1to1 Media

Bank’s Financial (Dis)Services Ignites Social Lending Momentum

The concept behind social lending is not new. But social lending, also called peer-to-peer lending, is still a new industry with its own challenges. Chris Larsen, cofounder and CEO of social lending company Prosper, talks with 1to1 Media's Liz Glagowski about the benefits and challenges of the space, as well as some customer-focused lessons from the Web 2.0 world for both Wall Street and Main Street banks.

Do You Have a Policy for That?

Domino’s Pizza learned a valuable lesson in 2009. After two employees posted a video of themselves on YouTube defacing a pizza, Domino’s waited a whole 24 hours to respond. In a digital world where people exchange information in real time, that response was 23 hours too late. Social media policies are crucial in this social media environment.

Customer Retention Is the New Acquisition

“There’s something inherently out of whack with the traditional marketing funnel,” Joseph Jaffe writes in Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones. “There are better ways to optimize it.” In this excerpt from Flip the Funnel, Jaffe provides an overview of one possible solution: flipping the funnel completely.

Mobile Feedback: Is It Worth Doing?

1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with Allegiance Vice President of Marketing Chris Cottle to determine whether and when the use of mobile feedback systems makes sense as part of the larger mobile marketing strategy.

Customer Engagement: Marketing’s New Frontier

Customers now have unprecedented perspective and expectations about the companies they do business with. The customer buys, continues to buy, tells others, and pays more because of their complete experience with a product or service provider. For marketing’s investment to pay off, it can no longer hand off a new customer and hope for the best.

AmEx OPEN Forum: A Customer Community Evolves

American Express’ OPEN Forum provides articles, videos, discussions, and events around topics such as innovation, lifestyle, money, technology, and more for small business owners, as well as a Twitter aggregator and peer profiles. Jason Rudman, director of OPENForum.com, shares his thoughts on the community site’s evolution.

Customer Support Communities Evolve to Meet Social Demand

“Social” and “viral” aren’t words just for YouTube videos and Facebook posts anymore. Increasingly, companies are extending the social concept into the customer service organization by expanding their online support communities to allow customers to help each other with service issues.

Overcoming Roadblocks to Online Community Success

The value of a vibrant online customer community can’t be denied: engaged customers, potential insight for product development, contact center deflection, and an organic knowledgebase. So how can a company create a vibrant customer community in the first place? And how can it improve customer service?

Virtual Meetings Foster Employee Engagement

As the economy forces companies to find ways to drive down operating costs without decreasing employee engagement, companies like Cisco and HP turn to virtual meetings as a solution.

The 10 Rules of Customer Centricity

Many companies claim customer centricity in their list of company values, in their organizational tenets, or in their mission statement. Being customer centric is not easy. Use these 10 rules to assess your organization’s customer centricity.

Strategy Creation Should Be a Collaboration

In this excerpt from The New How, Nilofer Merchant explains that there is a better way to create business strategies that succeed:

Prime Targets: Current and Lapsed Customers

Marketers are reevaluating costly prospecting activities and thinking more about previously neglected marketing targets, i.e. current customers and lapsed customers. At the same time the list market itself is changing, giving marketers access to new data and list technology that provide new opportunities for targeting contacts.

Social CRM – Is the Customer Finally In?

Social networking sites have generated wide interest for two reasons: First, in social sites people with similar background and interests are already organized into target groups via data relationships. Second, relevant marketing campaigns may be generated using “social conversations” that provide up-to-date insight into user interests and buying behavior.

Choice Hotels Upgrades the Customer Experience by Listening

Choice Hotels recently enhanced its customer listening strategy to make customer experience improvements both at a corporate level and at specific hotels based on voice of the customer surveys.

Intuit Learns Why Customers Do What They Do

Intuit, the provider of QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax, has used a Web analytics solution for a few years. It deployed text analytics tools to understand online customer behavior and the voice of the customer on its sites.

Staying Power Requires Customer Focus

“Embracing an outside-in perspective—focusing on creatively delivering something of value to customers instead of obsessing over pushing your product portfolio—builds an inherent flexibility into organizations.” In this excerpt from Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati outlines what it takes to become a more resilient organization.

It’s Rude to Interrupt

As CMOs, marketing VPs, and distributed marketing managers grapple with declining ad budgets, growing attention is being placed on technology platforms that drive costs out of marketing and make it easy for distributed marketers to develop ads targeted to a particular customer or prospect. The right technology means a consumer in Portland, Maine, will get a far different message from one in Portland, Oregon.

RealNetworks Delivers Unified Customer Service

RealNetworks overcame common call center challenges of a multilocation service organization, creating a unified and consistent customer service experience while tailoring the experience to the user's specific needs.

Three Ways to Improve the Customer Experience

A new research report offers a fresh perspective on the value of customer experience and the role employees play in providing a positive experience.

Finding Loyalty

Retaining customers is hard work. It takes inspired thinking, creative programs, and a special attitude. Often, it also takes a loyalty program.

