Customers

One would almost think we have entered a stage of customer service nirvana: Two industry categories not ordinarily associated with high levels of customer service satisfaction -- airlines and fast food -- have garnered relatively good scores in a new American Customer Satisfaction Index report. The ...

Customer satisfaction with the airline industry took a dip in J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction study after two consecutive years of improvement. The drop was not a large one; overall, passenger satisfaction dropped to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale. In 2011...

Banks have still not made important reforms or improvements in their checking account practices, according to an update Pew Charitable Trusts made to a report it released in April 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts." The original report set out a discouraging li...

If a customer walked into one of your brick-and-mortar stores -- assuming, for this exercise, that you have brick-and-mortar stores -- and asked if you had any Sleepytime Pajamas, how would you want your sales associate to respond? Whether you only carried Sweet Dreams Pajamas, you'd just sold out o...

Consumers face a number of hurdles if they want to switch banks -- which they increasingly do, as their banks continue to raise fees, raise minimum balances, and create entirely new charges. Some bank policies are, in fact, designed to make it challenging -- and expensive -- for customers to walk aw...

The trend toward an "always on, always connected" lifestyle driven by the use of social networks and mobile technology has, if nothing else, groomed consumers to become demanding in their expectations of the online experience. Unfortunately, the e-commerce experience has changed little since early d...

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 ...

Social Dynamx has just launched a new enterprise-class social customer care platform that will allow customer support and community management teams to identify, prioritize and handle millions of one-on-one customer social media conversations daily. As a subscription-based platform, it is designed t...

Driving revenue performance and applying data in order to influence/generate buying behavior throughout the customer life cycle is not new -- it's an ongoing goal. Real-time marketing, which relies on capturing data in real time, improves revenue performance and is the optimal way to drive 1:1 custo...

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...

Cloud contact center provider inContact has released the first of what will be three major upgrades to its flagship product this year. New features in the release touch upon many areas, from agent scripting to a Web-connect module, new unified agent desktop tools and an expanded blended dialer. Most...

"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 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...