CRM as a concept has been around for a long time. And many firms have undertaken not just one, but several, CRM initiatives. As such, Gartner has looked at how CRM evolves and developed generational models that explain the changes in thinking and emphasis that we see.
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Each year we put a stake in the ground to identify trends that marketers should pay special attention to. This year we see these on the horizon:
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I had the privilege to attend the recent 2012 NRF convention and was impressed with the buzz around loyalty marketing and customer centricity. In one session Macy's CMO Peter Sachse stated, "We don't need new customers. We need to keep the ones we have and get more out of them." Simple yet powerful; all marketers should take this approach--and will create more valuable brands as a result. Yet, why do so many companies continue to miss the mark here?
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Instead, many companies use social to promote a product, to sell, or to monitor brand mentions. To be truly effective at leveraging social to engage customers and foster loyalty, organizations must transition from using social as a one-dimensional broadcast device to a two-way communications channel that enables meaningful and personalized dialogue.
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Last year was an exciting one for the voice of the customer (VoC) world. We saw significant advancements in a number of key areas, including process, culture, and technology. Ultimately, these moves led to better experiences for customers and better financials for companies.
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You can't avoid the noise generated by holiday shopping this year; whether it's because of a slow news day or because people are tired of hearing about a somber economy and dizzying coverage of the presidential campaign, there has been definite momentum for a deep dive into consumer's shopping habits this year. This past Black Friday I was invited to speak on Fox News Channel to offer tips to consumers who might be worrying that they missed the best deals
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Business leaders don't have to look very far to see consumer outrage at companies like Netflix and Bank of America for inadvisably boosting prices and adding new fees. Before increasing prices, companies would be well served by taking the time and care needed to understand which customers value which products and services, their price sensitivity especially given the current economic conditions, and the competitive landscape.
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Social customer service is no longer a nice-to-have. It's a must. Successful social marketing has opened up the social customer service route, and there's no turning back. Consumers have responded to calls to interact with the companies they purchase from and are using social channels comprehensively. In fact, consumers and companies alike have embrace Facebook and Twitter as mainstream communication channels; anything your customers have to say to you, they'll do so in public.
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Net Promoter is both popular and controversial, so naturally we in Forrester's customer experience (CX) research practice get lots of questions about it from CX leaders whose companies have adopted it or plan to adopt it in the future. Overall, we know that Net Promoter can effectively support CX efforts when companies implement it correctly. But we also know that correct implementation from a CX perspective is in no way a given.
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The real-time Web is an increasingly powerful tool for customers to get the word out when out when they feel a company has wronged them. In fact, a recent study by loyalty marketing company Colloquy revealed that 26 percent of those surveyed said they were far more likely to raise hell about a negative experience than they were to sing the praises about a positive one.
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For most of my career I've been obsessed with delivering an exceptional service experience, creating advocates, and coaching others to do the same. And, after nearly two decades in customer facing and operational roles, I think I'm pretty good at it. Recently, I had an opportunity to sit in the "buyers" chair. My subpar experience helped crystallize some things in my mind, specifically the behavioral attributes required of your people to create a true customer-centric culture: empathy, impeccable listening skills,
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My friend Sasha has been facing some tough personal and financial challenges, and has threatened many times to close her business. After years watching my business advice fall on deaf ears due to her indecisiveness and inertia, I finally stopped giving it. We recently surveyed our B2B community, and it felt like Sasha influenced the results. Inertia was a recurring theme.
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I recently had a discussion with my colleague Richard Evensen about how customer experience (CX) pros draw on the work done by market insights (MI) departments. Our conclusion: In most cases, they don't. Instead, we often find CX teams doing their own research to understand and improve the experience. This represents a broader phenomenon that we call shadow MI: research commissioned or executed inside a company without the approval or involvement of MI professionals.
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If there is one acronym that marketers live and die by its KPI. Any marketer worth his or her salt knows that measuring key performance indicators is essential to show progress and improvement when it comes to shoring up the company's bottom line. Without KPIs, marketers may have a difficult time proving to their boss that they're doing something other than playing Angry Birds all day long.
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I just added up the time that I spent last week having frustrating interactions with companies as a customer: 1 hour and 10 minutes (roughly). I owe most of that to my wireless carrier, but a few other companies also made generous contributions. In each case, I ended the interaction feeling worse than when I'd started--edgier, tenser, more negative in general. It's not as if I could turn those emotions off, either. Petty though they were, they lasted a while.
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Most every seminar on contact center best practices I've attended in the past few years has preached the gospel of nurturing long-term customer value. The importance of establishing trust, building loyalty, and developing customers for life has been drummed into us like a Sunday school lesson. In theory, at least, businesses are beginning to heed the call.