The Direct Digital Marketing Mandate

Marketers who want to be relevant to today’s consumers must use direct digital marketing as the cornerstone of any marketing plan.

Eldorado Hotel Casino Integrates Marketing Across Channels

Eldorado Hotel & Casino in Reno, NV, for example, uses mobile, email, and social media marketing as part of its integrated marketing program. And it has seen bottom-line impact as a result.

The Leaders of Customer Loyalty

Apple, Google, and Samsung lead more than 400 brands when it comes to customer loyalty. What sets them apart from the rest?

How Social Do We Need to Be?

More than ever, it seems that marketers are struggling to understand just how “social” they need to be to engage customers and reach new audiences.

Customer Strategy Trends to Watch in 2010

Experts look ahead to the customer strategy trend that will have the biggest impact on business in 2010. Not surprisingly, social media is mentioned.

Subaru Revs Up Customer Value

Subaru gained hidden insight about both new and existing customers by analyzing online leads and creating a consistent experience.

Meeting Today's Customer Expectations Means Taking a Multichannel CRM Approach

Customers are interacting with companies through an ever-increasing number of channels, including the Web, email, live chat, and phone, as well as emerging social channels, such as discussion forums, Facebook, and Twitter. An intelligent, multichannel CRM strategy is therefore becoming a necessity.

I'll Go to the Gym…Tomorrow

One of the wider debates about the economy questions whether the severe recession will alter consumption patterns. The classical economics perspective might suggest that the answer is "yes." Consumers, businesses, and financial institutions will have learned from the experience and return to a more balanced, cautious approach to consumption, borrowing, and lending. The traditional view—markets consist of parties that act rationally and in their own best interest—suggests that we will learn from the experience and practice better self-control. On the other hand, behavioral economics suggests that we largely may revert to the same consumption patterns that led to the crisis. Behavioral economics holds that many of the decision-making processes we use are not rational, and that we often make decisions that are not in our best long-term interest.

NetApp's Jay Kidd: From CTO to CMO

Reporter's Notebook: Listening to Social Consumers

Gaining customers’ loyalty is dependent upon knowing something about them. Social consumers are no different from cardholders, magazine subscribers, or any other customers; the more you know about them, the more you can tailor offerings to their liking.

1to1 Media’s Faves and Raves of 2009

As we close the books on 2009, we look back at some of the highlights. Here is the list of what you thought were the most interesting, topical, or just plain clickable stories of 2009.

Foxwoods Bets on the Customer

Foxwoods worked to better anticipate customers’ needs by integrating of all the resort and casino data as part of its integrated customer data strategy.

News From 1to1 Media: A Message from Ginger Conlon, Editorial Director

The Present and Future of Direct Digital Marketing

The growth and impact of direct digital marketing had a significant impact across many different industries in 2009. Because good direct digital marketing—relevant marketing communications addressed to individuals through the primary digital channels of email, Web, and mobile—is founded in the smart data management and segmentation afforded by a universal profile management system, industries from cable and broadband to retail to hospitality to restaurants are reaping the benefits of a targeted, personalized approach to digital marketing communications.

7 Customer Data Elements Every Organization Should Have

Despite the generally acknowledged importance of having a good understanding of the customer, in most organizations the customer’s profile is a sedimentary amalgam of the results of previous data collection initiatives. Information typically is retained or continues to be collected because it was used in the past, or because someone thought it might be useful in the future. While this approach results in impressively sized data warehouses, it can mean that emerging categories of data are often overlooked, and time and resources have been wasted collecting, storing, and managing low-value data. This results in unreliable decisions, poor customer service, and lost revenue.

Agents as Brand Ambassadors

As the contact center becomes more strategic, some companies are using their service organization to help promote their brand.

Constructing a Customer Focus From the Ground Up

Companies continuously struggle with how to align their strategy, training, and processes to focus on the customer, but ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City, OK, has an atypical advantage. The center, which opened in July, built its business with the customer in mind. John Cameron, Ph.D., a physicist and former cancer patient, decided four years ago that he wanted to make proton therapy—an advanced form of radiation of tumors that spares the healthy tissue and results in fewer side effects—widely available to patients. The therapy has always been in limited supply because the centers that administer it are costly to build and maintain.

Creating an Analytics-Friendly Environment

As customer relationships become more complex, the customer analytics tools that guide executive decision making should take center stage. This means companies must create an analytics-friendly environment to maximize their full data potential. But building the right analytics organization is more than hiring a smart team. It’s also paying attention to the vision, tools, and people that make up a successful analytics program.

Data Privacy as a Call Center Strategy

Companies collect and monitor information in their contact centers more than ever before. Almost everything gets recorded, and tools that access customer data, such as text mining, speech analytics, and live chat, are growing in popularity. During their conversations with agents, customers may reveal sensitive information, which could make them vulnerable. Data security and privacy strategy, once the domain of IT, must extend to the customer service organization.

Direct Mail’s Dynamic New Look

Three companies in the travel industry share their successes using innovative, multichannel direct marketing strategies.

