629 Posts Found

An organization must, at the outset of considering using a CRM system, decide whether the main goal of the CRM system is to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Anne Stanton, Herb Rubenstein | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Customer Related, IT / Technology / E-Business

Guy Kawasaki interviews Bill Price, co-author with David Jaffe of a new book, The Best Service Is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs. In this interview he reveals the concept of “Best Service” and why it is important to small business owners.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Bill Price, Guy Kawasaki | Source: Sun Microsystems | Subject: Customer Related

One way to generate a precise customer value proposition is to think about the four most common barriers keeping people from getting particular jobs done: insufficient wealth, access, skill, or time.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Henning Kagermann, Mark Johnson | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

The central challenge of a segmentation strategy isn’t how to develop one—a variety of approaches work—but how to make it useful and integrate it into a company’s ongoing planning and performance-management efforts. The segmentation must explicitly link corporate financial objectives to the behavior of people in a segment and to customer experience goals. This linkage allows general managers and marketers to understand how the experiences … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Marc Singer, Peter W. Dahlström, Sean R. Collins | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Marketing / Sales

Abundance has satisfied, and even over-satisfied, the material needs of millions—boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating individuals’ search for meaning.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Pink | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Personality / Behavior

Reichheld, a director of Bain & Co., a strategy consulting firm in Boston, takes an old-fashioned concept?loyalty?and shows its relevance to customer retention and long-term profit growth. His position seems obvious, but its import has been lost amid the rapid turnover in the current business climate. He notes that major companies replace half their customers in five years, half their employees in four and a … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Frederick F. Reichheld | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

The fanfare and promise that boosted CRM’s introduction – and raised managers’ expectations – have turned to disappointment and doubt. There is, as these authors point out, still hope for reviving and realizing hopes for high returns from CRM. To help them, managers would do well to apply the lessons that these authors write about.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael Pearce, Yvette Mahieu | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, IT / Technology / E-Business, Marketing / Sales

Leonard L. Berry examines some of America’s great service companies and finds “nine drivers of excellence” that are behind them all. Discovering the Soul of Service looks at 14 diverse businesses, including the St. Paul Saints minor-league baseball team, Dial-A-Mattress, Midwest Express Airlines, and two of the world’s fastest-growing service companies–Charles Schwab and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. “The lessons they teach are clear indeed,” writes Berry, a … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Leonard L. Berry | Subjects: Best Practices, Customer Related

Experiential marketing, a decidedly turn-of-the-millennium form of corporate persuasion that strives to elicit a powerful sensory or cognitive consumer response, is rapidly superseding the stodgy features-and-benefits approach generally in vogue since the gray-flannel ’50s. In fact, says Bernd H. Schmitt, a professor of marketing and director of the Center on Global Brand Management at Columbia Business School, leading enterprises ranging from Gillette and Martha Stewart … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Bernd H. Schmitt | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Consumer needs and desires are not entirely mysterious. In fact, marketers of successful brands regularly draw on a rich assortment of insights excavated from research into basic frames or orientations we have toward the world around us, according to HBS professor emeritus Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of Marketing Metaphoria. Here’s a Q&A and book excerpt.

Content: Article | Authors: Gerald Zaltman, Lindsay Zaltman, Martha Lagace | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Some of your customers aren’t paying their bills. Others are so high-maintenance that the cost of serving them is eroding your profits. Before you show them the door, try this five-step process to manage these problem customers.

Content: Article | Authors: Feisal Murshed, Matthew Sarkees, Vikas Mittal | Sources: BNET, Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Most large companies have a foundation of fact about their customers in their data warehouses and business intelligence systems in the form of structured data: purchase history, coded responses to surveys, service ticket types, and so on. This foundation, however, lacks critical customer information, which floats above the fact plane. Call-center notes, open note sections of surveys, emails, weblogs, chat rooms, online forums, product reviews—and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Bean Ph.D. | Source: MarketingProfs | Subject: Customer Related

Much is being said these days about how marketing effectiveness can be increased by targeting customers with the right message at the right time based on customer behaviors and buying patterns. However, many companies have not been able to evolve past text-based confirmation messages.

Content: Article | Author: Jeff Hassemer | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

[In sales] we talk about acquisition, penetration and retention. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be acquired. I certainly don’t want to be penetrated, and I don’t want to be retained. When you think about the language we use—targeting an audience, launching a campaign, capturing a market—what does that have to do with relationships?

Content: Quotation | Author: John Foley | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

Is a satisfied customer a loyal customer? Not necessarily says the author of two books on CRM, who in this article makes the important point that satisfied customers can defect but customers who have a strong relationship rarely do.

Content: Article | Author: Ian Gordon | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Management, Marketing / Sales

The studies we’ve conducted are 100% conclusive: customers who’ve had an issue that was resolved effectively became more loyal than those who experienced trouble-free service! Why? Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see us strut our service.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Leonardo Inghilleri, Micah Solomon | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Customer Related

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Whether they are sales associates, flight attendants, cashiers, hotel receptionists, or telemarketers, frontline employees are central to value creation. As the first interface with the consumer, they can make or break the relationship. From a strategist’s perspective, however, it can be difficult to get frontline employees to treat customers consistently the way the business and the competitive environment demand. Faced with an angry customer, many … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Anthony Miles, Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Customer Related, Management

Just as city planners use master plans to stimulate healthy growth, a “Customer Community Master Plan” enables marketers to develop an overall customer interaction plan.

Content: Article | Author: Adrian C. Ott | Source: MarketingProfs | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales

“In the process of working with some of the best run companies in the world, we have learned a great deal about how the world’s finest organizations unleash the power of their human systems and how the worst fail to do so. Though the specific ways that the HumanSigma [management] model may be implemented in your company may vary, the underlying philosophy can be boiled … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jim Asplund, John Fleming | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Customer Related, Human Resources, Management