Customer Service

It seems so many companies are finding it easier than ever to automate, speed up, and turbocharge their way into mediocre performance with customers all because they don't stop to re-define the essence of their strategies for attracting, selling to, and serving customers in the first place. What's n...

The coming year is going to see the fruition of several dominant trends that have been percolating just under the surface of CRM specifically and enterprise software markets generally. It's going to be an invigorating and challenging year because many software companies will need to re-invent thems...

There's a dividing line emerging in marketing today, and it doesn't have anything to do with the size of a marketing budget, the amount of CRM or channel management software installed, the size of the company or its long-standing reputation. In fact all these things don't matter nearly as much as a...

Ask any salesperson what they never have enough of, and leads will always be at the top of the list. The traditional forms of creating leads including advertising, direct mail, webinars, events and tradeshows, and even cold calling aren't delivering enough leads to create consistently strong pipeli...

American retailers are turning to radio frequency identification technology -- RFID tags -- to ensure that in-demand items are in stock this holiday season, hoping to bolster end-of-year revenues, experts say. Holiday revenue can account for 25 to 40 percent of a company's annual revenue, and retail...

Companies allocate significant resources to customer satisfaction measurement and improvement. Wayne Hoyer, chairman of the marketing department at University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, says satisfaction with product or service quality has a strong and positive impact on customers...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

As goods and services increasingly become commoditized on a global scale, companies are looking for new ways to reduce costs, customer churn, and make the most of their existing customer base. In order to whittle down their overhead, many companies are looking at outsourcing their service delivery g...

Consumer satisfaction with wireless phone service providers has slipped significantly over the last year, according to an annual study released by J.D. Power and Associates yesterday. Overall, satisfaction fell 10 percent compared to 2004. That's the largest year-over-year change in satisfaction sin...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they d...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

Today, the first place your customers look for help is online. Gartner Group has estimated that capturing a new customer is 4 to 10 times more expensive than providing good service to an existing one. They additionally said over 68 percent of customers defect due to poor service. In a more recent st...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at highe...

In the recent cases of customer data sales by bank employees, employers came face to face with their biggest security challenge -- trusting their employees. "It's pretty much the toughest security problem to deal with," says Rich Mogull, research vice president at Gartner, Phoenix. At the end of May...