Direct Mail’s Dynamic New Look

Three companies in the travel industry share their successes using innovative, multichannel direct marketing strategies.

Direct Mail’s Dynamic New Look

Three companies in the travel industry share their successes using innovative, multichannel direct marketing strategies.

DSW Evolves Its Customer Strategy

Kelly Cook, vice president of customer strategy at DSW Show Warehouse, has spent 15 years in customer service and marketing. In April she joined DSW to take on a new challenge—to evolve its marketing strategy from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more targeted program. Here she talks about her new role.

Five Challenges Sales Organizations Face Today

Janice Lipsitz, senior sales performance consultant at Wilson Learning, says sales organizations have become increasingly overwhelmed, which often prohibits them from adopting a long-term selling approach. Here, she lists five common challenges sales reps face today.

Getting Sentimental About Customers

An emerging technology known as sentiment analysis works to untangle the millions of comments and suggestions posted on the social Web into valuable customer data.

Grand Circle Brings Its Tours to Life for Its Agents

Training call center agents to help customers fix problems with complex products or services is difficult enough, but it’s not impossible if they’re shown step by step how to operate, diagnose, and correct issues. When that complex service is a custom travel booking, training agents to be knowledgeable about everything from local customs to unforeseen circumstances becomes more challenging.

Making Data Governance Work for You

Customer-centric organizations across the globe realize the challenge that effectively managing customer data can present. As a recent Siperian report on data governance suggests, companies need to make sure they’re not getting in their own way by implementing stringent data policies.

Mastering Multichannel Customer Service

From phone calls to tweets, customers want to interact with the companies they do business with in the channels of their choosing. Here’s how three companies are meeting that challenge.

Measuring the Loyalty of the Social Customer

Social media sites teem with activity between brands and consumers. These online interactions often present opportunities for building engagement and loyalty unavailable in any other channel. They also present a challenge: Social CRM requires new methods of measuring impact, particularly in the case of loyalty.

On the Beat

We love it Volvo Customer Gets Service After Turning to the Web It looks like victory could be around the corner for Freya Svensson, the unhappy Volvo owner who posted blogs and videos of herself singing and wearing a Viking hat, to shame the car company into replacing her faulty transmission. Her November 24 post reports that she got a call from Bill Casey at Volvo Customer Care as a result of her online actions. He said Volvo would send an engineer on December 9 to examine her car and her records to try and resolve the problem. In addition, Casey said that as a result of her posts Volvo is reviewing its internal systems for capturing customer issues, looking into streamlining the customer care department, and examining the gaps in service between the dealerships and customer care.

Organizational Culture as a Marketing Asset

Meet Jay Kidd: current NetApp chief marketing officer (CMO), former chief technology officer (CTO), and straight-shooting message-crafter to high-tech audiences. “I can be a fairly strong critic and guide when my organization is producing [marketing] materials or messages that our customers are consuming,” he asserts. “Hyperbole is my personal hot button. ‘Unprecedented’ is one of those words that gets me. ‘Unprecedented’ never is.”

Sales Strategies for Long-Term Success

Many sales organizations live in the moment, focused on closing sales and moving on to the next prospect. It’s the organizations that take a long-term view of the sales process and focus on building trusted partnerships rather than solely on closing sales that will maintain a competitive advantage.

Security as a Customer Service Tool

If you’ve ever been the victim of identity theft or stolen credit card information, you know that fixing it can be a lengthy, stressful process. You must resolve disputed charges, cancel credit cards, order new ones, sign affidavits, and follow up with multiple companies and credit bureaus. Chris Swecker, former head of corporate security at Bank of America and retired Assistant Director of the FBI in charge of fraud, says that while no one should have to go through such an ordeal, proactive customer service during times like these may help to strengthen a customer’s relationship with his or her financial institution.

The New Face of Customer Service Agents

Customer service is evolving at a rapid pace. What used to be considered a necessary cost center is now a strategic customer touchpoint. The focus on efficiency has shifted to customer satisfaction and effectiveness.And as contact centers evolve, so must agents’ skill sets.

The Only Constant Is Change

You may think it cliché, but today more than ever change is the one thing that’s certain. And as if adjusting to constant change isn’t difficult enough, keeping pace with the ever-increasing speed of change is a daunting yet necessary task. Slow down too much and your competition will pass you by; but rush ahead too fast and you may overlook something vital to your success. It’s like riding the high wire on a motorcycle.

The Rebuilding of MySpace

Like the ghosts of market leaders past, MySpace’s complacency led to the loss of far too many loyal customers over the past few years. Members who used to spend more than an hour every day on the site were lured away by competitors’ offerings, for example, Facebook’s interactive features, like sharing photos, posting status updates, and sending pokes to friends.

The State of Multichannel Customer Service

Customers want service when and how it’s convenient for them, and they expect consistency in the service experience across channels. Businesses are offering service via multiple channels, but all too often those channels operate in silos that create inconsistencies. In fact, according to 1to1 Media’s 2009 Multichannel Service survey, which surveyed nearly 130 senior customer strategy executives, only 14 percent of respondents think their firm delivers a consistent experience across channels; 68 percent think their service experience is somewhat consistent across channels and 18 percent said their service is not at all consistent across channels.

