and create greater profitability.

Blindsided by Change

Every marketer’s goal is to send relevant and engaging content to customers. But consumer buying behavior over the past five years has fundamentally altered, and it is still evolving so quickly that the rules of consumer engagement are forever changed. The biggest difference? Customers are in the driver’s seat now, displacing the marketer who has a preconceived, static marketing strategy.

Use the “Less Is More” Rule to Get to the Inbox

A full 90 percent of the billions of emails ISPs receive is categorized as spam and never makes it to the inbox. Unfortunately, much of the email that is blocked or diverted to the spam folder is sent by “legitimate” senders, whose focus on maximizing list size leads to unengaged subscribers and spam complaints. Reaching the inbox is essential to driving results from email, but marketers must realize that when it comes to optimizing email deliverability, less is more.

Skip Hub-and-Spoke: Go Virtual

Home-based agents can have a significant impact on delivering a higher level of quality, flexibility, and cost savings for a company’s customer contact initiatives. That explains why a growing number of organizations are considering supplementing their brick-and-mortar call centers with a remote agent workforce. But how they go about doing that—whether through a hub-and-spoke model or via a truly virtual implementation—will determine how much of the promised value they can reap from the effort.

Celtics Score Customer Engagement With Social Media

Despite losing a nail-biter in game seven of the NBA finals this season, the Boston Celtics have reason to celebrate. The team’s social media efforts have prompted a jump in fan participation and resulting customer insight.

Face to Face: Develop, Don’t Destroy, Customer Value

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.

Face to Face: Develop, Don’t Destroy, Customer Value

Higher Education Gets Social for Service

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.

The Customer-Focused Sales Cycle

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.

The Secret to Winning in Today’s Marketplace

Customer centricity is the most often heard CRM buzzword these days and almost every other CRM concept, ranging from customer engagement to customer experience management (CEM) to customer profitability and customer value, is linked to it.

Social Media Membership Is Not Participation

“Social media are powerful tools for socializing customer relationships, but they are not intended to be exclusively outbound communications vehicles,” writes Denis Pombriant in Hello, Ladies! Dispatches From the Social CRM Frontier. “Much can be gained from listening to customers via the several inbound technologies under the social umbrella.” In this excerpt from Hello, Ladies!, Pombriant explains that it’s essential to distinguish between members and participants of online communities when creating an interaction strategy.

Autodesk Formalizes Its Social Media Strategy

Many companies are using social media, but few have mastered incorporating it into daily business. Engineering software provider Autodesk decided to change its corporate culture and hierarchy to make social media an engrained part of each business unit.

Delivering, Quite Literally, the Brand Promise

Consumers are increasingly agnostic as to whether they buy their goods in-store, over the phone, or online. Often the only “human” experience a shopper has with a company’s brand is in the product delivery. But here’s the rub: Mobile and ubiquitous communications mean that customers are now constantly moving targets, and they expect service and delivery to accommodate their schedules. They want a text or a voicemail when a delivery or service appointment is 30 minutes away NOT a delivery window of between four to seven hours. Product and service delivery has not typically been geared around this thinking. It needs to be.

Employee Engagement Is a Core Ingredient for Stellar Customer Service

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.

Turning Up the Voice of the Customer

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.

Want Engaged Customers? Stop Obsessing About the Sale

Ally Bank has been running ads that show a “typical bank” offering pony rides, toy trucks, and ice cream to new kids, but it takes those same things away from kids that become customers. Not only are the ads cute, but they also represent an unfortunate reality: companies don’t treat customers as well as they treat prospects. And the problem is exacerbated when you look at the experience of new customers.

Preparing Your Website for the Holidays

Over the past few years, as overall retail sales (in-store and online) have witnessed only tepid growth, online sales have risen dramatically and consistently. Understanding the critical role the Web can play in compensating for slower in-store sales, retailers must ensure highly satisfying Web experiences that are fast, reliable, and user-friendly—especially for their key customer segments.

