1to1 Media

The Making of a Trustworthy Credit Card

The old credit card business model, in which companies make money off of consumer error, is finished. With regulations taking effect, the credit card industry needs to shift its strategy. Don Peppers of Peppers & Rogers Group offers some suggestions on how credit card companies can act in their customers' best interests.

Expert Insight – Consulting Advisor: The Secret to Profitable Growth

Building a deep understanding of customers' needs begins with customer segmentation. Customer segmentation helps companies to focus on the different attributes and behaviors of their customers and serve them more effectively. This builds customer equity and profitable growth, say Onder Oguzhan and Asli Cantutan of Peppers & Rogers Group.

Expert Insight – Consulting Advisor: The Secret to Profitable Growth

Service That Sticks

The quality of a company’s customer service is a critical competitive differentiator in today’s market; proactive customer service is a highly effective way to create that differentiation. If conveyed through marketing communications, proactive service can be a powerful strategy for exceeding customer expectations by servicing customers at the right time and in the right place. One company seeing success with this strategy is Super Glue.

Engage Customers Using B2B Social Networking

It is essential for sales teams to continually engage with and monitor their customers to ensure they are adequately supplying the most appropriate products and services for their customers’ changing needs. Employing a BtoB social networking solution allows sales professionals to effectively monitor clients’ respective industries and engage with them at the most appropriate time.

Breaking it Down: A Glossary for Mobile Marketing

Before marketers jump headlong into the mobile marketing fray, it’s important for them to understand the different types of mobile marketing approaches that resonate with consumers. Here’s a rundown on some of the more popular mobile marketing tactics and how they can be applied.

The Future of Distributed Marketing

As distributed marketing management technology finally brings corporate and distributed marketers together into a highly coordinated and effective marketing machine, capitalizing on brand value at the local level can, at last, be fully realized. The organizations to accomplish this first will have a strong competitive advantage.

Advanced Analytics in the New Economy

Economic pressures are forcing conversations about the importance of predictive analytics to a place of prominence in organizations. Companies now not only strive to analyze data from traditional channels, but also from their websites, social media, gaming sites, and mobile. Although the rise of interactive media presents its share of challenges for the practitioners of advanced analytics, it also creates opportunities.

Is There a Right Kind of Customer Loyalty?

Three loyalty experts discuss the different types of customer loyalty -- behavioral, emotional, and profitable, as well as what companies can do to create and improve it all.

Making the Case for At-Home Agents in a Random World

Every enterprise must make ready for the unknowable event – be it a blizzard or brown-out – while managing the day-to-day task of balancing superior customer care with cost efficiency. One solution is to use at-home agents.

Capitalizing on Real-Time, Personalized Customer Communications

Interactive communications is a key form of customer contact in our daily business lives. Companies are relying on these customer touchpoints to build their brand, differentiate the customer experience, and drive additional revenues. With the right interactive communication solution, companies can also reduce costs, minimize risk, and ensure a positive impact on the bottom line.

Five Ways to Ensure CRM Success

We’ve found that the greatest payback on CRM is realized when a company views it as a strategic weapon that can bring together the entire organization as opposed to relegating it to a tactical marketing function. Without that aerial view of the company and its constituencies, a CRM strategy and the tools that support it will not deliver maximum ROI.

Do You Have Customers or Fans?

Owners of the largest sports teams understand that careful marketing management is the road to success. Based on a complete understanding of their global fan base, it can inspire more than passionate support, creating customer loyalty that turns fans into brand advocates. In all marketing, making customer experience the top priority is crucial for a company to meet its business goals and stay in the premier division of its industry.

Improve Retention in the Contact Center

Customer care expert Barbara Burke recently spoke with 1to1 Magazine about employee engagement in the contact center. Here, she provides advice on engaging agents so they stay longer:

Letting Your Online Customers Vote with Their Clicks

One increasingly common online technique is multivariate testing. While A/B testing allows you to test just one factor at a time, multivariate testing enables you to test many changes simultaneously. Evaluating the impact of combinations of factors and variations often reveals significant interaction effects that can have a dramatic impact on your conversion goals.

