Cloud computing in the past has been a controversial subject, with companies leery of putting proprietary data in the cloud. But with its promise to reduce costs, scale up, and provide real-time access to data, cloud computing is shedding its reputation and companies are increasingly migrating to this service.
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Earlier this week, my colleagues and I were debating the differences between what makes a good customer experience and if high marks for delivering customer experience translate to that company being truly customer centric.
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It's no mystery: Social savvy consumers have high expectations and will quickly spread the word when those needs aren't met. The results of the third annual American Express Global Customer Service Barometer released today confirm the lengths those consumers will go when they encounter poor service. The survey results also reveal how dismal the general state of customer service has become.
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After attending Forrester's Marketing Leadership Forum last week, I came away with two realizations: 1. Marketers are getting serious about leveraging conversations about their brands in social networks, and 2. Because many marketers are jumping in without a clear strategy about how social fits in with other customer touchpoints, data silos are proliferating.
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Brand building is a journey for all companies and organizations, said Chris Stutzman, vice president and principal analyst, at Forrester during his opening remarks during Forrester's Marketing Leadership Forum 2012 today in Los Angeles.
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April is customer loyalty month, a 30-day wake-up call for companies to realize that engaging customers one-on-one in stores, through social media, and in marketing communications can have far-reaching effects on customer loyalty, word-of-mouth marketing, and increased sales.
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It's inevitable. We've all experienced an airline horror story at one time or another. Whether it's a delayed flight, lost luggage, or a surly flight attendant, these experiences tend to unite us like the 4th of July.
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Mobile is no longer about the phone; it's about being connected. In fact, in some countries there are more mobile subscriptions than there are people (Mobile Marketing Association). Additionally, it takes 90 minutes for the average person to respond to an email, but it takes 90 seconds for the average person to respond to a text message (CTIA.org).
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One thing most likely on every marketer's mind today is integrated marketing. With ever-emerging customer channels and communications devices, marketers find themselves in a constant race to implement effective strategies, processes, and technologies that link communications across channels, ensuring consistency and personalization. In return, they want the complete view of the customer--a picture into their cross-channel behaviors and a guide to what influences them on their journey to purchase.
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Is your customer experience where it needs to be? If not, your business may be missing valuable opportunities to boost customer satisfaction and improve retention. Worse yet, you may soon be facing critical problems.
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AT&T is facing a customer backlash brought on by complaints of data throttling. After a customer in California sued AT&T in small claims court of data throttling, numerous customers have started petitions on Change.org in an attempt to urge AT&T to alter its data policies. The combined petitions have garnered thousands of signatures.
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The importance of delivering exceptional customer experiences during a down economy is essential to fostering customer satisfaction--a critical measure for success. But according to the 2011 fourth quarter customer satisfaction report released yesterday by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, there were only mild improvements in customer satisfaction with a yearly gain of .07 percent, and some not-so-surprising winners and losers.
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I stated in this January article that 2012 will be the year that mobile more successfully integrates with other customer interaction channels. As Forrester reveals this week in the report, "Mobile is the New Face of Customer Engagement" for mobile to successfully blend with other channels and engage with customers, CIOs need to rethink their role, strategy, and organizational structure.
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Now that your company is just getting the hang of navigating the social world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, along comes another site that you should start leveraging...Pinterest.
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Satmetrix's Net Promoter Score has always brought about some interesting debates: Should organizations tie compensation to their? What is the ideal score to strive for? And should it be the single predictor of a company's growth? At the company's Net Promoter 2.0 conference held today and tomorrow in San Francisco, it seems like pundits may have a new discussion in which to participate.
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In business, we don't use social media for the sake of being social; we leverage social media to grow our business. However, how can we determine whether a social media marketing or sales strategy is proving beneficial to our bottom line when many of us are still struggling to determine how to measure the success of our social efforts?
