In a high-volume service business mistakes happen. The actions that result and the speed at which they’re taken to make things right with the affected customer are critical.

Focusing recovery efforts solely on correcting the errors, while failing to address the inconvenience they have caused for the customer by not responding to their initial needs may generate potential negative word of mouth.

Recently, my friend Mike had an experience at a hotel that dealt a negative experience but promptly turned it into a positive one by responding to his requests. As a result, he’s a word-of-mouth promoter for the company.

Continue reading "Turn a Negative Into a Positive" »

Posted by Mila D'Antonio at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At today's 1to1 Webinar, "What's Next for Loyalty Programs?," presenters Luc Bondar and Will Wittkopf of Carlson Marketing talked about using loyalty data more strategically. Part of the discussion was about "enterprise loyalty," which involves taking the data generated by a program and using it to improve other areas of the business--and in some cases, extending the loyalty program across multiple product lines or lines of business.

Continue reading "Loyalty Programs: Let's Talk Tactics" »

Posted by Chris Helm at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week eBay announced it will increase the fees it charges to those who sell items through its online stores. The new prices will raise fees by an average of 6 percent for the approximately 500,000 online store owners, eBay estimated. Some sellers are angry with the news, and are considering jumping ship to Amazon, Yahoo or shopping.com. But eBay is cool with this, because some experts say the move was done to "fire" its below-zero (BZ) sellers.

Continue reading "eBay Fires Customers" »

Posted by Elizabeth Glagowski at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

"The biggest mistake organizations make is thinking that branding is marketing," Intellidyn president and CEO Peter Harvey told me in a recent conversation. "Companies need to tell people who they are -- branding -- or they'll waste their money on marketing."

Continue reading "Marketing Versus Branding" »

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Customer lifetime value. It's a metric that many of the executives I speak with long to calculate and use, but say they lack the data necessary to truly assess. One of the challenges is in how an organization defines customer value. Some base it on purchases alone. Other may include such "soft" data as customer influence (with other customers and in the broader market) in the calculations. There are myriad views of what comprises customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Continue reading "Customer Value: Do the Math" »

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Instead of treating IP as simply enabling cost savings, companies are really looking at how it can drive business value—IP not as a means to an end, but as a catalyst to drive change.

That mission became clear at last week’s International Contact Center Management show, where many vendors told me that they’re customers are saying “I’m willing to make fundamental changes to the customer experience and the way I manage contact centers.” They say they plan to achieve this through an IP-enabled contact center—the contact center of the future.

Continue reading "The Contact Center of the Future" »

Posted by Mila D'Antonio at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week a U.S. court ruled that cigarette makers can no longer use the words "Light," "Ultralight," "Mild" or "Natural" to describe their cigarettes. Everyone know by now that cigarettes, no matter how they're labeled, are unhealthy, but it took a court ruling to get the ads changed. It brings up to me the question of trust.

Continue reading "Will There Ever Be Truth (and Trust) in Advertising?" »

Posted by Elizabeth Glagowski at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to do something somewhat sacriligeous. I'm going to take issue with part of the NetPromoter concept, which is the subject of this week's Inside 1to1 story. Yes, I think the concept is full of simple brilliance. And as I write this I'm wearing my Fred Reichheld Fan Club t-shirt. But here's my problem. Reichheld, as well as the folks at Satmetrix who have cornered the consulting market on NPS, are touting the index as part of the way marketing managers and executives should be compensated.

Continue reading "My NetPromoter Problem" »

Posted by John Gaffney at 7:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

In "Are You Modeling Customer-Centric Behavior" I wrote about one of the key messages I glean from my conversations with three of our 1to1 Customer Champions -- Kevin Cantwell, president of Big River Telephone; Kelly Lam, manager of marketing services for BMW Canada; and Brynn Palmer, director of the customer experience for Charter Communications -- when we met to tape our next Champions webcast (watch for it in September!). That message was the importance of executives modeling customer-centric behavior to create a customer-focused culture.

Continue reading "Employees Are Customers Too" »

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 8:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you want your front-line staff to be customer focused, you have to continually stress the importance of doing so. And the best way to do that is to be customer centric yourself. Creating a customer-centric culture must start at the executive suite if it is to permeate an organization.