Create a Surefire Sales Success Plan

“The sooner you take responsibility for your success, the quicker you will change the arc of your potential, and achieve more than you ever thought possible,” writes Robert Early Johnsonin Kick Your Own Ass: The Will, Skill, and Drill of Selling More Than You Thought Possible. In this excerpt from Kick Your Own Ass, Johnson offers five strategies to achieve your desired sales targets, no matter how sizeable they might seem.

An Employees-First Approach Delivers the Best Service Results

When a young entrepreneur, Tony Hsieh, started an online shoe company in 1999, he strived to find call center representatives who were passionate about delivering quality customer service experiences. He so believed in his philosophy of empowering agents and finding employees who had the right cultural fit, that he offered new customer service agents $2,000 to leave the company after an initial training period if they thought they didn’t mesh with the company’s culture.

IHG’s Ambitious Marketing Makeover

“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.

Using Voice of the Customer to Create Customer Experience Success

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.

Redefining Employee Flexibility

In the face of tough economic conditions, organizations are struggling to reconcile shrinking margins with increasing customer expectations. Retailers, in particular, are looking for every competitive advantage that will help them retain their current customers and attract new ones. Given that a retailer’s greatest asset—as well as its largest controllable expense—is its workforce, retailers who successfully control labor costs while delivering an exceptional customer experience will likely thrive even in these difficult times.

Mobile Marketing—It’s a Whole New World

In spite of the challenges that are inherent in anything new, the fun part of mobile marketing is the opportunities it presents. Laptops have now become “handtops” giving marketers the ability to engage consumers in ways that haven’t been done before.

It's Time to Track and Analyze the Voice of the Customer. Now What?

With the continual onslaught of information published and shared online, businesses are facing numerous challenges when it comes to analyzing and reporting on all the content by customers. Among those challenges is what type of reputation management or social media monitoring solution to use. There are four basic questions to ask yourself before diving into a text analytics solution to help you decipher, understand, and act on all the information you’re gathering.

IVR: A Foretold Death?

All technology serves a purpose; and most technology has a lifecycle that includes a beginning, a peak, and then a decline. Like other technologies, interactive voice response systems (IVRs) are no exception. Beginning in the 1970s IVRs were useful because companies needed a cost-effective way to automate simple services on the most ubiquitous communication network of the time: the telephone. But alles hat ein ende…everything has an end.

Marketers, Beware the Hype of the iPad

With more than three million units sold over the course of just 80 days, the iPad continues to change the game for those in the marketing and mobile spaces alike. Amid the excitement and Apple’s soaring sales, questions have started swirling around marketers’ abilities to capitalize on this hot new device – and the ways in which they can interact with potential customers better.

Healthcare Insider Shares Customer Strategy

Some healthcare management providers such as Cigna are discovering that customer trust is at the heart of the healthcare industry's transformation. Cigna Customer Experience Officer Ingrid Lindberg shares some of the company's approaches to developing tighter relationships and trust with customers.

Connecting the Dots Between Sales Compensation and Customers

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.”

Discovery’s TLC Channel Sets Its Sights on Location Marketing

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.

Financial Services Miss Social Media Opportunities With B2B Clients

Financial services firms are among the many organizations using social media to interact with their B2C customers. However, according to the recent Forrester Research report "Building Successful B2B Financial Services Social Marketing Programs," many large financial firms have neglected social media marketing as a way to reach their business customers.

A Look at Customer Strategy: Does Size Count?

Research reveals that customer centricity programs still have limited bottom-line influence on the business strategies of small and medium size organizations—but the desire is there.

Co-creation Builds Loyalty and Profitability

PhotoBox’s customer obsession was born from the poor customer reaction to its initial website redesign in early 2008. After that experience, the company made a priority of collecting and acting on customer feedback. “One of the key things the website launch taught us was to be less assumptive about what customers want and to actually ask them,” says Renaud Besnard, operations director. As a result, the company created the PhotoBox Insiders programs.