Trendspotting

Mobile technology is slowly infiltrating every facet of consumers’ lives. Smartphones aren’t just for salespeople, executives, and trendy college students anymore. Likewise, their capabilities surpass the calling, texting, and light gaming commonplace among early generation models. Mobile’s penetration into every demographic group and its enhanced applications mean this is the perfect time for businesses to adopt mobile as a new channel to engage customers.

Trustability and Its Opposite

Acting with customers’ best interest in mind is the key to business sustainability.

Trustability and Its Opposite

Acting with customers’ best interest in mind is the key to business sustainability.

Who’s Measuring Your Opinion?

What sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google are doing to track and measure consumer sentiment.

Multichannel Service Is a Work in Progress

Too many companies today are delivering siloed service. Customers, however, see one company—and expect a consistent experience across channels. Unfortunately, silos prevent companies from delivering that. In fact, according to 1to1 Media’s 2009 Multichannel Service survey, which surveyed nearly 130 senior customer strategy executives, only 14 percent of respondents think their firm delivers a consistent experience across channels; 68 percent think their service experience is somewhat consistent across channels, and 18 percent said their service is not at all consistent across channels.

Reporter's Notebook: Real-time Lists Help Miles Technologies Reach the Right Sales Prospects

When it comes to lead generation and sales strategy, getting the right information is especially important. For Miles Technologies, real-time information about leads and prospects is crucial.

Get Your Audience Engaged

In this excerpt from So What? Mark Magnacca explains how to create a positioning statement that will engage your audience and create opportunity.

The Importance of Customer Segmentation in the Contact Center

From Customer Lifetime Value to SatMap scoring to the Pareto Principle (20 percent of customers deliver 80 percent of the value), everyone seems focused on slicing and dicing customer characteristics to achieve some sort of profile. These efforts often yield results for many parts of an organization, such as geographically dispersing salespeople or demographically chartering marketing efforts. Customer care organizations, however, are often overlooked.

The Importance of Customer Segmentation in the Contact Center

Tips for Selecting the Right Enterprise Marketing Platform

The urgency to meet the timely needs of a company’s sales reps, resellers, franchises, and others revenue producers is even more pronounced now in a down economy: Cracks in the marketing chain could be perceived as deeper trouble within the overall organization. According to a 2008 Forrester survey conducted well in advance of last fall’s meltdown, more than 40 percent of respondents struggled with campaign design, offer management, and customer segmentation. Nearly 60 percent of respondents lacked the ability to both manage marketing processes and resources and coordinate campaign management across channels.

2009 Holiday Shopping Roundup

Holiday shopping stories are to news organizations what Santa is to shopping malls. Everybody’s got one. Here at 1to1 Media, we’ve thrown our Santa hat into the ring with a roundup of holiday shopping facts, figures, and advice for those looking to put a one-to-one spin on their holiday season. Happy Holidays!

What Does It Take to Build Customer Loyalty Online?

Competition among online retailers is fierce, especially during the holiday season. Customer loyalty is crucial for businesses to survive over the long term. So what will make customers loyal online?

Reporter’s Notebook: Online Advertising's Slippery Slope

"I hope you know what you’re doing." That’s what interactive strategist Alan Chapell of Chapell & Associates told attendees at this week’s Digiday:Target event when referring to popular online data collection practices that could be considered questionable, if not all-out devious. Online advertising needs a data strategy around trust, not schemes.

Converting Browsers to Buyers

In this excerpt from Inbound Marketing Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah describe the four elements of a compelling call-to-action.

Converting Browsers to Buyers

In this excerpt from Inbound Marketing Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah describe the four elements of a compelling call-to-action.

Cracking the C-Suite in 2010

Identifying the relevant executive for each sales opportunity is initially the best use of your time in your next sales campaign. We define the relevant executive as the executive who stands to gain the most or lose the most as a result of the application or project associated with your sales opportunity.

Long-Term Financial Strength Comes From Long-Term Customer Relationships

Yapi Kredi Emeklilik, a Turkish financial services company, focuses on long-term customer needs and value, from acquisition to retention, with impressive success.

The Secrets to Engaging and Retaining Employees

If having happy employees is essential to having happy customers, it should follow, then, that all companies would focus to at least some degree on employee engagement. Not so. According to 1to1 Media’s 2009 Employee Engagement survey, about 20 percent of respondents’ companies don’t consider creating and nurturing employee engagement to be important.

How to Avoid the 5 Biggest Holiday Email Marketing Mistakes

As email has become the direct marketing workhorse of the holiday shopping season, marketers place increasing pressure to avoid colossal blunders that will compromise their retail success. To ensure you don’t stub your email marketing toe this holiday season, here are five common mistakes to avoid:

The Purchasing Influence of the Subconsious

In this excerpt from All Customers Are Irrational, William J. Cusick dispels previous assumptions about how our brains work and explains why customers’ irrational subconscious should be a major consideration when crafting business strategies.

