Customers

Enterprises expend considerable effort to understand their customers and provide a superior experience and enhanced services to them, but still they see an enormous difference between their understanding of customers' requirements and their customers' actual expectations. This difference might be du...

Insurers constantly caution seniors that their Medicare Advantage perks such as hearing aids, dental payments and even gym memberships will fizzle if Democrats get their way and cut government subsidies for them. However, tens of billions of Medicare dollars funneled through insurers also pay for ex...

U.S. airlines may not keep passengers waiting in an airplane on a tarmac -- whether for take-off clearance or stalled because of bad weather or just about any other reason -- for more than three hours, according to new rules issued by the Department of Transporation. After two hours, airlines are re...

It's no mistake. This credit card's interest rate is 79.9 percent. The bloated APR is how First Premier Bank, a subprime credit card issuer, is skirting new regulations intended to curb abusive practices in the industry. It's a strategy other subprime card issuers could start adopting to get around ...

It's important to keep the story of eService in mind when thinking about social media's role over the past few years in reshaping the ways customers interact with brands. Undoubtedly, the influence of social channels has been at least as profound -- and perhaps even more profound -- than that of eSe...

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differen...

This fall has not been kind to T-Mobile. First, the mobile operator had to account for mountains of lost data that Sidekick customers had stored on the infrastructure of Danger, the Microsoft-owned company that developed the Sidekick device. Then there was the nationwide service outage for millions ...

One of the most important ways marketers can differentiate their offerings in today's unique selling environment is by creating a remarkable customer experience. One step toward achieving this goal is to ensure they have a single database that is tightly integrated with their CRM system to capture i...

Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social ...

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least. Contact center managers have a never-ending desire to streamline operations to keep spending in check. If they're not focusing...

Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employe...

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.

Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park. The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good ide...