Healing the Healthcare Customer Experience

Regardless of what happens in Washington in the near future, it’s obvious that the healthcare industry is changing. Fueling this change is customers’ increasing expectations of better service from their healthcare companies, especially insurers. Thanks to social media, mobile technology, and the plethora of information and access online, consumers are creating a dialogue with all the companies they do business with. Their expectations of customer service have gone up in all industries, including healthcare. And as premiums rise, customers are paying particularly close attention to their relationships with their healthcare providers.

Multichannel Marketing Grows Up

Fueled by the recession and the rise of social media, companies are increasing their budgets and shifting their resources to focus on multichannel marketing, with the goal of delivering a consistent experience to customers.

Curing Healthcare’s Unhealthy Customer Experience Reputation

The U.S. health insurance industry is at a crossroads. Customer demand, government legislation, and even internal voices are all signaling for the industry to make changes. For health insurers looking to improve the customer experience, many obstacles stand in their way.

Accurate Data Is the Core of Customer Strategy Success

Companies are use customer relationship management (CRM) and similar solutions to answer those questions; they are also trying to enhance revenue through programs like revenue optimization and yield management. CRM focuses on the trees. Revenue optimization and yield management focus on the forest. All require sound data.

Putting the Ability Back in Deliverability

For too long, email marketers have been stuck in the vicious cycle of managing their deliverability. They have spent significant time and money to monitor ISP delivery codes, examine problems, and fine-tune numerous settings – only to discover their adjustments didn’t really solve anything. Or, they found out what needed to be done to resolve deliverability issues at the conclusion of a campaign, after already suffering potential damage to both their reputation and results.

Customer Data in the Cloud

1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman speaks with RightNow Technologies CIO Laef Olson about steps that can be taken to increase the adoption of CRM dashboards.

The Strategy That Fuels JetBlue’s Customer Engagement

JetBlue celebrated a milestone on February 11: its 10-year anniversary. Another much less jubilant commemoration for the airline coincided with its week-long anniversary celebration. February 14 marked the three-year anniversary of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, the now infamous day when a snowstorm grounded hundreds of JetBlue flights at JFK International with their passengers stuck inside the planes for hours on the tarmac.

What’s Wrecking Your Customer Experience?

Most companies want to elevate the customer experience, but somewhere between the good intentions and actual implementation, many things can break down. The current state of the customer experience is not ideal. What pitfalls can companies avoid to deliver a quality customer experience?

The Flawed Vision of Customer Data Integration

The true golden opportunity for CDI lies in its ability to uncover the depth of interactions and to understand the full relationships companies have with their customers.

Face to Face: The Fuzzy Math of Social CRM’s ROI

By all indications, 2010 should be a banner year for social CRM. And for good reason: Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are excellent tools for companies to connect with their customers and listen to their interests and challenges. Used effectively, social networking tools can even help marketers and customer service personnel anticipate and intercept customer complaints.

Use Social Media to Treat Customers as Partners

The growth rate of adults using social media has quadrupled in recent years, and is now at dizzying new heights. Twitter alone reported almost 24 million unique visitors in September, a year-over-year increase of 1,170 percent. The numbers demonstrate that a company’s customers can assemble in social communities with astonishing speed and quickly become an influential force for change.

Marketing Attribution: From Silos to Synergy

Marketing metrics that show attribution improve collaboration and results.

Three Priorities for Managing Data Quality

Companies are starting to see the potential benefits of a strong data quality strategy. With such a broad and complex topic, what should be the top priorities?

Toyota: Too Little Too Late?

The automotive giant can use its recall as an opportunity to restore confidence in its brand by delivering exceptional service, or risk losing its brand integrity.

Creating Love & Trust With Customers

With Valentine’s Day coming up, hints at romance and love are lining every store front. Love, after all, is a universal language seen everywhere around the globe. It’s a language that doesn’t change. But how do companies create and share that emotion with their customers? Just like in any great relationship, there should be mutual accountability and trust between a company and its customers -- nevertheless, a relationship without symmetry is short lived. To make sure marketing messages resonate universally and companies maintain positive brand reputation globally, here are a few tips for building a strong relationship and trust with global customers:

Keep Customer Data Locked Up

As customer data grows more important to businesses and cloud computing eliminates the need for physical presences, the future of customer data may indeed be in the hands of customers. One data expert envisions the creation an online data locker that would be controlled by the customer and accessed by retailers, banks, or other vendors.

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.