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When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run ...
If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...
When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say I write about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRM investment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize and economize their customer data and how it's handled. W...
Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great stories from my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "my experience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith in humanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're o...
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specificall...
About a year ago, I heard a great story on NPR's "Marketplace" that illustrated the concepts of sunk costs and opportunity costs using baseball players as a sample group. While fans marvel at the enormous contracts paid to star players, there are thousands of younger players who toil away in the mi...
There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses. While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than 15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority of them are in small businesses. That's a big opportunity for CRM ...
In a past life, I was a bosun's mate in the U.S. Navy. A bosun's mate's job is best described as "sailor stuff" -- running small boats, tying up and casting off in port, steering the ship, maintaining things, and lots and lots of painting. Bosun's mates also stood lookout watches, monitoring the env...
I have a lot of fun writing about CRM -- the ideas, the tools and how they're brought together as a coherent strategy. CRM is a foundation on which to build relationships, layer on additional sales and support tools, and create a customer-centric business. But this foundation needs a foundation. Aft...
I remember being an impatient kid when something I really wanted was on its way. The first time I was aware of my parents mail-ordering something for me -- I think it was a baseball jersey I especially coveted -- I can recall bombarding them with a chorus of the phrase, "when is it going to get here...
Customer service is a crucial part of the customer experience. That seems immediately obvious. And customer experience is the big buzzword right now, so companies are going bonkers revamping their customer service operations. Right? Would that it were so. Almost paradoxically, many businesses are st...
There are three things certain in life. We all know the two cited by Benjamin Franklin, but there's a third certainty that we all face regularly and have to cope with constantly. That's the certainty that we'll make mistakes. Everyone makes them; if it hasn't happened to your business, you haven't b...
I just wrote a note to a friend of mine thanking him for his participation at a conference I recently helped organize. It was a thank you note, and he's a CRM industry influencer; I won't divulge names, because it's not important to my point, nor do I want to seen like too much of a suck-up. In any ...
CRM is not a small market. Nor is it a niche sequestered away in a corner of the larger CRM market. CRM is a $13.045 billion industry in 2012, and it will grow to $16.694 billion in 2015, according to Gartner. No matter how you look at things, that's a lot of money. With a projected growth of near...
"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth. Logically, we know that's not true. Yo...
At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. Most of the application...
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specificall...
The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is tru...
When I go to CRM conferences -- and I go to many -- one of the things I relish is the opportunity to speak to leaders about thinking surrounding social CRM. That group is not limited to the pundits and authors most closely associated with SCRM; it also includes users at these events who have reached...
The top 10 trends in CRM was the topic of the lead-off talk by analysts Gene Alvarez and Ed Thompson at Gartner's Customer 360 Summit last week. Most of the items were evergreens that are fixtures when such trend lists are drawn up, but there were two that caught my eye, if only because of their jux...
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