Customers

We all like to say our businesses are "customer-centric." It's the de rigueur thing to say these days, and it's the only smart way to describe yourself to your customer audience. But how many companies really revolve around the customer? Not many, and for realistic reasons. For instance, your busine...

American consumers seem to be generally happier with their recent computer purchases lately than in years past, but it appears buyers of some brands are happier than others. The spring launch of Apple's iPad helped the Cuptertino company boost its already formidable customer satisfaction rating in t...

Social media's explosion over the last few years has had some obvious implications for CRM. At first, as in every new thing in CRM, the implications for sales were appreciated first, although they have yet to be fully realized. However, this time around, there are other forces at work -- namely, eco...

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz. You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course...

I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among ot...

I was at a friend's dual celebration of birthday and wedding anniversary recently, and as part of the occasion someone had prepared two fantastic cakes, which were both amazing to behold and a delight to eat. While the appearance was all to do with the icing, the taste and nutrition were defined by ...

Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media. Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor. Generally speaking, the people behind these sites have a gripe that has a fragment of truth in it, and it would b...

Less than 15 years ago, establishing a global presence was a conscious decision that a company made. It usually involved long and complex discussions about offices, physical presence and physical travel. With the advent of the Web, all of that changed in an instant. With the establishment of a websi...

On July 5, Pitney Bowes announced it had received acceptances for over 90 percent of the existing issued ordinary shares of Portrait Software, a leading provider of solutions that focus on enhancing customer relationship management systems and enabling clients to achieve improved customer retention ...

Customer service is being touted as a lot of things these days -- "the new marketing," "the new CRM," even "the new sales." That's all well and good, but many customers just wish customer service could be "the new, actually functional customer service." The situation isn't abysmal everywhere; there ...

Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It's a mixed bag, really -- some people take gr...

Its 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, and Fred from the ABC call center is logging onto the company's metrics portal to find out his first call resolution and average handle time. He also has access to a complete set of other metrics that provide a composite view of his performance over the previous week...

The use of analytics in contact centers enables management to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, ...

Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don't do. You don't use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing t...

Last time, we explored how we can make IT more sustainable by improving data center energy use. Managing energy use is the most well-understood form of sustainability we have, but it is largely an internal form of sustainability practice. If we intend to make our businesses sustainable -- i.e., ab...