Become a “Customer’s Apprentice”

Organizations that nurture customer relationships and take every opportunity to learn in partnership with customers will have a distinct advantage. By crafting opportunities for customers to engage, respond, and advise, you’ll know them better, so you can serve them better.

Mobile App Secrets Revealed

When does a mobile app help the customer experience? When can it hurt it? How can you make your mobile app stand out? Bill Westerman of Create With Context shares his secrets of mobile app success with Liz Glagowski of 1to1 Media.

Intrawest Tracks VOC Across Channels and Continents

Guests visiting Intrawest’s resorts expecting a certain atmosphere and experience, whether they’re looking for family relaxation, thrills on the slopes, or a romantic getaway. Gauging how well the company delivers on those expectations requires an extensive voice of the customer program.

Mint.com Uses Email as a Personal Finance Tool

Personal finance site Mint.com created a business model to work in its customers’ best interests when it comes to managing money, and the company uses email marketing to maintain a personal relationship with those customers.

The Best Talent Wants a Vibrant, Challenging Workplace

In this excerpt from Enlightenment Incorporated, Scott Lochridge and Jennifer Rosenzweig explain how enlightened companies create a workplace that is so compelling the best talent will be practically lining up to work there.

The Best Talent Wants a Vibrant, Challenging Workplace

Pattern Recognition: You Can’t Always Know What’s Next

The urge to recognize patterns is a universal human bias, and it pollutes our very rationality, coloring our view of real life and distorting our judgment in important ways. As a result, we don’t really see randomness, and we don’t understand it very well at all. We like to see patterns, and so we do see patterns.... This is the central argument in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, a very insightful if somewhat disturbing book by Leonard Mlodinow.

Understanding Your Online Reach

In this excerpt from 140 Characters, Dom Sagolla discusses the pros and cons of social media reach, and touches on how to determine the engagement of those you’re reaching.

Multichannel Service: Customer Disconnect

According to 1to1 Media’s 2009 Multichannel Service survey, only 14 percent respondents think their companies deliver a consistent experience across channels; 68 percent think their service experience is somewhat consistent across channels and 18 percent said their service is not at all consistent across channels.

Sentiment Analysis Illustrates Natural Language's Complexity

True sentiment analysis requires more than just picking out keywords and pairing them with obvious indicators of emotion like “hate” or “love.” In addition to the words themselves, language contains sarcasm, irony, humor, and a slew of other nuances determined by context. Parsing sentences to understand exactly what they mean seems to require a human element, but researchers are getting closer to making it an exact science.

Social [Your Word Here] Strategy

The recent Forrester Consumer Forum had a noticeable (and unsurprising) theme: social. Social CRM, social marketing, social networking. There was even a presentation on how social technologies can drive offline, traditional programs. For attendees, the event wasn’t just an opportunity to learn about emerging trends; it also helped them to determine whether they’re behind more socially focused competitors, and if so, how to catch up.

Three Companies Use Analytics to Win Back Customers

Here’s how three companies use this data analytics strategy to reach out to prospects -- and customers -- before a sales opportunity is lost.

Understanding the State of Trade Promotion Optimization

Much of the technology buzz in the consumer products industry today revolves around the notion of trade promotion optimization (TPO). Trade magazines, business consultants, and analyst firms continue to extol the potential virtues of optimization and predictive analytics tools, yet few take the time to clearly define what this means, or more important, what it requires to achieve success.

Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania Improves Customer Relationship Health

Health insurance organizations rely heavily on the call center as one of their only direct customer touchpoints. And as customer expectations for a positive experience increase, the call center becomes even more important for ensuring customer satisfaction. Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania (BCNEPA) understands this, and has invested in improving call center interactions with virtual hold technology.

Go From Six to Zero Degrees of Separation

In this excerpt from Just Listen, Goulston explains how customer-facing professionals, like those in sales and marketing, can move from cold call to warm conversation through listening and engagement.

NBA’s Marketing Portals Are a Slam Dunk

The pace of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in today’s hypercompetitive market needs to be as fast off the court as it is on it. Multichannel sponsors the likes of Gatorade and Adidas expect the league to act quickly when providing details on advertising opportunities.

1to1 Strategy Goes Down Under

Don Peppers visits Australia to open the new Peppers & Rogers Group office. Take a peek at the strategic challenges and opportunities of multinational expansion with a customer focus.

Say What?

There are myriad ways to track the benefits of feedback programs. Here are 13 ways; track at least three—after creating baseline measurements—and you’re sure to see how VOC is paying off for your organization.

Airline Loyalty Is More Than Pie in the Sky

In this market, is airline customer loyalty possible? New research says yes, if the airlines pay attention to the power of customer relationships among their most valuable customers.

Consumers as Marketing Co-Creators

In the following excerpt from Reinventing Interactive and Direct Marketing, Chick-fil-A’s Michael McCathren discusses how iBranding engages the fast-food chain’s customer—and how iBranding is helping to deepen customer relationships in a whole new way.