Getting Emotional About Sentiment Analysis

Customers are irrational. They make purchase decisions impulsively, and one poor customer service interaction may ignite their passion to bad-mouth a company to everyone they know. Marketers are eager to tap into these emotions to learn not only the motivations behind what customers are saying, but in what context and why. Companies are looking to sentiment analysis to gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ opinions and emotions.

Long-Term Financial Strength Comes From Enabling Customers’ Future

When a new market opens, some companies will rush in with short-term growth strategies no matter the product or service on offer. This was not the case with Yapi Kredi Emeklilik. The Turkish financial services company, which offers private pension plans and insurance products, knows its customers are planning for their future. So when it first entered the private pension market, the company decided to focus on its customers’ long-term needs and value, from acquisition to retention.

Long-Term Financial Strength Comes From Enabling Customers’ Future

One Strategy, Double Results

It is almost trite today to suggest that satisfying customers is easier when you start by satisfying employees. Or that customer loyalty and employee loyalty tend to go together. Or that customer engagement and employee engagement work hand-in-hand. Nevertheless, every day brings more evidence of this proposition, and the e-social revolution now provides great opportunities to engage your employees while in the process of engaging your customers.

One Strategy, Double Results

PhotoBox's Customer Obsession Drives Double-Digit Growth

Photography is a very personal endeavor, capturing memories or creating artistic representations of everyday life. Customers want a brand they can trust to work with their treasured photos. Realizing this, PhotoBox made a commitment to customers to deliver an exceptional experience and to offer the products and services most important to them. Renaud Besnard, operations director, goes so far as to say the company is "customer-obsessed."

Technology Can Help Us Fix the World Economy

How ironic that even as new technologies drive everything in business to become smaller, faster, and cheaper, the regulatory apparatus of most governments is becoming bigger, slower, and more expensive. Maybe the time has come to drag governments and their policies into the 21st century with the rest of us, and to use the technology to help stabilize and manage the world economy.

Technology Can Help Us Fix the World Economy

The Building Blocks for Optimizing Marketing Investments

Mastering the five essential elements of marketing optimization will help to improve return on marketing investment and increase long-term customer equity.

The Gains and Pains of Unexpected Rapid Growth

The World Cup is big business for many companies, particularly Nedjma, a mobile phone operator in Algeria. Circumstances surrounding Algeria’s World Cup journey led to 2 million new subscribers for Nedjma in six weeks. CEO Joseph Ged discusses how the company found itself in the situation, as well as his strategy to retain these new customers over the long term.

The Human Element of Retention

As important as data and segmentation are to Yapi Kredi Emeklilik’s customer strategy transformation, employee training is also crucial to gaining one-to-one customer relationships.

The Human Element of Retention

As important as data and segmentation are to Yapi Kredi Emeklilik’s customer strategy transformation, employee training is also crucial to gaining one-to-one customer relationships.

The Real Cost of Customer Experience

Is it costly to deliver an outstanding customer experience? Of course it is. But perhaps the more important question is, what is the cost of delivering a subpar customer experience?

What If Customer Experience Had No ROI?

Three essential issues to consider so customer experience improvements deliver a real return. I’m often asked the question: “What’s the ROI of customer experience?” To some degree, that’s a silly question. It’s like asking what’s the ROI of technology for Google, products for Best Buy, movies for NetFlix, or cars for Hertz. ?Customer experience is an integral component of every organization that has customers. Think of it this way, what would happen to the financial health of your company if you just stopped interacting with your customers?

Integrating Pixel and Paper for Maximum Multichannel Magic

I keep hearing from marketing managers that all you need is a good email marketing campaign—no need to spend money on the print and postage of a direct mail campaign or spend the money to integrate TransPromo communication techniques. While email and other web-based marketing campaigns can be inexpensive, they often fail to hit their intended targets because we’ve all become incredibly adept at using spam filters. Some tell me that a well-designed social media campaign is a valid replacement for most other types of marketing in our increasingly wired world. But the network-based nature of social media limits the reach of most social media campaigns, which rely on networks that may not include the people you are trying to target.

