No better time to LISTEN to your customers!

If you’re like me, you have seen an INSANE increase to the volume of incoming emails in the past few months. It’s mind numbing: every single company you have ever had any kind of relationship with is reaching out to try to reassure you, attract you, differentiate themselves, and more. It’s just too much! (I knew things had gone over the [...]

Why Do Some Companies Avoid Research Like the Plague?

In a previous post about obstacles to win loss research, I talked about the fact that some companies just don’t do ANY research. Some of the reasons that companies don’t do research: Don’t trust their customers’ perspectives: Some companies are skeptical about their customers’ ability to be objective/overcome their biases.  Other companies consider their technology/concepts to be beyond their customers’ limited imagination.  [...]

Are You Talking to Your Customers?

Talking to your customers is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of how this crazy economy is impacting their business, their customers, and the implications of all of this on how they work with you. By reaching out to proactively talk to your customers, you can learn a lot about the pressures they are dealing with which [...]

B2B Customer Experience Best Practices

Are you interested in understanding what the customer experience (CE) movement is all about? As the dynamics in the customer's world are constantly evolving, an insatiable curiosity about customers is a key to success. Company-wide alignment with customers prevents waste (improves profit) and prevents customer hassles (improves organic revenue growth). Check out the 2014 ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Benchmarking Study. As [...]

By |September 27, 2014|

Why CRM Implementations Fail: The Top Ten Killers

Submitted by guest blogger, Reuven Shelef, President of OUT OF THE BOX Consulting CRM solutions make big promises. Implement one well, and you’ll increase sales, improve support, and create loyal customers almost overnight. As a Salesforce Cloud Alliance Partner, I know that’s not universally the case. Over the years, I’ve become familiar with what can cause a deployment to work well, [...]

Peter Shankman’s New Passion: Listen to Your Customers…or Else!

Today I had a great 1:1 with Peter Shankman, the uber social networking guru, who has been spouting radically new ways of thinking about social media, PR, marketing, advertising, and customer service for years. What led to our conversation is his newest focus on getting companies to understand the bottom-line benefits of listening to their customers and delivering what customers want. [...]

Technology Is Revolutionizing Customer Service

From guest blogger, Lance Overbay – Lance studied engineering and minored in English. He has a love for all things Android. Today's entrepreneur and startup business owner is born into a world of digital communication. Mobile phones are often used for texting rather than talking. Requests for information now involve finger-walking the Internet rather than physical journeys backed by research in [...]

Payoff for Coordinating Customer Experience Management

From guest blogger, Lynn Hunsaker, of Clear Action – Customer Experience Optimization Consulting Connect your customer experience management efforts across the company, and enjoy exponential benefits, according to the 2011 Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study. Companies with managers (of their top five methods to achieve CEM goals) who meet together quarterly or more often for coordination purposes, or have dotted-line [...]

Have You Thanked a Customer Lately?

Keeping customers happy and preventing them from being lured away by your competitors is a key strategy to having a stable customer base and healthy revenues. Part of a successful customer retention strategy is ensuring that customers know that they are valued and not viewed as a commodity that you can replenish as needed.

I Love You, but I’m Not IN LOVE With You!

Guest blogger: Maeve Naughton, Customer Reference Programs expert We’ve all seen the movie where the girl or guy turns to their significant other and says “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe while other times you want to yell at the TV and say “Duh!!!!!” Shouldn’t the recipient of the news have known? [...]

Proving the Link Between Employee Loyalty and Customer Loyalty

Guest Blogger: Patrick Reilly, Resources in Action The relationship between employee and customer loyalty is easy to sense or feel but hard to prove. This is a tough question to answer well, especially for the analytics, but let’s see if we can create a trail of causation. Recent research by Dan Pink author of Drive indicates that there are three important [...]

Customer Satisfaction Bonus Traps

Guest Blogger: Lynn Hunsaker, head of ClearAction Customer Experience Management Why do sales and service representatives feel compelled to tell customers how to answer a survey? Does the company want to know what the customers really think, or is the company trying to build positive publicity by claiming superior ratings? The answer to the second question exposes the company's culture and [...]

Authenticity: The New Consumer Sensibility

This is a blog entry by guest blogger, Reena Kapoor of Conifer Consulting.  Reena is a pre-eminent product marketing consultant and this entry shows one of her key values in the work she does with clients. An excellent video talk by Joseph Pine on What Consumers Really Want. He talks about how we've evolved from economy that was based on commodities, [...]

Plain talk about determining sample size

  In preparing for a session of the Power of Market Research class that I teach at UCSC Extension Silicon Valley,  I was brushing up my ‘spiel’ about how to determine sample size for research studies (surveys, focus groups, etc.)…and realize that this is a mysterious concept that could use some plain talk. Sample size is a very important element of [...]

Why Customers Defect

Guest blog by Mary Sullivan of KickStart Alliance You’ve heard the adage, “It costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to retain an old one.” Even if you question the multiplier number, you know the concept is valid. And yet, businesses don’t always realize when former customers have decided not to buy from them again. [...]

What the @*!# Were They Thinking?

Remember the 2004 "What the @#!* Do We Know?" movie that explored the power of our brains and our thinking?  I loved that movie…and it got me thinking just a little differently…I have no hope that my interaction with Citibank last night will have anywhere NEAR the same impact. I just happened to check my online credit card account info last [...]

By |September 13, 2009|