Think you can't put a dollar amount on great customer service? Think again. StellaService, a provider of customer service ratings for online businesses, announced last week that the value of great online service in the U.S. is $17.3 billion and across all consumer categories it soars to $268 billion per year.
Continue reading "Putting a Dollar Amount on Good Customer Service" »
Oracle Corp. Senior Vice President and Chief Customer Officer Jeb Dasteel discusses how the software giant goes about collecting, analyzing and acting on information it gathers from its customers.
Social CRM is quite the hot topic lately. With all the articles written about it, many companies feel they are lagging behind. But don't worry if you don't have a specific strategy in place yet. Even with the fast pace of social media, rushing into a social CRM strategy could have negative effects.
Continue reading "Are You Making Social CRM Strategy Mistakes?" »
In the world of social media your voice is your brand. Do your employees parlez sociale media?
Some companies today leave their online branding to chance. Their employees are blogging, tweeting, and Facebooking on their behalf without guidelines or training on how to best do so. Every comment these employees keystroke has the potential to improve or destroy the customer experience, customer engagement, and brand reputation. In a time when trust is paramount to success, when customers increasingly expect that companies will act in their best interest, companies that neglect to support their employees with interaction guidelines and social media training risk negative word of mouth that could spiral out of control--and ultimately damage not only their brand and reputation, but also their business performance.
Continue reading "Speaking the Language of the Social Customer" »
In this age of data explosion, marketing and data are becoming synonymous. A perfect storm of technology, data, and the new consumer, are coming together to finally demand and achieve true one-to-one relationship marketing. First, personalization; then, mass customization; and now, real-time marketing. It truly is a great time to be a marketer. But how do we harness the power of
real-time engagement? More important, what does real-time marketing even mean?
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Erik Nelson:
Riding the Crest of Real-Time Marketing" »
Although many organizations continue to gain a growing number of followers on Twitter and Facebook, CMOs continue to wrestle with how best to engage customers to meet their product and support needs using social media.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: Leveraging Social Media to Deepen Customer Connections" »
We all know that marketing must be targeted, focused, and personal in order to appeal to existing customers and to attract new ones as well. To emphasize the importance of targeted marketing, Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, created 10 key advertising principles for the next century under a new Marketer's Constitution. He discussed the principles last week at the NexTargeting Summit in New York City hosted by X+1.
Let's face it. We're all tired. We are tired of getting so much spam. We are tired of having to throw out so much useless direct mail. We are tired of having to hang up on a telemarketer. We, justifiably, have communication fatigue. And at today's Varolii's Interaction '10 user conference, executives offered some remedies to liven up customer communications for both the company and customer.
Continue reading "Fighting Communication Fatigue With Mass Personalization" »
Tough times call for drastic measures. A natural reaction to the current economic downswing was for companies to counter a drop in revenues by cutting costs wherever possible. The result meant that many companies' marketing budgets were substantially cut and their staff was reduced to a skeletal crew.
Personally, I have seen a significant drop in direct mail and catalogs in my mailbox, and many of the companies that used to regularly market to me and my household have completely stopped. Broad scale advertising seems to have slowed, and many of these brands aren't finding me online either.
Where have these companies gone?
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Jim Umberger: Staying in Front of Your Customers" »
One-to-one marketing: the ability to reach an individual rather than a segment, and the ultimate goal of every marketer. Marketing to a segment of one is such a difficult feat to attain that there are entire magazines, conferences, websites, and blogs dedicated to it. And thanks to the age of the Internet, reaching a consumer directly and personalizing that experience has had a major revitalization.
However, all that is changing rapidly. It would seem the Internet has been the best friend of the one-to-one marketer, but now is making one-to-one marketing less relevant on a daily basis. Over the past few years the evolution of the Internet has created a new social connectivity, allowing people to not only get personalized content when, where and how they want it, but also to share that content and their experiences with their friends and connections.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Jeff Hilimire: 1to1toMany Marketing" »
My philosophy professor used to say: everyone serves a purpose in life, even if they only serve as a horrible example for others.
A more accurate description of Nestle's mishandling of a big fracas in social media could hardly be written. It started with an initiative by Greenpeace to get Nestle to stop using palm oil in its products, contending that the harvesting of palm oil was damaging the environment. The organization created a faux Nestle Kit Kat logo, and posted a video on You Tube. Then - you guessed it - Nestle tried to have You Tube take the video down, and things spun out of control from there, with Nestle doing dumb things ranging from the outright idiotic, like deleting critical comments on their Facebook fan page, to the inane and passive aggressive, like correcting critics' spelling errors.
Continue reading "Nestle - A Social Media Case Worth Studying " »
Most every executive wants to move the needle: more awareness, more customers, more interaction. But pushing metrics up doesn't always mean success, if the cost is too high, said Robert Shaw, Ph.D., professor of marketing metrics, Cass Business School, and founding director of Value Based Marketing Forum, during his keynote at 2010 Gartner CRM Summit UK. Sometimes, what drives the most value is to narrow your focus and use analytics to target the right customers at the right time.
Launching and sustaining a customer relationship management initiative can be as challenging as reaching level four in the video game "Top Gun." During a presentation at the 2010 Gartner CRM Summit UK Michael Dunne, a Gartner research vice president, cited 13 reasons many CRM projects are handicapped or lose momentum. Business leaders or project leaders...