Consumers as Marketing Co-Creators

Do Mobile Apps Help or Hurt the Customer Experience?

Mobile apps can improve a brand’s customer experience if they provide some value to the customer, experts say. Comcast and the Indianapolis Symphony orchestra share their experiences and how it has impacted customer relationships.

It’s Never Too Late to Be a Visionary Leader

Have you ever spoken with someone in a leadership position and wondered to yourself, “Who taught this person their leadership skills?” I hit that point early on in my career. The first time was several years ago when I worked as a call center rep. I was on a call with a customer, and I was unable to answer his question. I went to my supervisor’s desk for help or to be pointed in the right direction, thinking it was the obvious thing to do. I have to say, she was very kind to put her personal call on hold to hear me out, but the helpfulness ended there. Her response to my question was, “I don’t know,” followed by a blank, impatient stare.

With CRM, Less Is More

What single CRM change will give you the biggest bang for your buck? There’s no one answer. But there is one commonality: Less is more.

Changing (Service) Channels

There are three common practices that most financial institutions perform without really looking deeply enough at the impact on the customer experience.

Changing (Service) Channels

There are three common practices that most financial institutions perform without really looking deeply enough at the impact on the customer experience.

Customer Experience: The Foundation for Customer Retention and Loyalty

The importance of customer experience as a key component in delighting customers has been oft-repeated and emphasized. But, is customer experience a complex, intangible pie-in-the-sky wish that the marketers hope or promise to deliver, or is it accomplished through a systematic approach?

Happy Employees, Healthy Business

Happiness is hot. Over the past few years psychologists have placed increased emphasis on what makes our lives pleasant, good, and meaningful1—in short, what makes us happy.

Happy Employees, Healthy Business

Happiness is hot. Over the past few years psychologists have placed increased emphasis on what makes our lives pleasant, good, and meaningful1—in short, what makes us happy.

Loyalty is a Virtue and an Asset

Understanding and tapping into customer loyalty can lead to significant longterm business benefits. For many companies, however, reaching this goal can be elusive.

The New Rules of Marketing Success

In this excerpt from Baked In, Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain why executives must rethink innovation and bake marketing directly into products themselves.

The New Rules of Marketing Success

In this excerpt from Baked In, Alex Bogusky and John Winsor explain why executives must rethink innovation and bake marketing directly into products themselves.

A Conversation (Not a Lecture) About Social Media

Nigel Dessau doesn’t pull any punches on his blog or, for that matter, in person. “The advice I give to other CMOs is to fire anybody who is a ‘social media expert,’” says Dessau, senior vice president and CMO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), a technology company that produces computing and graphics solutions. “I think most of them are talking rubbish. The first person who crossed the Andes was not an ‘Andes specialist.’”

A Three-Step Guide to Blogging

“You used to have to express your opinion by flying thousands of miles and giving speeches. Now you can do that in a blog. It’s the same thing.” The key to thriving as an executive blogger today, Dessau asserts, is “to remember that you are a brand—as a person, and as a company. And you have to be honest as a brand.”

Aligning Customer Loyalty With Business Strategy

Any business considering whether to implement a customer loyalty program, and any business trying to manage its own ongoing program, should know five best practices if it wants to have a best-in-class, successful loyalty program.

Cigna Employees Experience the Customer Experience

True to its name, Cigna’s customer experience organization wanted to give employees a customer-focused view of the organization.

Customer Equity Management: The Next Frontier in Banking

Many banks follow one of the two mainstream growth strategies: harvesting their existing customer base or pursuing competitors' customers. Large banks usually opt for the former strategy, while smaller banks often choose the latter. In either case, banks are fishing for the same fish in the same pond. Banks of every size bombard customers and prospects with marketing communications and aggressive cross-sell efforts—steadily deteriorating customer experience. Yet all indicators on a CEO's dashboard may be positive, so a bank's eroding customer equity is overlooked. The result is frustrated customers.

Customer Strategist - Contributors

View a list of people who contributed to the second issue of the Customer Strategist.

Customer Strategist - Outlook

Customer experience is more than the buzz phrase du jour. It is, in fact, a powerful business driver. Customer experience is “the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effects of interactions with a supplier’s employees, channels, systems, or products,” as defined by Gartner.

Deciphering Customer Data

Any company can collect data; all it takes is a customer base, input fields, and a database. All-State Legal has all those things, which allowed for the extensive collection of customer information. However, drawing insight from that data proved far more difficult. Although it is a relatively small company, it has complex data analysis needs because it provides stationery and printing supplies to the legal industry through four sales channels.

Prescribing a Healthy Customer Experience

Cigna Customer Experience Officer Ingrid Lindberg ensures that the customer is at the center of every decision healthcare provider Cigna makes.

Randomness Happens. Are You Ready for It?

We all appreciate the randomness of life and business, but many of us don’t fully realize the implications of the type of randomness we are subjected to. In many situations the randomness of events is not distributed according to the kind of normal curve, or bell curve, that we all learned in Statistics 101. Rather, some things are randomly dispersed according to what is known as a “power law.”

