The Power of “I Don’t Know”

Early in my prior life as a product manager, I realized that guessing at what customers want and need from products was not a sound strategy. That’s when my passion for soliciting insights from customers directly was born vs. taking a stab in the dark when faced with tough decisions. I’ll never forget one particular meeting I was in where we [...]

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 [...]

Are B2B customer satisfaction surveys a dying breed?

When talking to a colleague recently, I was recently reminded of why I went into customer research back in 2000 when I started The Insight Advantage. I was passionate about customer service and wanted to help companies continually improve by keeping their finger on the pulse of their customers. My intention was to do customer satisfaction surveys for companies on an [...]

Win Loss Analysis: Your Secret Weapon for Success

In my years as a research consultant, I’ve never found a tool with as much bang for the buck as win/loss analysis. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept, win/loss studies work like this: Get information from your sales team or contact database to identify accounts that you ‘won’ and those that you ‘lost’ (aka didn’t WIN) in a given [...]

Sifting Through Social Media Noise Requires Good Analysis

Businesses across the world are realizing that they need to figure out how to sift through the megatons of information that is being shared about them via social media amongst customers, ex-customers, prospective customers and more. It’s extremely important to pay attention to the information being posted online about the impressions that people have of your products and your company.  This [...]

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 [...]

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.

Good Customer Service: Do What You Say You’re Going to Do

It sounds so obvious. Is there anything more important in your efforts to keep customers happy? I’m in the middle of a situation with Samsung where my new networked printer isn’t working because it requires a new network card.   Samsung handled things great.  After several support calls that didn’t fix the situation, they realized that the card needed to be [...]

Will You Give Me a Good Satisfaction Rating???

I’m a huge fan of companies who solicit my feedback after I’ve done business with them…after all, that IS the business I’m in—ensuring that companies have information about how well they are meeting their customers’ needs.  However, I definitely think that there is a right way and a wrong way to do this. How many of you have been asked the [...]

Think Like Your Customer: Aligning Selling to Buying Process

Guest Blogger, Gary Katz of Marketing Operations Partners. Earlier this year I read Bill Stinnett’s excellent book, Think Like Your Customer, which should be required reading for anyone in Sales and Marketing, especially if you market high-value products and services. A glaring Marketing Operations disconnect for many companies is our tendency to over-focus on What and How we want to sell, [...]

The Good — Amplified!

This is a blog entry by guest blogger, Reena Kapoor of Conifer Consulting.  Reena is a pre-eminent marketing strategist and this entry shows some of her key values in the work she does with clients. Many companies fear social media.  But the good ones have less to worry about than they might fear. While SM can be intimidating (especially with all [...]