That was one of the key messages I glean from my conversations with three of our 1to1 Customer Champions -- Kevin Cantwell, president of Big River Telephone; Kelly Lam, manager of marketing services for BMW Canada;
and Brynn Palmer, director of the customer experience for Charter Communications -- over the past two days. We met to tape our next Champions webcast (watch for it in September!), and had several opportunities to chat during meals and such.

Continue reading "Are You Modeling Customer-Centric Behavior?" »

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Monday's issue of INSIDE 1to1 discussed a new direction for marketing strategy to go in, where the entire organization is involved in marketing success. Now Forrester Research has expanded its advice to the B2B space, where customer relationship progress traditionlly has been very difficult to achieve.

Author Laura Ramos predicts that B2B marketers will move online, where tactical demand generation can evolve into strategic ownership of the customer relationship, experience, and intelligence. What do you think? Does success revolve around an online strategy in the B2B space?

Posted by Elizabeth Glagowski at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There’s a crackdown going on in New York. Last week the NYPD started a wave of ticketing and towing illegally parked scooters. Many scooter owners park their rides on the sidewalk to avoid getting hit by drivers who “touch” park or getting moved by drivers who are desperate for a space.

Scooter manufacturer Vespa has stepped in, pushing for a policy change for parking two-wheel vehicles in the city. The company is circulating a “Vespatition” to pressure lawmakers; about 5,000 people have signed it so far. According to Aaron Peterson, manager of Vespa’s SOHO dealership, who was quoted in the newspaper Metro, better parking options could help spur scooter sales, but the “result would be a more efficient city” because scooter riding is better for traffic and the environment than cars and SUVs are.

Oddly, some scooter riders don’t want Vespa to improve their parking situation. Some riders who park on sidewalks remove their license plates so they don’t get ticketed; many of those same riders don’t want to have to start to pay for proper parking.

Regardless, what struck me about this is that it seems to me that Vespa is working to create a win-win-win situation for its customers (at least the ones who do want a proper place to park), the city, and itself. It’s another case of a company potentially benefiting from increased loyalty and sales by looking out not only for its customers, but also for its community.

What’s your opinion of Vespa’s approach?

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Although "76 percent of firms polled by a leading analyst firm indicate they have some type of CRM [technology], 80 percent of customers stop doing business with companies because of a bad experience. So there are obviously lots of companies that have deployed traditional CRM and still treat customers badly enough to lose them."

This is an excerpt from an email RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte sent me yesterday. Gianforte talked about how companies that misuse CRM technologies could "strip mine" their customers (that is, ring out every ounce of value then move on to the next customer) instead of creating long-term relationships by treating customers "like the renewable resources they actually are."

This got me thinking about customer value. One of the things we talk a lot about here at 1to1, especially when the conversation includes Return on Customer, is how every action an organization takes that impacts its customers can either increase or destroy customer value not only at that moment, but also for the long term. Whether it's a targeted marketing campaign that improves the customer connection or a blast email that turns off customers who feel it's irrelevant to them; whether it's a strategic selling approach that creates a real partnership or a hard sell that jeopardizes the trust necessary to close the deal; or whether it's a pleasant contact center experience with an agent who truly seems interested in helping solve a customer's problem or a poor experience with an agent who rushes customers off the phone to meet stringent average handle time metrics -- all those actions increase or destroy long-term customer value. And not only the value of a particular customer, but also of anyone that customer shares her experience with.

In my opinion, the key is to have a solid customer strategy in place before implementing any CRM technologies. Doing so helps to ensure that you'll select technologies that can best support that strategy, and that you're not simply automating bad processes (thus giving a poor customer experience faster). Yes, it's certainly possibly to be customer centric without needing any technology. But today's CRM tools can help take that customer focus to the next level and beyond.

What's your best advice for harnessing the potential of CRM technologies to help build customer value?

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Small businesses face tough choices. Often faced with limited resources, companies with small workforces used to trail in CRM deployments.

That doesn’t seem to be the case today. Affordable and accessible technologies have made it possible for SMBs to grow their businesses. But for SMBs to jump in the race, also requires a change of mindset.