What are you going to do to help your company sell more? This the question Stephen Prentice posed to attendees at the 2010 Gartner CRM Summit UK.
Prentice, a vice president and Gartner Fellow, advised attendees that their companies must engage customers today to get mindshare and wallet share. The current environment, however, presents a significant challenge to doing so: The reality, Prentice said, is that things are changing much more quickly than we think.
Continue reading "Business Truths to Ignore at Your Own Risk " »
Companies are making more extensive use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to engage their customers. But because many organizations are just becoming involved with social CRM, most executives are still figuring out how best to measure the returns from these initiatives. 1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman spoke with Brad Wilson, General Manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM about different approaches for CMOs to consider.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: Measuring the Benefits of Social CRM" »
The old credit card business model, in which companies make money off of consumer error, is finished. With new regulations taking effect, the credit card industry needs to shift its strategy to be more customer focused.
Continue reading "The Making of a Trustworthy Credit Card" »
When it comes to customer loyalty, benchmarks provide a gauge for companies to determine how they are delivering customer experience.
Today Satmetrix released its 2010 Net Promoter Industry Benchmarks for the insurance, financial services, airlines, telecommunications, technology, retail, and online services industries based on survey responses from 19,500 U.S. consumers. John Abraham, general manager of Net Promoter programs at Satmetrix, said that the scores serve as an indicator of how companies are performing.
Continue reading "A New NPS Report Shows Winners, and Losers, in Customer Experience" »
Yesterday British soccer superstar David Beckham tore his Achilles tendon during a match. The L.A. Galaxy player was on loan to A.C. Milan for the winter, keeping fit for the upcoming World Cup in June. Doctors say the injury will keep him out of soccer for up to eight months. That means no World Cup, and possibly the end of his storied soccer career.
While the impact on England's team won't be too severe (he is not considered an automatic starter for the national team these days), the companies that sponsor him will certainly feel the pain. Beckham is one of the world's most popular figures and many companies have invested millions to make him a spokesperson. As marketers prepare for the run-up to the World Cup, his injury may have a lasting business impact.
Continue reading "The Business Impact of David Beckham's Injury" »
Many decision-makers are struggling to strike a balance between efforts to reduce their organization's contact center costs with the need to maintain quality for a consistent customer experience. 1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman spoke with Nicolas de Kouchkovsky, Chief Marketing Officer at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Applications about actionable steps business leaders can take to optimize their call center operations.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: Trends Driving Workforce Optimization Strategies" »
Few companies truly understand the importance of investing in their employees. But fewer still realize how critical it is to routinely listen to employees to know exactly where to make their investments in their companies.
A new television show "Undercover Boss" on Sundays on CBS reveals how some executives are in the dark about their companies' employees and policies.
Continue reading ""Undercover Boss" Provides a Wake-Up Call for CEOs" »
2009 was the year many companies became aware of the potential impact of social media and began experimenting. 2010 needs to be the year we make it an integrated part of our activities, not just a standalone novelty. I hope by now you've come to terms with the fact that your customers -- and your employees -- are talking about you and your industry in social media, whether you're out there or not.
One of the most important steps in equipping your company to participate in social media is establishing a social media policy. It could be as simple as saying, "Understand the standards of the online community and don't do anything stupid." For most companies though, the realities of branding, marketing, communications and legal issues require a bit more detail.
And if you don't have a policy in place, you have a de facto policy that says, "Do whatever you want."
Last week I moderated a panel of loyalty experts who discussed distinctions between emotional and behavioral loyalty. During the roundtable, Prof. John Daly of the University of Texas added a new type of loyalty into the mix -- profitable loyalty. A profitably loyal customer helps the company make money. The key is knowing who these customers are and taking action.
I know what you're thinking. Delivering a one-to-one customer experience shouldn't have to be a choice over branding; it should be an essential part of branding. I agree. But when your brand isn't fully established, can taking a one-to-one approach help a company win over established competitors?
If you ask someone to name a social media tool, they would probably say Facebook or Twitter. These get the most attention and are familiar to the masses. Now ask them how they use either service and you are likely to hear that they post a message for others to read. This misses 80 percent of the opportunity. Where is the dialogue, the engagement that drives traffic and loyalty? Sadly, it is mostly absent.
A growing number of companies are launching Voice of the Customer programs to help gather customer feedback across multiple channels. 1to1 Media's Tom Hoffman spoke with Roderick Morris, Vice President of Marketing at Vovici to discuss some of the inherent challenges of making these programs succeed, including data integration issues.
Continue reading "Hoffman's Hot Seat: Getting Voice of the Customer Programs to Succeed" »
Over the past couple weeks, I've interviewed a couple handfuls of data analytics experts for an article that I'm working on which will highlight the new data economy. Each expert seems to concur: Data silos still remain the main reason that keep many companies from integrating their analytics efforts into multiple channels or layering indepth predictive analytics.
Continue reading "An Enterprise Approach to End Data Silos" »
How is it that so many people think they know what I need? They haven't asked, nor have I met them. Yet they fill my inbox with information they assume I need. It's rude.
Is it possible that senders of this "stuff" think they're the only ones pitching information? Have they considered that they'll end up in my junk folder? I guess they don't care, because the next transmission is on the way. It's all about them, what they're selling, with no real interest to serve me.
Continue reading "Guest Blogger Michelle Cubas: Earn a Place in My Inbox" »