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As I was writing an article for 1to1 Magazine--a piece about sales strategies that make price irrelevant--writer's block struck. The source of my difficulty derived from a nagging customer service issue; nothing major, but one of those sort of surprising service experiences: "Hmmm, I really didn't expect this company to behave that way..." Happily, the moment I eventually got off the phone with the company's customer service representative, one of the most colorful comments from a source I spoke to
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Sometimes you make an investment that turns out to have more value than you expected. You buy a baby monitor and realize it can double as a way to hear family members summon you from the house when you're in the backyard. You purchase a smartphone and discover that it's also a voice recorder, compass, and tool to identify birds or track your daily jogging performance. In a sense, the same thing is happening with home agents. We can all
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Voice of the customer (VoC) leaders are constantly on the hunt for better analytics to identify what customers are saying and doing and, in turn, where companies should focus their attention. For the most part, the hunt is worthwhile. Just think about the value that text mining has delivered during the past few years. However, this focus becomes a problem when it turns into tunnel vision, leading VoC pros to ignore other research tools that yield deep customer understanding.
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Every year the Voice of the Customer (VoC) Awards process gives my fellow judges and me the opportunity to explore the inner workings of the day's best VoC programs. I've already documented many of the best practices we've uncovered on my blog and in Forrester reports. Now I want to let you behind the curtain. Here are the pieces of advice that this year's nominees provided for other organizations to learn from, grouped into common themes. Straight from the horses'
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With pressure mounting on the marketing function to more clearly identify the return on various investments, attribution modeling may seem like the Holy Grail to some marketers. To others, attribution modeling--or attribution management, as it's often called--is as much an enigma as the concept of marketing ROI.
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Traditionally, within B2B transactions, buyers were dependent on sellers to provide expert advice. This often led to courtship, evaluation, and acquisition. Of course buyers could pay consultants or purchase analyst research, but ultimately all roads led back to the seller. Even in the Google era, search results usually returned vendor-authored content. Vendors were essentially in control of what information was released to buyers, and when. Conversely, social networks promote a free and open exchange of information that continues to drastically
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Fear is that ever-present nagging voice in the back of our minds; it's the one that tells us to stay close to the shore and to avoid risk at a certain cost. Now, more than ever, fear has become a daily constant in our lives -- fear of losing your job, fear of losing a client, or worse, fear of not being "good enough" to offer value. In a constant stream of seemingly petty anxiety and uneasiness, I have to
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Teams perform better when they have more positive interactions than negative interactions. Why? Some might assume that teams that perform well have more to be positive about, so they end up having more positive interactions. But psychologists find that it's actually the other way around: positivity drives performance.
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Many executives will say they believe that having loyal customers is critical to business success. But what are they really doing about it? Most will point to their customer care training or CRM system and say, "That's how we take care of loyalty here." Some will point to their monthly newsletter or discount program to demonstrate their efforts. All of these are good attempts. However, they are not enough. Companies need to take a more holistic approach to creating greater
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A few weeks ago I described the sobering fact that most voice of the customer (VoC) programs don't deliver business results. I recently dug into the responses to Forrester's Q1 2011 Global Customer Experience Peer Research Panel Survey to find out why. Here's some of what I found (full results will be available in my new report titled, "Voice Of The Customer Programs Don't Deliver Enough Value," due out later this week):
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As a reporter, writer, and synthesizer of insights (a more accurate title these days), I've long wrestled with the question of whether I should clean up my source's quotes. If a CMO describes "averse" economic conditions when she clearly means "adverse," can I change her quote for her benefit (as well as the benefit of the reader)? Zappos kicked a similar question into the realm of marketing ethics, according to this nifty article on Slate, "Awsum Shoes!," that asks whether
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Challenges are mounting for sales teams: higher quotas, changing metrics, and new channels in which to sell. The problem is that these changes can get in the way of salespeople doing what they do best, which is selling. To better understand this conundrum, BigMachines recently conducted a benchmark survey, identifying the key factors that drive sales teams, as well as the roadblocks they encounter. The results uncovered widespread, inefficient processes and the fact that few organizations actually take the steps
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I am not generally a user of social media. I don't Tweet, I don't blog on my own blog. LinkedIn is a bother now that I have a job. When I signed up for Facebook a few years ago, I did so only because my thriller-writer friends insisted. My profile photo was my book cover jacket. Over the course of 3 years I amassed 38 friends on Facebook. I have not seen the movie The Social Network. I am not
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To get my child to join me at the dog park in the mornings, I had resorted to bribing him with a stop at Starbucks. With my "mom" hat on, it proved to be an effective enticement. As a frequent customer and loyalty practitioner, I cannot help but question why it was so much work (on my part) to reap my deserved recognition and rewards. We've all talked about how Starbucks has changed us. We now talk in terms of
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According to contemporary wisdom (in other words, according to what I hear), customers who experience service failures followed by effective service recoveries actually become more satisfied and loyal than customers who experience no failures at all. This is called the service recovery paradox, and academic research suggests that it's not as common or consistent as we might think. Many customers who experience solid service recoveries still end up less happy than their problem-free counterparts. Service failures are bad, after all.