Randomness Happens. Are You Ready for It?

Sainsbury’s Serves Up Fresh Customer Data

In the multitrillion-dollar grocery industry, retailers and their suppliers continuously seek new ways to gain a competitive advantage. The result is a hugely competitive and highly dynamic market—one that incites these businesses to learn everything they can about customers that could help them to influence purchase behaviors and loyalty. At the heart of retailers and suppliers’ struggle to stay competitive, however, is a lack of direct insight into individual customers’ needs—information required to build closer relationships with them and to better serve them.

Setting Social Media Guidelines

Intel Corporation is one company that has implemented detailed social media guidelines for its employees and contractors. The guidelines begin with six guiding principles, including respecting proprietary information, disagreeing politely, thinking before posting or responding, posting “meaningful” content within the employee’s area of expertise, and following Intel’s code of conduct and privacy policy.

Starting a Social Media Conversation

Social media is the big buzz right now. Too many executives want to get their business on Twitter or Facebook without really thinking about why. Often, they read an article in The Wall Street Journal about who is using Twitter/Facebook/fill-in-the-blank, think that their brand is falling behind, and then chide their marketing and PR team to “get on social media.”

The Emergent Evolution of the Social Customer

Social CRM is important to business, but there is something else that must be understood: Social CRM is a science of business. The reason it exists is because of a revolution that doesn’t stem from business, but instead is in how we communicate—a social revolution that affected every single institution that we deal with—economic, social, political, and business, among others.

Adidas Relies on Insiders for Insight

When Adidas developed a Facebook fan page, it quickly attracted 2 million users as part of its social media strategy. The company acquired a proportionate number of followers on its Twitter and YouTube pages, leading to the perhaps surprising question: Are these online communities too big? In Adidas’s case monitoring and analyzing postings by 2 million members wasn’t realistic, so it created a community within a community, called Adidas Insiders, inviting only the most active users on public pages to join.

Creating Alignment Is the Key to Organizational Success

In this excerpt from Behind the Cloud Benioff and coauthor Carlye Adler reveal how to focus your goals and align your organization around them.

Creating Alignment Is the Key to Organizational Success

In this excerpt from Behind the Cloud Benioff and coauthor Carlye Adler reveal how to focus your goals and align your organization around them.

The Economic Recovery Mirrors Customer Strategy

At the recent Premier Business Leadership Series (PBLS) conference leading economists framed what they think will be a global economic recovery in a way that mirrors customer-centric strategy.

The Evolution of Direct Marketing

Many marketers are frightened right now. They see old paradigms crumbling. They wonder about survival. When will things just get back to normal? That’s an unfortunate point of view. Because nothing is going back to the way it was, and we have already entered a new golden age of marketing. The opportunities for marketers to transform their companies have never been greater.

Create a Company You Are Proud to Work For

Mila D'Antonio interviews Scott Lochridge, co-author of Enlightenment, Incorporated about why it's important to create a company that our kids would be proud to work for. The keys to success in the next economy will be to focus on the critical issues required to attract and retain the very best talent -- the people who will collectively reshape the future.

Customers: The True Value of Any Organization

Radical Action for Radical Times: Expert Advice for Creating Business Opportunity in Good or Bad Economic Times is a compendium of thought leadership gathered by Jonathan Hornby to help organizations succeed, regardless of the state of the economy. In this excerpt, based on his interview with Peppers & Rogers Group founding partner Martha Rogers, Ph.D., Hornby explains why customers are every company's scarcest commodity and companies need to understand their true value.

Refocus for the Recovery

It’s the time to refocus for the recovery. Don’t land in the economic rebound with your same old practices in place; use the time to improve your marketing game so that when the recovery hits stride and your budgets increase, you will have improved your effectiveness and gained an edge on your competition. Here are four steps you can take to improve your game now:

Down Economy Uncovers Opportunity in the Call Center

The contact center has all the elements to succeed in a down economy: laser focus on efficiency, numerous measurements, and the goal to deliver a positive customer experience.

Listening Is About Truth

In this excerpt from Smart Selling on the Phone and Online, Josiane Feigon explains how and why listening has changed and how to adjust and improve your listening skills as a result:

The Ultimate Customer Data Project: Electronic Healthcare Records

The strategy of how to make health data portable and valuable to hospitals and doctors while maintaining trust and privacy is an enormous challenge for any database expert.

“United Breaks Guitars” Offers a Valuable Lesson in Customer Service

When Sons of Maxwell lead singer David Carroll watched his guitar being thrown from a United plane over a year ago, he probably never imagined he would become a YouTube sensation because of the experience. And United probably never envisioned how a YouTube video called “United Breaks Guitars” about a customer’s negative experience could have such a major effect on the airline.

The Erosion of Relationship Selling

A lot has changed about buying in the past decade. Information on how industries are changing, how technology is evolving, what solutions are available, and how successful other companies have been with them is now more readily available than it ever has been. This leads to an interesting challenge for those trained in relationship selling.

