Improving customer interactions one decision at a time

William Band at Forrester (@waband) recently tweeted that his next research project was: When to use CRM apps vs BPM tools to improve customer interactions? Pros & Cons of each? I replied that companies should be sure to manage customer treatment decisions too and he asked me to expand on that thought. Every customer interaction... [read more]

Socialytics for Sales, Marketing and Customer Service

Last week at the CRM evolution conference in NYC I presented an updated discussion on socialytics in a social CRM context. The conference itself was excellent, here's conference chair Paul Greenberg's follow up post. Anyway, the concept of socialytics (a trend we started covering last year) or deploying an analytics platform to capture... [read more]

Social CRM: Not a Cure for Customer Compliants

Salesforce CRM execs are likely celebrating this week as they gained a shiny new customer- Facebook.   Word on the street is that the social networking giant recently ranked the second lowest score (underperformed only by Myspace) on a customer satisfaction survey conducted by ForeSee Results. Great news for... [read more]

Social CRM: Thinking Outside the “Call Center” Box

If one studies history of automobiles, the first cars powered by internal combustion engines running on fuel gas appeared as early as 1806. But early autos were little more than horse drawn carraige fitted with an engine. It was not until 1889 that Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach designed a vehicle from scratch... [read more]

You Have to Segment Your List

Digital marketing is an effective way to control costs costs and measure ROI. One of the easiest ways to start making your campaigns stand out is to segment your list. The more effective your segmentation, the more you can focus. With better focus, you can drive better results.Segmentation is truly an art; if you’re not careful you could... [read more]

Pink Floyd, Seinfeld, and Extremes in Customer Service

One of my favorite Pink Floyd songs from the later years is “Poles Apart”, off of their 1994 Division Bell album. The song was on my mind yesterday and I had customer service issues with two companies–and couldn’t have been more pleased with a third. Verizon and Comcast battled throughout the day for “most frustrating, most... [read more]

15 Things You Should Be Doing for Social Media Success

Here are a few things to consider to drive social media success.1 - Know what is available so you 'know social.' There are good new things coming out often, you need to stay in touch. More importantly track all the updates on popular existing social media channels.2 - Find out where your 'birds flock.' Track where your consumers hang out... [read more]

Seeing through your customer’s eyes

You have a great idea. You turned it into a product. It’s going to solve all kinds of problems. The company you work for is great (lucky you). You see it and you want everyone else to see it too. You want to make sure people know that you have the coolest thing around, so: • You write a white paper that tells all about your product... [read more]

My Thoughts On The Gartner Customer 360 Summit

I got to attend Gartner Customer 360 Summit this week, which quite honestly impressed me. This is a rare occasion for someone as jaded with conferences as I am. Most conferences I go to typically offer an amazing networking opportunity, but the alarming trend is that quality of content is at a steady decline. There are many reasons for this (or at least as how I see it), but that’s a topic for a whole different blogpost altogether. The Gartner conference registered in the top percentile of content + networking for me. The two reasons for that are below: high caliber of attendees and a proper blend of social and business. [read more]

Q&A with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas from our Recent Webinar

Social CRM has just gone from being a buzz word to being an official software solutions category: Gartner has released their Magic Quadrant for Social CRM! On that occasion, let me post the Q&A from our recent webinar with Radian6′s Lauren Vargas below. The replay of the webinar is available to Web Analytics Association members from... [read more]

Online and offline become 1: a new era has begun (part 2)

This is the second part of the post Online and offline become 1: a new era has begun. In this post, I discuss the second article by David M. Raab. Bridging the Gap Between Online and Database Marketing Raab starts his article with the following subtitle: “Centralizing information is valuable even when it cannot be tied to a specific... [read more]

How to Gain Knowledge from the Online Community

As employees today have increasingly free reign to connect and share data online, the amount of untapped organizational knowledge grows in proportion.  The very nature of online communities allow us to create personas that enable us to say whatever we want, whenever we want, and to whomever we chose.  As our virtual... [read more]