Customer Connections Drive Profitability

Sometime it takes a major shakeup to rethink operations. In the case of Global Crossing, a post-bankruptcy restructuring prompted the telecom company’s leadership to realize that regaining profitability meant increasing its emphasis on getting closer to its customers. Over the past four years the company has been reorganizing around the strategy of building long-term mutual value for its customers and itself. Changes included the creation of customer-facing units that assist sales, service, access management, and support; the integration of the seven touchpoints within Global Crossing’s customer lifecycle (administering quotes, ordering, delivery, billing and payment, service assurance, inventory management, and account servicing); and an internal reorganization, which shifted the responsibility for customer experience to IT rather than having it be a standalone function. Here, Anthony Christie, chief technology and information officer at Global Crossing, discusses the reorganization and how his new role as CTIO helps the company connect every aspect of the business (internally and externally) back to customer experience.

Harnessing the Power of Customer Intelligence

SimplexGrinnell raised its net customer advocacy score by 34 percent over three years in large part by doing one thing exceptionally well: acting on customer intelligence. The provider of fire and life-safety solutions captures and reports on customer insight across the company, responds to customer experience issues, and measures the results. Here, Karl Sharicz, manager of customer intelligence at SimplexGrinnell, discusses the challenges that led to the deployment of an enterprise customer feedback program, the processes in place to enable the insight, and the company’s plans to grow the strategy.

The 4 Steps to Becoming a Customer-Centric Airline

Top-tier companies in all industries are finding that technology and pervasive information in the hands of customers is changing the game, making it increasingly difficult to rely on brand image, market presence, or scale. What will distinguish the leaders of the future will be outstanding customer service.

Why Do Customers Buy?

In this excerpt from Put the Win Back in Your Sales, Dan Kreutzer discuss the importance of understanding why people buy, and how doing so helps customers through that buying process.

Being Smart About Smartphone Customer Strategy

The growing adoption of smartphones by consumers is creating additional opportunities for marketers to connect with prospects. SpeechCycle Chairman and CEO Zor Gorelov discusses some best practices for utilizing so-called rich phone applications to engage with customers and enrich their interactions.

Your Best Salesperson is a Robot

On the web you can break customers into three categories: those that will never buy, those that are going to buy, and those who would buy if you could interact with them more. Forget about the first two groups, as they can’t or don’t need to be sold. However, that last group is ripe to buy your product – you just need to interact with them. They need to hear more about how your products and services relate to them. They have questions. They have concerns. And they want to know more. These are the people who you can reach through a virtual agent.

Linking Customer Experience to Business Outcomes

Whenever customers have an experience with a brand, they create current-period, short-term value by buying the product, as well as long-term value, because the experience itself makes them more or less likely to do business with the brand in the future.

Chat-Assisted Sales

Nearly one in five online consumers in the United States has used chat for customer service over the past year, according to Forrester Research. While chat serves as a powerful channel in which to offer service to customers online, companies are finding that chat can also act as a compelling sales tool, with conversion rates and average order values increasing when activated during the purchase process.

Creating a Social CRM Experience

Connecting with customers and prospects online is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today. Companies are adopting social CRM strategies to help conquer this challenge. They’re using social CRM to guide and support how they communicate with customers and prospects online and to better understand their needs and expectations. While CRM technologies help organizations access customer data, social CRM helps companies participate in online customer conversations based on that CRM data. In this podcast, Michael DiLorenzo of the National Hockey League and Augie Ray from Forrester Research describe successful social CRM initiatives.

Integrating a Niche Network into Your Social Media Mix

The best practices of using general social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter for customer engagement have been extensively explored. However, the use of private or “niche networks” – private networks that resemble Facebook in features and functionality but center around a specific theme – is largely considered new territory.