Winning the Arms Race Between Marketers and Consumers

In this excerpt from Viral Loop, Adam L. Penenberg explains how marketers can cut through the clutter in this new environment to connect with consumers who, he says, “are increasingly hostile to having their time interrupted.”

Millennials and Today’s “Experience Economy”

A $1 trillion market can be yours for the taking. “Millennials” – the 80 million Americans who exercise this economic clout – want to do business with you. Just one hitch: You must deliver a superior service experience when, where, and how they like it.

Email Is Alive and Well…Sort Of

The Wall Street Journal published an article on October 12 called “Why Email No Longer Rules” suggesting that email marketing is dying a slow death as social sites like Facebook and Twitter become the public’s preferred communication tools. The story spread like wildfire at email provider ExactTarget’s user conference last week. The consensus at the show was that reports of email’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Sears Builds Social Loyalty

Online communities are notoriously hit-or-miss, for a variety of reasons. The lack of engaging social media features or personalization, no sense of belonging, or too much promotion are just some of the reasons customers visit sites once and never return. Sears created its communities with an emphasis on engagement, recognition, and dialogue to avoid joining the list of orphaned online retail communities.

What Marketing With Meaning Can Do for You

In this excerpt from The Next Evolution of Marketing, Bob Gilbreath explains how marketing with meaning can help companies reengage with today’s consumers.

Best Practices for Voice Marketers

Sophisticated mobile marketing is a medium growing in popularity, from email to text and now voice. A far cry from traditional telemarketing or call blasting services, direct voice marketing is truly a tool for building customer relationships, running niche marketing campaigns, and providing customers with information that provides value to them. Leveraging the power of the human voice makes communications much more personal than direct mail or email, and when voice marketing is done right, it can take 80 to 90 percent off a company’s traditional marketing expenditure and improve marketing results. What follows are six best practices marketers should consider to truly reap the benefits of voice marketing.

Self-Service Doesn’t Always Cut It

It seems like people can accomplish just about anything through a company’s interactive voice response (IVR) these days: pay bills, get flight information, refill prescriptions, get answers to questions. But other times this convenience comes at the cost of some extremely important customer interactions. It makes me wonder: Are we in danger of going too far with customer self-service?

Drive to Digital Records Begs Due Diligence

From a data strategy perspective, creating a national privacy framework from the patchwork of laws and regulations currently governing the handling of healthcare information could prove a political and practical migraine.

The Five Decisions Made by Beloved Companies

“Beloved companies decide differently than everybody else,” writes Jeanne Bliss in I Love You More Than My Dog: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad. “Acutely aware of how their every action impacts how customers feel and respond to them, they take the time to make purposeful decisions about the contact they have with customers.” In this excerpt from I Love You More Than My Dog, Bliss reveals what those five purposeful decisions are and how they impact the customer.

Cultivating Loyalty at the C-Suite

“Selling to senior-level executives requires a different set of skills and strategies from the more traditional departmental-level transactional sale,” write Stephen J. Bistritz, Ed.D, and Nicholas A.C. Read in Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Want You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top. In this excerpt from Selling to the C-Suite Bistritz and Read explain how to cultivate loyalty with C-level executives.

Cultivating Loyalty at the C-Suite

Peppers Unplugged: Live From the Motivation Show

A happy, engaged employee leads to happy, loyal customers. Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group reports from the Motivation Show about what is out there and what people are looking for when it comes to motivating employees to keep them engaged.

The Evolving Handshake

Generations ago business deals were made by a simple handshake between two parties. Aided by advancements in communication technology the handshake has evolved into email conversations, tweets, Facebook wall posts, collaborative wikis, and more.

Can Loyalty Exist in the Auto Industry?

Trust and customer loyalty are not heard much around the car showroom, but they are possible. Both the automaker and dealer need to be more responsive to customer needs and build a relationship at every level that leads to loyalty.

World Wildlife Fund Studies Online Users for Insight

While the World Wildlife Fund is firmly focused on the outdoors and nature, the organization has recently ramped up its online conversations with prospects and donors to gain customer insight and listen to the voice of the customer.

Agent Experience Equals Customer Experience

The pervasive technologies that we encounter as consumers in our day-to-day lives are slowly beginning to deliver on their promise of being easy to-use, while making our lives richer, more efficient, and enjoyable. A notable exception is the integrated remote control that the cable company delivers, but the equation is more than brought into the positive when the i-Phone offers walking directions to the nearest tapas bar in London.

“Negative Listening” Is a Customer Experience Killer

In this excerpt from Celebrating Failure, author Ralph Heath explains how negative listening can kill a customer relationship before it starts—and how to learn from that mistake and focus on creating positive first impressions.

Personalization Makes Customers Feel Like Kings

As technology provides ever more ways to interact with customers, marketers must ensure their customers still feel like kings. The concern is that businesses are allowing technologies to depersonalize the customer relationship. When personalization is lost, it becomes much easier to treat customers as an amorphous mass, communicating with impersonal tools, or worse still, bombarding them with offers when they’ve opted out. The fact is, consumers respond much better to personalization.