Take Altman Lighting, for example. The 52-year-old family owned and operated commercial lighting with 140 full-time employees and 400 customer accounts worldwide had no system in place to funnel leads or integrate the customer database until recently. With the help of Exact Software, Altman employees log every customer communication—whether it is fax, email, phone—into an interface. Now communications are clear and hot prospects don’t get passed over.

I spoke to Altman’s Assistant General Manager Roger Pujol last week who explained that the corporate mindset had to first change before the company deployed any technology. “The old way things got done was by saying ‘who do I go to to get something done? What is it that I want done?’ With the use of workflows, if someone needs something done, there’s a specific task for that and they just enter the task,” he said.

Stowe Mountain Resort’s corporate mindset also changed when it embarked on a $100 million revitalization last year. The organization realized that the culture had to change along with the physical aspects. As a result, Stowe started taking the pulse of its visitors to find out what they actually wanted in a resort—essentially to create a total ski experience. Stowe has been making changes based on the new customer insight.

Stowe and Altman are just two examples of SMBs changing their cultural mindsets of how they approach customer strategies. They’re also proof that technology, together with strategy, is the key to ensuring a small businesses can operate with more efficiency and create room to grow.

Posted by Mila D'Antonio at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

No one can deny Google's dominance in the Internet space, but what's interesting is its ability to create both short-term buzz and long-term loyalty. Cool features like moveable maps and book text searches, along with its supreme search engine make it stand out from other online services. The New York Times compares its "wow factor" strategy to Yahoo's, which is more conservative and deliberate, but is also losing search market share.

Google's experimental nature may well win in the long term as well. According to Satmetrix, Google creates the most loyal customers of any online service. It ranked highest in terms of customers who would recommend the services to others. It looks like Google's got a one-two punch of real success, for itself and its customers.

Posted by Elizabeth Glagowski at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I remember the not-to-distant past when most wireless telecoms gave all their best deals and service to new customers and didn't pay much attention to existing customers. It was all about acquisition; achieving critical mass. But as churn rates grew, so did the recognition that retention might actually be a good idea. Most of the rest of us already seemed quite aware of the adage that it costs less to retain customers than to acquire new ones, understanding that companies need to balance acquisition and retention -- emphasizing each as appropriate over time, but not sacrificing one for the other.

As a T-Mobile customer I've noticed this change over time. I remember when I wanted to purchase a Treo, but the company wanted to charge me $300 more as a long-time customer than it was charging new customers. After an email to the head of marketing for the U.S., asking if he would be willing to spend $300 simply to keep his existing phone number, I received the "new customer" price within 24 hours. However, the pricing for the non-squeaky wheels did not change. What I noticed was that a new explanation of the pricing appeared on T-Mobile's site shortly after my experience. Fortunately, T-Mobile now has significantly more customer-friendly pricing that seems to recognize the value of its existing customers, which I happily discovered when opting up to a BlackBerry.

Verizon Wireless is also taking steps to be more customer-focused. In our INSIDE 1to1 newsletter we discuss how the company is loosening its grip on customers by prorating early termination fees and is adding a new loyalty plan to reward such behaviors as paying bills online. It seems that the new approaches aim to engender trust and build long-term loyalty. Industry watchers expect competitors to follow suit.

I say that this is just the beginning for an industry that, more than most, must continually strive to offer new and better products and services to customers to engage them, grow them, and keep them out of reach of the competition. What do you think of Verizon Wireless' approach?

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

As a fervent BlackBerry fan, I've been especially interested in the adoption of CRM on handheld devices. This is one of those areas that has been talked about for a long time before reaching any critical mass. Although mobile CRM almost seems like old news (nearly every CRM vendor offers a mobile component), the fact is that it's really just taking off among users.

There seem to be several reasons for this. One is that mobile professionals are starting to think more about how to get real business intelligence into their hands when they're on the road or with clients. Tony Castle, president and CEO of Castle CRM (a New York-based Sage Software partner), called this strategic access when we met earlier this week during a briefing with Sage on some news they'll be announcing in September. I had asked everyone their opinion on mobile adoption. He was making the point that mobile access to contact information and your calendar is great, but it's not enough. The real benefit is access to deeper customer and product data and historical information like purchase history. We recently covered this topic in our April magazine article "Business Intelligence in the Palm of Your Hand."