Marketing is in the Midst of a Revolutionary Change

The business function of marketing is in the midst of amazing change. As marketers we are faced with a major dilemma: Drive change or become irrelevant. Old practices and processes just aren’t enough anymore. Pressure to deliver ROI, leverage and optimize new social media channels, and at the same time, integrate our departments, our data, and our channels – all in the face of shrinking budgets and a lagging economy – have forced marketers to reinvent their brands and their roles as marketers.

Prescribing an Updated Drugstore Shopping Experience

Here’s a customer-experience pop quiz: What does it take to keep your customers engaged? a) a refreshed, updated look; b) unique brand offerings; c) better customer service; or d) an emotional connection. For three major chain drugstores, the answer appears to be: e) all of the above. CVS/pharmacy, Duane Reade, and Walgreens have all made changes in recent years that are enhancing the customer experience and bringing “one-stop shopping” to a new level for healthcare.

The Bottom-Line Benefits of Behavioral Targeting

When it comes to behavioral targeting, Amazon changed the game. Its recommendation engine set the standard for e-commerce while raising the bar on customer expectations for cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Other B2C companies followed, and now many B2B businesses have caught up, employing lead scoring and nurturing efforts based on visitor behavior.

10 Ways to Reach Top Decision-Makers at Trade Shows

Here are 10 strategies for reaching the select group of high-level decision makers that are essential to building your business:

Reporter’s Notebook: Tech Marketing Priorities for 2010

Technology marketers are tasked with many initiatives, but a new survey says that their top priority for 2010 is to find new customers. According to a recent survey from Unisfair entitled "The Future of Tech Marketing," 68 percent of the 500 technology marketers surveyed consider lead generation to be their top marketing priority. Brand awareness and customer retention are tied for second place at 16 percent.

Healthcare Reform: A New Era of Customer Experience for Insurers

Healthcare providers face a daunting three-year transformation to a new healthcare system while developing new ways to win the hearts of the American public, one consumer at a time.

The Future of CRM: Cloud, On Premise, or Hybrid?

For many companies that are considering or already rely on customer relationship management (CRM) technology for greater business efficiencies, improved marketing campaigns, and stronger client relationships, the decision to invest in a cloud computing strategy is still a bit foggy.

Document Management’s Surprising Customer-Centric Benefit

The hype surrounding new technologies like social media and mobile seems to have pushed other traditional customer touchpoints to the background. So while old-school communications like direct mail and file processing may not grab headlines, it is a serious business for many companies. And, increasingly, companies are incorporating new document management and direct strategies to improve not only efficiencies, but the customer experience as well.

The Mechanics of Innovation

Innovation is about ideas. But they can't live in a vacuum. Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group says that when ideas mix with others, particularly from other disciplines, the results can drive innovation forward. Companies that encourage a culture of cross-functional brainstorming and employee empowerment are the ones that thrive as an environment conducive to innovation.

Nurture Your Drip Marketing Campaigns

As a marketer, staying in front of your customers and prospects should be a top priority. You likely have a series of campaigns intended to touch your intended audience on a regular basis – everything from outbound telemarketing programs to inbound marketing activities.

Customer Insight Powers Nokia’s Innovation

“Unlike its rivals, Nokia has had to struggle for much that most multinational companies take for granted,” writes Dan Steinbock in Winning Across Global Markets. “Indeed, it is the tremendous perseverance of the Nokians, both individually and in teams, that has motivated the company to win against all odds. In this excerpt from Winning Across Global Markets, Steinbock explains how listening to customers is an essential part of that winning strategy.

Dynamic Multichannel Marketing Puts the Focus on the Customer

We can all admit it. Customer-centricity is equal parts necessary and scary. We all know why it is necessary. The customer is an individual, one who is evolving in how he or she consumes media and experiences a brand. It is an inescapable truth for modern marketers. But the concept is also scary. It forces marketers to contemplate substantial change in how email, mobile, and Web-based communications – collectively known as direct digital marketing – are approached.