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It's an exciting time to be a retailer. In addition to the announcement made on Monday at the National Retail Federation's Big Show in New York City that retail sales are forecasted to grow 3.4 percent this year, the show also demonstrated that retailers will soon be better positioned than ever to offer customers a seamless, innovative, and convenient shopping experience.
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Every organization and company has unique opportunities to create meaningful interactions with their customers every day, through any channel, by engaging customers and offering exceptional value with each touch point.
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In 2012, social media will continue to transform our society, businesses, and social discourse. But I wonder if executives are still largely unconvinced that engaging in social sites and blogs isn't relevant to their work.
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As organizations continue to become increasingly overwhelmed with data files, the elephant in the room is unstructured data. And the problem seems to be getting out of hand.
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Don Peppers, founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group, asserted in Fast Company's blog last Friday that companies must leverage social media to harness the diverse opinions of their customers in order to evolve and innovate.
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American consumers may be turning to their smart phones more and more to make purchases and for seeking customer service. A new study, however, shows that the contact center still remains people's "go-to" source for service.
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With a little more than two shopping weeks left until Christmas, retailers are pulling out all the stops in the hope of getting customers through the door.
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This week "Consumer Reports" unveiled its 2011 Naughty & Nice Holiday List. First introduced in 2010 as part of a public-education campaign, the Naughty & Nice Holiday List examines the good and not-so-good shopping policies and the companies behind them. In doing so, Consumer Reports calls out untrustworthy practices, such as Liberty Travel's hidden fees, and praises Costco's generous return policy.
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Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday because it involves no commerce--no stress of purchasing gifts, no frenzied search for sales, no glitzy décor, and no marketing. The holiday involves the simple pleasures in life: food, family, and football.
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A protestor participating in Occupy Seattle recently was photographed lighting a Bank of America debit card on fire. The photo of the card going up in flames represents the sentiment among consumers right now and the power they hold.
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Promotions and hassle-free shopping are top of mind for consumers as they begin to think about the holiday shopping season. According to a number of studies, an increasing number of savvy holiday shoppers with limited budgets and a lack of time, plan to maximize discounts and deals this holiday season, as well as take to the Internet to conduct their shopping.
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When Oracle announced on Monday that it entered into an agreement to acquire RightNow Technologies for approximately $1.5 billion net of RightNow's cash and debt, some analysts and experts in the service industry had some immediate misgivings.
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The importance of providing a multichannel customer experience in marketing and service is paramount today for companies to keep and grow their customers. But in this race to have a presence on every new channel that emerges, I feel that we often ignore the basics: phone and email.
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Apple's release today of its iCloud service will not only set the company apart from its competition yet again, but it will also help to foster a loyal customer base.
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Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, is more than just a musician; he has the ability to inspire. Co-author of the book The Art of Possibility, Zander claims that art and music can energize our personal connections and lead to innovation and adoption to new practices. Today, he spoke at the World Business Forum in New York City. Below are some of the inspirational quotes from his speech.
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In 2007, Howard Shultz wrote a memo to then Starbucks CEO Jim Donald about how the company needed to get back to its core values and mission and make the changes necessary to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion for which Starbucks was known.
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In a down economy, delivering exceptional customer service is the difference between profiting and shuttering your doors.
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Some of you may have heard about or have downloaded the latest app called "Buzzword Bingo." The game allows people to challenge coworkers during conferences or meetings to see who can get five of the latest marketing catchphrases, technical jargon, or corporate buzzwords in a row to get Bingo.
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The age of customer empowerment has arrived, as evident at IBM's Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2011. The aim of the conference, being held this week in San Diego, is to drive home the importance for companies to successfully optimize their networks, organizations, and strategies on what IBM refers to as the "Buy, Market, Sell, and Service" commerce lifecycle.
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Some have compared Target shoppers' rush for its limited Missoni line yesterday to Black Friday.
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Earlier this week, I wrote an article "Putting Customer Service in Charge of Social," in which experts agree that marketing-led social initiatives tends to create silos and block visibility into customer concerns by customer service.