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An exciting new movement that calls for combining Voice of Customer (VOC) data with operational data (CRM, financial, etc.) is happening now. This new opportunity is Voice of Customer Intelligence or VOCi. The ultimate goal of VOCi is to provide actionable business intelligence derived primarily from VOC data sets, but integrated with other related customer data to tell a powerful story that company executives buy in to and rely on to make decisions. VOCi requires a shift from data gathering
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It's imperative for companies today more than ever to focus on supporting and growing relationships with their core customers and turning those customers into their best salespeople. When people get really excited about a company with which they do business, they share their love with colleagues, friends, and family; they brag about how great it is to work with your company, and how clever they were to find you. Most important, they will passionately recommend your company to everyone who
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The term social intelligence is being used to describe the next big thing in social media monitoring and analysis. Zach Hofer-Shall of Forrester Research deserves credit for popularizing the term. Several leading technology solution providers have come to embrace it. So, too, have a growing number of industry practitioners and observers. I count myself among the latter. Social intelligence is a terrific way to describe the next rung on this evolutionary ladder. That rung maps to some key technology innovations.
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The digital research company eMarketer has just released its latest report on social media usage in the United States, "U.S. Social Network Usage: 2011 Demographic and Behavioral Trends," and the data is remarkable. The report is notable for three reasons. First, we have hit the two thirds majority of U.S. Internet population for social network use -- 63.7 percent of U.S. Internet users actively use a social network. Second, social networks' rapid growth rate is slowing, which seems to be
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More than half of companies say that they have voice of the customer (VoC) programs in place today, and many others say they're planning to establish programs within the next year. That's a good thing, because collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback is a recipe for success in financial as well as customer experience terms. The firms recognized in Forrester's 2010 Voice of the Customer Awards attributed impressive business results to their VoC efforts, ranging from increases in customer
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SMS is a bit Jekyll and Hyde; it's among the most private forms of communication available, yet is extremely social. Therein lays the intrigue. My question is this: "If someone hands you a business card, there is implied permission to call or email. What about texting?" I started an exploration with a query on Twitter. As responses began to come in, my curiosity was piqued. I began to wonder about where this peculiar channel fits into customer service and social
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I've just had one of those maddening IVR experiences that consumers love to hate. I called a local Internet service provider and got caught in IVR purgatory when the system kept asking me for an account number that I didn't have. By the time I gave up -- dozens of unproductive buttons later -- I was ready to launch an IHateDell.net-style campaign to let the world know not to do business with the cable company. In today's environment, where brand
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The term social demand generation has been kicked around for at least a year among social CRM types. And it's definitely not a "geeks-only" phrase. I've heard social demand generation used by both veteran markers of the hardcore Michael Porter school (writer of Competitive Advantage) and by "new-school" social media marketers alike. That said, should social demand generation be called social revenue marketing? No! Social revenue marketing is simply a subset of social demand generation. Here are five reasons why
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When Christi McNeill describes her social strategist role at Southwest Airlines as the "cheerleader and advocate for social media," she may be embracing her organizational culture's flair for humor. McNeill's hard work and effort has helped lift Southwest's social media presence to the top of the class in the airlines industry. McNeill describes her role's largest challenge as "Doing it all," which a quick look at her company's "Nuts about Southwest" blog confirms. In addition to writing posts and manages
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I waited until the last minute to get my car inspected this year. It was a Sunday, so my usual service station was closed. Luckily, the Firestone near my house was open and had availability. I was happy just to find a place, but the folks at Firestone made me happier by delivering a positive experience from end to end -- clean store, polite service guy, clear expectations about timing, a call to make sure I wanted to replace a
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If you called American Express a few years ago to report a lost credit card, you got the card cancelled right on the spot. If it appeared under the couch a few minutes later, you were out of luck. You still had to wait several days for a new card to arrive. It was bad for you. It was bad for Amex. Luckily, a customer care professional (CCP) noticed this phenomenon. And, luckily, Amex had a formal program for CCPs
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A few weeks ago I called a local chimney-cleaning company and set up an appointment for a cleaning. When the workmen arrived, I asked them to remove their sooty shoes when walking around the house. Despite this request, the workers left an ugly trail of black soot stains on our basement carpeting. So began a fascinating opportunity to experience how some companies are mastering the integration of marketing and customer service. My problem was turned into a marketing opportunity by
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"Don't waste your time!" This is a phrase we hear all the time. People have even written songs about it. And for a businessperson especially, time wasted is usually equated with time lost -- which further translates into lost customers. If you ask most people, a time-waster most often conjures up the image of a lazy, non-productive person; in other words, a non-achiever. But are there situations where "wasted time" can actually be a good thing?