Customer Service Goes Mobile

Traditional customer interaction channels are often reactive in nature. Whether customers have an inquiry or require service, customers must initiate contact. Organizations that adopt a proactive service approach via the mobile channel can reach out to customers in real time, before they call or email the company.

Five Ways to Improve Customer Engagement on Your Website

Customers come to websites with high levels of expectation, and low levels of patience. They now expect to be immediately drawn into engaging, interactive content when they visit a website, and if they don’t find it, they leave promptly. Recent studies have shown that more than 70 percent of site visitors will leave a site within one to two minutes if they don't find the products they're looking for, 36 percent of which won’t ever bother returning to that site. Here are the top five ways to build a website that succeeds in engaging customers

Reporter’s Notebook: Twitter Leads in Business Social Media Use

A joint survey by MoreVisibility, PitchEngine, and Help a Reporter Out (HARO) finds that social media programs are increasingly becoming an integral part of business and that many firms are expanding their efforts.

New Survey Shows Opportunity for Customer Experience Improvements

Today there’s considerably more talk than action when it comes to improving the customer experience. But the results of a new Temkin Group survey show that many companies do have a strong desire to improve their customer experience.

Corporate Politics and the Hierarchy of Corporate Success

Abraham Maslow, in his groundbreaking hierarchy of needs, wrote that human’s basic physiological need for survival is food, water, shelter, and clothing. What are the basic physiological needs for survival in corporations?

Creating a Privacy Game Plan for Your Social Media Strategy

The rise of social networks as a marketplace is arguably one of the most important economic phenomena of recent years. Companies seeking to exploit these new opportunities will need a privacy game plan, however, to meet customer and regulator expectations. You need not look further than the current Facebook backlash to see the negative consequences when you don't think of privacy issues.

Privacy in the Online Advertising Arena

If everyone in the online advertising arena hasn't been paying attention to the privacy issues associated with their business, there is reason to assume they soon will be. Recent events have commanded much attention.

Creating Customer-Focused Sales Teams

Most companies today still organize their sales teams by geography or product. Yet, as customer expectations grow, customer relationships in sales will become more important—as will organizing the sales force around customers. Companies with sales teams designed around customer needs may gain an edge in the marketplace. What are the opportunities and challenges of such a customer-centric sales model?

Face to Face: Trustworthy Businesses Will Take Over the World

The increasingly intense competitive struggle among Amazon, Google, and Apple, over the marketing of e-books is a great example of the power of trustability when it comes to business. These three giants of the digital industry – three companies at the very frontier of digital commerce – have each based their business success on earning and keeping the trust of their customers.

Face to Face: Trustworthy Businesses Will Take Over the World

Harnessing the Power of Digital Customer Data

Mining the vast data available in the digital world offers an unprecedented opportunity to identify and understand the commercial intent of consumers. In this environment, however, a “one-size-fits-all” database marketing solution rarely meets the needs of diverse organizations that must extract maximum value from customers.

Getting All the Rights Right

For decades, marketers have sought marketing’s holy grail of delivering the right message to the right person in the right medium at the right time. The reality in today’s marketing world is that in spite of all the chatter few, if any, consistently deliver on that premise. The reason is simple: Getting all the rights right is challenging. In fact, without a systems-based approach to marketing, it’s virtually impossible.

Linking Marketing and the Contact Center

Historically, the contact center function has been the poor relative to marketing, enjoying a less strategic position in a company’s arsenal. The two are often siloed from one another, which is to the detriment of both parties in terms of brand perception and delivery of a positive customer experience.

Winning Marketing Strategies in Turbulent Times

Unrelenting budget and revenue pressures are forcing CMOs to work harder than ever to maximize their marketing strategies. Aprimo CMO Lisa Arthur offers her recommendations on effective ways for marketers to succeed in a challenging environment.

