Mobile phones are very personal devices. I bet most people would go back to get theirs if they accidentally left the house without them. And as new apps emerge and the technology expands, our reliance on mobile phones will only increase. For businesses, it's the perfect platform to create and maintain strong relationship strategy with customers.
Continue reading "What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Phone?" »
Successful marketers don't think like advertisers; they think like publishers, according to David Meerman Scott, author of World Wide Rave. They create a video, an e-book, a webinar, something that creates value for their customers. This approach is different than the ones taken by most marketers who advertise online.
Marketers who think like publishers get attention, he says. One video will get 100 views versus another that will get 100,000. Why is that? Why do some blog posts get no comments while others get 50? Meerman Scott reviewed thousands of pieces of viral marketing content to find out. He discovered six commonalities among the most popular content and dubbed them Rules of the Rave. At the same time he coined the phrase World Wide Rave because he found that typical viral marketing is, well, less than customer focused. "There's a sleazy connotation to viral marketing, especially...games and contests. That's not what I'm talking about," he says. "I mean valuable content that people want to share."
Search engines are very good at matching keywords, finding quoted snippets of text, and crawling for metadata. What Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and the rest aren't so good at is determining context of and relationships between phrases. Searching for "Apple" could mean Apple computers, Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter, or the fruit. A new kind of search engine from Financial Times, geared toward business people, takes online searching in a completely different direction.
Gartner reports that through 2012 more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business markets due to under investment in the information infrastructure and business user tools.
Jim Davis, senior vice president and CMO at SAS, partly blames the misused and abused term of "analytics strategy." "When we look at analytics, there's no single definition, rather we have to define analytics on the spectrum capability," he said.
In light of the recent sudden and dramatic deterioration of the economic climate, what are the key developments driving CRM strategies and the adoption of enabling technologies now? I recently recorded a podcast summing-up my take on the situation, based on Forrester's latest research. Here's what I know: Locking-in customer loyalty through deeper engagement and differentiated experiences will continue as critical priorities. Six trends will drive CRM decision-making in 2009.
I just returned from a nine-day trip to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mixing vacation and business, I learned a lot about the business climate within the banking and telecom industries, as well as the actual climate and weather in Riyadh...sand storms and all.
Watch my Peppers Unplugged video to learn more:
I recently stayed at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel for the first time. It was just what I expected--and it wasn't.
It's usually gratifying when a company uses personalized messaging or event-based marketing to show it really knows you and wants to strengthen its relationship. But how does it feel when they miss that opportunity? Not so good.
I was surprised this week when I read that Tampa, FL-based Sykes Enterprises, an $819 million business process outsourcing company, decided to close its 12-year-old Minot, North Dakota contact center because of a lack of applicants for job openings.
Continue reading "Why Did Sykes Close Its Contact Center?" »
I've been having a ponder about customers, especially now, in a lousy financial climate. That's the people like me who buy services and products from you. You have the opportunity to make us feel welcome in your world, or really unwelcome. Your brand can suck or soar. And so can your profits.
Right now your focus ought to be on survival. Not corporate survival, personal survival! I'm your customer. Can you survive without me?
Continue reading "Guest Blogger TimTrent: On Being a Customer" »
Tomorrow ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent George Stephanopoulos will conduct an interview with John McCain completely on Twitter. They are calling it a "Twitterview." As a journalist, the idea of keeping an interview subject's answers to 140 characters intrigues me, but I'm not sure how valuable the interview will be conducted within this type of platform.
Continue reading "ABC Experiments With Twittering the News" »
So far, the downturn we are encountering looks like a recession. It may be one of the more severe recessions in the last 50 years or so, but it's still only a recession, and not even close to turning into a genuine "depression," if you define that as a 10 percent or greater decline in GNP.
We should all remember, however, that economic downturns are entirely natural events, and you can't prevent them any more than you can prevent ocean waves, or thunderstorms. The global economic system is a highly complex, path-dependent system of interacting forces. In fact, in the aggregate the economy performs very much like the weather, and will always generate unpredictable results. No one has ever successfully predicted economic cycles consistently, and no one ever will -- ever. This is because the better we get at predicting them, the more opportunities we create for imaginative investors to arbitrage those predictions away with their own investments.
Continue reading "Three Steps to Turn a Recession into a Depression" »
You've heard it a thousand times, but I'll say it again anyway: Customers today expect you to know who they are (i.e. understand their specific needs) and treat them accordingly (e.g. communicate with relevance).
During a session at the Gartner CRM Summit UK, Furkan Ocal, a manager with Peppers & Rogers Group, reminded attendees about some of the important basics of gaining that customer knowledge. He offered four fundamental steps for customer segmentation that can help business leaders to better understand and communicate with their customers: identify, differentiate, interact, customize (IDIC). These principles may not be new, but they're effectiveness have stood the test of time.