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All of my favorite restaurants have at least two things in common: amazing service and great food--and yes, in that order. No matter how delicious the dishes, it's always the people--and how welcome, happy, and just plain "good" I feel around them--that keeps me coming back. The enthusiasm of an engaged employee is infectious--to both coworkers and to customers. We've all felt it. That's why no matter what business you're in, the people who work for you can help be
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The volume of social conversation is exploding. Hundreds of millions of blogs, millions of forums, and hundreds of thousands of online communities are supporting instantaneous conversations worldwide. And every day, new channels, forums, communities, and topics are emerging, opening the door for even more conversation and information exchange. Consider the numbers: Facebook users collectively spend more than 6 billion minutes in the online community every day. Microblogging site Twitter is on pace to process almost 10 billion tweets this year.
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For years contact centers have operated as islands within the enterprise. Customer complaints about everything from broken products to dirty restrooms have typically been trapped in the call center like the marooned characters on Lost. Valuable information that could be used to improve products and services, drive marketing, and shape new programs has rarely been shared outside the four walls of the call center facility.
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I remember thinking that the Greek and Roman mythology unit in my Junior High Social Studies class was really boring. But in the past few years several movies have come out (Troy, Clash of the Titans, and even Percy Jackson) that have made those ancient legends seem cool. Pure fantasy, but cool nonetheless. The term "myth," according to the dictionary, can refer to a traditional story about the history of a people group (e.g., the ancient gods). Or it can
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Here's a surefire way to send a powerful signal to someone we are with that he or she is not very important to us: Release eye contact, stop listening, and look at our cell phones to take or send a text message. Oh I know...everybody is doing it. Right? Check again. I have never, ever, been with a major CEO, company owner, or any other highly successful person who constantly interrupted the flow of conversation or intimacy while they were
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Most customer experience efforts focus on doing bad things less and doing good things more. That's a reasonable approach. But, realistically, customers will run into problems no matter how hard companies try to eliminate them. Albert Einstein described this well when he said, "Every day, man is making bigger and better fool-proof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools." Even without foolish customers or incompetent companies, customer problems will persist because customers are constantly changing -
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I couldn't agree more with Denis Pombriant. No, really. The guy talks a lot of sense. In a recent post, "Engagement is a Contact Sport," he expresses frustration at the "old think" that prevents companies from recognizing social media as a valid marketing and sales tool. Denis writes, "It's a new world, so stop treating it like the old world." I want to stand up and give someone a fist-bump. My boss, SAS CMO Jim Davis, says that one of
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Anyone can sell a product online. But a successful company does more than just sell products -- they provide customers with the information and support they need to be effective with those products. Doing so will keep customers coming back and will inspire referrals.
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In a tough economy, a path of least resistance is the belief we can save our way back to profitability with savings from, among other so-called cost centers, call centers. Thinking fewer calls are better, we drive customers away from personal contact and toward website technology that lets them resolve issues for themselves. Thinking shorter calls are better, we link customer service representative performance to faster average handling times.
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The scenario unravels in rapid fire incompetence: A call center agent stumbles through a script, struggling to comprehend All-American novelties like Green Bay Packers "Cheese Heads." Lunchtime mercifully arrives, and leaves behind an empty call center as every agent heads to the cafeteria while the phones ring off the hook. The afternoon concludes with the staff playing a silly "True or False" game about American culture. All these scenes came from NBC's new "Outsourced" series - which, while attempting to
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Social media's skyrocketing adoption, along with "Generation Me's" coming of age and buying power, is drastically changing customer service and its best practices. Companies that don't figure out how to leverage social media while catering to the newly empowered Generation Me consumer will suffer lost customers, brand damage, and failed new customer acquisition strategies. "Generation Me" is a term loosely described as Gen X combined with Gen Y, meaning anyone from age 10 to 40 years old. Usually defined as
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