QVC UK Shops Around for Customer Feedback

Well known for its shopping channel, QVC also boasts a robust Web presence. Its UK website, for example, gets 3.5 million monthly sessions, according to Gina Deeble, head of interactive content, who discussed the company’s online feedback strategy during the Gartner CRM Summit UK. The company looks for ways to continually improve its customer interaction online, to deepen engagement and drive sales.

Search Engine Marketing Goes Mainstream

Companies eager to attract the right customers online are increasingly turning to search engine marketing. As a result, search engine marketing is growing and becoming a mainstream marketing strategy.

Winning Customers Against All Odds

Next month eyes will be on the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa. Sports fans, advertisers, and corporate sponsors all have a stake in the games. Even before the matches get underway, Algeria’s Nedjma mobile phone company is working to keep up with unexpected growth based in part on its sponsorship – it won 2 million new customers in the span of six weeks. CEO Joseph Ged discusses how the company found itself in the situation, as well as his strategy to retain these new customers over the long term.

The Business Case for Proactive Notifications

One of the hot growth areas in customer care today is to contact customers before they call companies. For decades companies have focused much of their strategizing on ways to squeeze related costs out of their budgets and they still spend at least $1 per minute to field each inbound call to the contact center. Automated outbound notifications cost as little as thirty cents per notification, which means the savings opportunity is significant. This is just one of the reasons so many companies are implementing automated proactive notification technology.

Marketing as Customer Service

Customer service is an aspect of business that has the highest exposure to existing customers. It is these customers whose experience propagates through word of mouth and social media. The realization that customers’ perception is directly related to their experience gives rise to a marketing vision to engage and retain the customer using marketing as a service.

Marketing as Customer Service

Lip Service or Real Change?

“Satisfying customers is a means to an end,” writes Richard D. Hanks in Delivering and Measuring Customer Service: This Isn’t Rocket Surgery, 2nd Edition. “With the appropriate management actions…satisfied customers can become loyal customers—and profits increase.” In the excerpt from Delivering and Measuring Customer Service, Hanks examines how operational improvements based on customer feedback can deliver improved business performance:

Is Your Website Impacting Your Customer Relationships?

Your Web site is your organization’s “front door” to your customers. A poorly performing Web site that is slow or unreliable can drive away customers and severely hurt your bottom line. The current homepage availability average is 100 percent – not bad, right? Now consider that a one-second delay in response time can reduce conversions by 7 percent; and that the average online shopper waits a scant four seconds before going to a competitor’s site.

Are You a Data Rock Star?

Data management is becoming increasingly important as companies collect more customer data than ever and integrate it with other data across the organization. They want to act on customer insight and business intelligence to build relationships, improve operations, and drive growth. This requires a special person to own or manage it, with skills that go above and beyond the typical data manager. What does this “data rock star” look like?

Making the Ordinary Business of Junk Removal Extraordinary

Anybody can haul junk. But not every company can make the ordinary business of junk removal exceptional. At 1-800-Got Junk?, employees work under the belief that customer loyalty does not happen without delivering on the exceptional.

The Evolution of Web Self-Service

A positive customer service experience is paramount to a company’s long-term business strategy. But a positive experience does not necessarily mean a face-to-face interaction. Many customers prefer the do-it-yourself approach, controlling the experience and handling service issues on their own. And as self-service tools evolve on the Web, there are more opportunities for companies to deliver a positive customer experience while keeping service costs down.

Are You Ready for Cross-Channel Commerce?

Retailers have been talking about cross-channel retailing for many years. At first, consumers had a choice between making their purchases in store and catalogue shopping. But when the Internet arrived, retailing was revolutionized beyond recognition, offering the potential to reach far greater numbers of consumers with a much more flexible and immediate service. The introduction of mobile commerce looks set to turn everything on its head once again, but how many businesses that talk about cross-channel retailing are really ready for it?