Trends

When politicians are campaigning, voters get close attention as prospective buyers and customers. After they take office, however, and are charged with actually running a government, how often do the elected officials maintain a real customer orientation to the voters? In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Purdue ...

The first point of contact between a business and its customers is increasingly a website, not a phone call or an in-person store visit. For government agencies, where store-like "walk-in" access is either difficult or unavailable -- especially at the national level -- improving customer contact t...

What if you answered the phone one day to a friendly voice offering tech support for some software that had been troubling you? "Not possible," you'd say. We all know the drill with technical difficulties. We call up the software company during business hours and then sit on hold only to get an agen...

For B2B marketers, social media has quickly become a desirable component of most cross-channel marketing campaigns. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, the vast majority of professionals worldwide are using social technologies for business purposes. Eighty-si...

Businesses are extending their reach across multiple channels of commerce -- from stores, call centers and kiosks to the Web 2.0 reality of social networking sites and blogs -- to maximize sales opportunities. As customers get more demanding in this competitive environment, it pays to listen to them...

One of the great things about CRM is that it allows you to discover who your best customers are -- and not just who the best ones are on a regular basis, but who are best over time. Knowing this allows you to focus your sales and marketing efforts more precisely and ensure the loyalty of these custo...

Salesforce.com's buy of Jigsaw is the latest, most indicative market mover in the transition to a lead generation economy. Twitter's forays into a sponsored tweets business model announced last week at Chirp is another. Yahoo selling its soul to Microsoft for Bing is another. And just about everythi...

The relationship between a business and its customers is determined by the interchanges that occur between them. These interactions are complex. They occur over a wide range of communication channels, such as phone, email, Web and text, including some outside of organizational control like social me...

As our lives grow more connected and more complicated, we strive to manage the influx of information and detail that consumes our daily living. In our everyday life, handling work, bills, family schedules and more is a daunting task even for those with exceptional organizational skills. For those of...

There's a huge discussion raging on the Internet started by a provocative question from Bob Thompson: Can you do social CRM without social media/networks? I find it curious that I am not in agreement with much of the discussion or, more to the point, I might agree with the conclusion but not the un...

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half. Many things came...

Some companies have a "PMO of one," which means that instead of setting up a sophisticated project management office, they assign one person the task of establishing and enforcing common project management processes. This person often has to deal with a broad spectrum of project work being performe...

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." CRM failures are very similar -- the ones that work do so for the same reasons, but those that go awry manifest a collection of diverse symptoms. CRM fails for a lot of reasons -- many of them traceable to...

Contact center managers have started to think beyond "service levels," "average talk time" and "wait time." Slowly yet steadily, FCR has found its way into customer operations dashboards. A dual function of customer experience and contact center efficiency, FCR accurately portrays the overall health...