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One day last week when I emptied my mailbox, I got an interesting surprise: the fall 2011 catalog for retailer Restoration Hardware.
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In today's economy, the importance of customer service is the bedrock for a sustainable business--and quite possibly paramount for survival.
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On a recent visit to the beauty salon, my hairdresser, and owner of the store, lamented on how the business had been slow in recent weeks. As she rinsed my hair under the sink, she talked about the reason for the decrease in business, equating the slowdown with the lunar phases. She said that she noticed an uptick in business during full moon cycles.
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Corporate leadership today is under scrutiny. And rightly so. Corporate bailouts, high profits, and big bonuses have shaken public confidence in many companies' leaders.
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As mobile usage continues to accelerate across the globe, new McKinsey research that tracked consumers' digital habits through a series of surveys covering more than 100,000 respondents, highlights the increase, with results showing nearly 50 percent of U.S. online consumers are now advanced users of smart phones, social networks, and other emerging tools--up from 32 percent in 2008.
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A new Accenture survey: "The 7 Things Your Health Insurance Providers are not Telling You," reveals seven surprises about customer service.
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Customer service is even more important in a down economy and the new American Express/CFO Research Global Business & Spending Monitor shows that global finance executives are increasingly willing to invest in customer service to support their growth. In fact, nearly half (46 percent) of senior finance executives plan to invest more in customer service over the next year.
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Love them or loathe them, self-service check-out lanes have become a necessary evil in many grocery chains. This week, Albertson's, LLC, a grocery chain which owns and operates 217 stores in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah, announced that it will remove its self-help devices from all of its stores starting this month.
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At 1to1 Media, we've written a sufficient number of articles about the dangers of ignoring what your customers are saying about your brand in social channels. So when my friend, who works at one of the largest global business enterprise management software providers, told me about a meeting that he and his colleagues had last week with a U.S. government-owned transportation company to discuss social sentiment, the outcome was too humorous not to share.
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According to a new Forrester Research report, "The Customer Experience Ecosystem," customer experiences currently range from OK to bad. The report's author Kerry Bodine gathered the data from Forrester's Customer Experience Index, which includes scores for 153 brands in 13 industries based on ratings from more than 7,700 U.S. consumers. The results were surprising. Only 7 percent of the brands in the study earned "excellent" customer experience scores. Thirty-five percent of the brands received scores of "OK," 18 percent received
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A new global contact center benchmarking report reveals some positive trends toward improving the customer experience.
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My local news yesterday reported a story about an employee in a barber shop who stabbed his boss with his scissors because he didn't want to wait on the next customer. The employer is fine and recovering, but the story is an extreme example of lackadaisical service.
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Last week the coupon site Groupon announced it plans to raise $750 million to go public--six months after refusing Google's colossal $ 6 billion offer to buy the daily deals site.
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In light of companies' recent cost-cutting efforts, today's employees have been tasked with working the equivalent of three, four, or five employees. Add to that long commutes and no raises and you have a recipe for an uninspired and unhappy workforce.
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Everyone organization wants it: the ability to deliver unique, authentic, memorable, wow customer experiences across the enterprise. But saying it and doing it are two separate things. Getting it done requires companywide commitment, understanding, and a willingness to consistently deliver optimal customer experiences.
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The increasing usage of social media is forcing companies to think about how to incorporate social into their contact centers--something that companies and contact centers haven't had a need to think about until recently.
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Even though consumers today use a barrage of social technologies, including SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, ratings and reviews sites, and blogs, a new study shows that they are less inclined to share word-of-mouth (WOM) experiences than they were three years ago.
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At IBM/Unica's Marketing Innovation Summit in Boston this week, it's more apparent than ever that marketers are facing increasing pressures and evolving challenges. IBM's global "State of Marketing" survey released yesterday offers more proof of the changing landscape.
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