Sometimes forgotten amid the news of stimulus packages, bailouts, mortgage meltdown, and market crash are the series of bankruptcies that have left big-box stores around the country vacant. In any other year, the failure of Circuit City, Linens n Things, and a number of other brands would be the top story of the day. These stories aren't getting the coverage they deserve, and the question of whether big retail chains can survive isnt being asked. Is it time we reconsider whether the dominance of Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe's, and their big-box cousins should come to an end and be replaced by smaller, locally-owned stores that existed in decades past?
Last week my husband John lost his cell phone in a New York City taxicab when it fell out of his pocket. Lucky for him, the cab driver didn't end up calling to blackmail him because of any lewd photos on the phone (a "30 Rock" reference, for those of you who don't watch the show). What ensued next was a systematic and surprising series of events.
We spend inordinate time and energy writing about the customer experience and how good experiences lead to customer loyalty and financial success. We have reinvented our approach to hiring staff to focus on the individual's "soft" people skills. We have spent many hours training our front-line staff on outstanding customer service techniques. We have constructed measurement systems and compensation models that reward or penalize the troops for customer satisfaction and loyalty. We have proselytized that CRM/customer experience management (CEM) is a business imperative that must be supported and mandated by the C-suite--and in many cases it is.
Yet many CEM efforts continue to struggle to achieve established goals.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Toni Hendrix: Managers' Role in the Customer Experience" »
Well, maybe they're just engaged. In today's lead 1to1 Weekly article, we discus the opportunities and advice for companies looking to integrate social media tools into their larger CRM strategy. It makes perfect sense as a strategy to learn about individual customers to create 360-degree view of the customer. There is still a way to go, however, before the two strategies meld.
Online reviews are common on companies' product pages, and on third-party sellers' sites, but what about a site created just to handle customer complaints, compliments, and other stories? That's the purpose of MeasuredUp, a customer-service social networking site that allows customers to post comments and allows companies to answer them, or partner with the network to leverage them.
Gartner predicts that by 2011, online communities will directly influence one third of all consumer purchases, online and offline, up from 9 percent in 2008. Considering the potential impact of that change, marketers who haven't already done so should build a strategy for optimizing social media. Gene Alvarez, a Gartner research vice president, offered advice on social media optimization during his session this morning at the Gartner CRM Summit UK.
"It's not about rebuilding what we had in the past; it's about building what's sustainable in the future."
That was a quote by Alcatel-Lucent CEO Ben Verwaayen at the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum 2009 today in Paris.
Continue reading "Economic Crisis, or Opportunity to Innovate?" »
Increasingly, senior executives believe they can differentiate on customer experience, but they face several challenges in turning that belief into reality, according to Ed Thompson, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst.
Continue reading "Live From Gartner CRM UK: Now Is the Time to Improve the Customer Experience" »
The future is moving away from enterprises owning the relationship to where customers own it. "The question is, how will companies respond?" asked Michael Maoz, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, during a session this afternoon at the Gartner CRM Summit UK.
Continue reading "Live From Gartner CRM Summit UK: Customers Take Ownership" »
What will CRM look like in 2020? Gartner analysts asked a keynote panel of industry vendor executives to weigh in.
Gartner's Jim Davies, research director, and Ed Thompson, vice president, distinguished analyst, fired off several questions on CRM predictions to three vendor executives at this morning's keynote panel. The panelists: Brad Wilson, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM; Woodson Martin, vice president, EMEA, Salesforce.com; and Steven Thurlow, CTO, Sword Ciboodle.
Continue reading "Live From Gartner CRM Summit UK: Past, Present, and Future of CRM" »
"We're all on the edge of fear due to the current economic conditions," Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner fellow, said during today's opening keynote. But like a roller coaster, there's also a thrill because of the potential for opportunity.
"Everything is changing. Competitors are changing, customers are changing," Raskino said. "Our job is to reconsider what is really going on. What is the new normal? The way we used to do business, what we used to understand...is all likely to change."
Continue reading "Live From Gartner CRM Summit UK: c=e.m.2.0 Is the Recovery Equation " »
I've been working on an ROI model for customer service social media, i.e. online communities. As I gain insight into this new frontier, I am amazed. Why? From all the things that you've seen me write and talk about--and if you haven't, you may want to take a look or a listen to a couple--you know that I am B.I.G. on customer advocacy. The customers come first. Without them, there's no business to be worried about.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D.: Why Customer Communities Work" »
Last week guest blogger Liz Strauss had a great blog post about the power of social media to create and build relationships (or not). But when launching your own social media strategy, what sort of expectations should you have? At last week's Conference Board Customer Experience Management show, I found out.