Another reason is the technology itself. Chris Reich, director, product management at Sage, pointed out that as the phone increasingly becomes integrated with handhelds, and thus those devices become more integrated with users' daily activities, demand is increasing for mobile CRM applications. "We've seen more interest in the first half of 2006 than we have in the past two years," he said. "It's on every RFP now." This doesn't surprise me, because it seems that companies are increasingly recognizing the benefits of real-time access to relevant customer information.

Sage's Larry Ritter, vice president of product management, pointed out that corporate IT support for mobile devices is more standard today than it used to be. In the past mobile users were often on their own when it came to support issues. This, of course, helps with the always challenging user-adoption issue.

What do you think? Are you a fan of mobile CRM? That is, access to real customer intelligence from anywhere, anytime? Or is it just a nice-to-have that will get more hype than true usage?

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What began as a meeting of customers with a common concern has evolved to an industry forum.

Last week I had a conversation with Talisma CEO Dan Vetras and Vice President of Marketing Jim O'Farrell about the newly launched CIM Forum. CIM is an ancronym for customer interaction management; the CIM Forum is a "business and technology consortium" created to discuss best practices primarily related to online customer service . What's interesting about this launch is its double layer of customer focus.

First, it started because Talisma executives recognized the need to learn more from its customers about their challenges and needs in gaining their customers' adoption of online chat. "It's been fairly apparent to us the past few years that not a lot people knew was chat was outside the industry," Vetras said. With a market penetration of less than 5 percent and most of the early adopters being in the tech industry, it was time to make a change. So Talisma invited such powerhouse customers as AOL, IBM, Microsoft, and Pitney Bowes to join a conversation on the topic during its customer conference. "They all have their own views of how chat should work in a global way," Vetras said. "So we brought them all together." The meeting went well enough to spark formal monthly meetings and create a working document on best practices.

The second layer of customer focus is bringing what has now become the CIM Forum to a larger audience. Talisma has opened the conversation to any company interested in joining the dialog. Yes, as "founders" of the forum Talisma benefits from getting insight into more companies' challenges and interests concerning online customer service, possibly including those of it competitors' customers. But in the interest of best serving its own customers, Talisama is also putting its customers' challenges, interests, and best practices out there for all to easily see -- including its competitors. But that's not a concern for Talisma executives; they're most interested in building a community that serves the best interests of all involved -- with the ultimate goal of better serving the end customer or consumer who uses online customer service. "Our goal is to share knowledge, " O'Farrell explains. "Whoever is interested is encouraged and invited to join the Forum."

Have you come across, in your industry, a situation where was started as what might be considered a type of customer advisory board morphing into a forum designed to serve whole the industry?

Posted by Ginger Conlon at 6:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night I got engaged and my new fiancé made reservations at an Italian restaurant in the city in which we live. Granted, we only had been there once before about two months ago, but when we walked in, the owner, Nino, remembered our table and had written my fiancé’s name on the table to reserve it. This is remarkable since John hadn’t told him his name when making the reservation. Nino simply remembered the sound of John’s voice because we had a conversation with him during our last visit. He also remembered our favorite wine and both of our entrées.

Nino knows that without customers, he doesn’t have a business. By listening to his customers, anticipating their needs, and then creating value with each visitor, he’s not only building trust with his customers, he’s increasing the worth of his business.

I can think of a few corporations that could benefit by walking a mile in Nino’s shoes.

Posted by Mila D'Antonio at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week Wal-Mart announced that it was giving up on the German market, and sold its 85 stores in Germany to Metro Group. This comes on the heels of its exit from the South Korean market as well. In Germany, many mistakes were cultural -- employees offered to bag groceries for customers (Germans prefer to bag their own groceries) and clerks were instructed to smile at customers, who are used to brusque service. Many Germans were put off by this approach.

The July/August issue of 1to1 Magazine talks about the strategic challenges multinational companies face when the enter new markets. The bottom line is that there needs to be an overarching strategy that also takes into account each individual country's unique needs, values and cultures. It looks like Wal-Mart found this out the hard way.

Posted by Elizabeth Glagowski at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)