Customers

Increasing contact center efficiency has always been a clear path to cutting costs, regardless of economic conditions. Increasing productivity and doing more with existing resources are now more important than ever, but cutting call center costs does not have to result in poorer customer service. Un...

In today's online environments, a bad customer experience can become visible more quickly and have more lasting consequences than ever before. More and more customer interactions are taking place online, thanks to a combination of factors that make the Web an attractive place for doing business: spe...

For decades, companies have leveraged technology with the twin goals of reducing the cost of customer support while improving its quality and dependability. This is reflected in the significant investments many organizations have made in providing information, products and services through self-serv...

There's a saying in the business world: Customer acquisition is an investment, but customer retention delivers profitability. So, how do you retain your customers and earn their loyalty? It's like any successful relationship: If you want customers to be loyal to you, you must be loyal to them and de...

Companies are now in the third stage of "economic downturn syndrome." Having passed through Panic and Denial, they're firmly in Acceptance. Panicky knee-jerk responses such as cost-cutting, layoffs, tightening budgets and resources are a thing of the past. Most companies have had a quick breather an...

The U.S. has a wireless subscriber base of nearly 270 million users, with 12.5 percent using mobile Internet services. At the other end of the wireless technology spectrum, 98 percent of all cellphones in the U.S. are now text-enabled. In the past two years, texting increased more than 450 percent.

"You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!" -- "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" It seems painfully obvious now, but to the characters in Reese's famous candy commercials of the 1970s and 1980s, chocolate and peanut butter do actually go together quite well. In fact, what the initially...

The most valuable asset of a company is its good name. Yet the rapid growth of the Internet and the explosion of social media, in particular, have made it infinitely more challenging for a company to protect its good name. Recent examples abound of how, owing to the viral effect of social media, ord...

Business schools have been discussing General Motor's loss of market shar for decades already, and the added denouement of the company's bankruptcy filing will no doubt drive many academic papers for decades to come. The roots of GM's fall from grace are numerous, and it would be incorrect to attrib...

Sarah Betesh's career in customer service began in box office call centers at venues such as the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia. She moved on to Tickets.com and Vertical Alliance, at one point becoming a call center manager. However, in spite of her success, Betesh left her call center care...

Not that long ago, the outsourcing of customer service to home-based agents was a small niche category, viewed as not quite on par with a bricks-and-mortar call center operation. For a number of reasons, that perception is changing -- starting with the lower costs involved and ending with the growin...

With consumers' inboxes perpetually filled with clutter, marketers are challenged to find new ways to break through with valuable, targeted messages that their customers actually want to open. The secret could lie in a largely untapped vehicle: transactional emails. The historical open rates of tra...

Driven by the housing market landslide and seizure of the global credit markets, economies the world over have slipped into retrenchment and recession. Many organizations are tightening capital and expense budgets, closing locations, shortening hours or reducing staff. Still others are tempted to re...

Several years ago, while selling software in the British telecom market, I met the CMO of a smallish network operator. He described the issues his business was facing, and when I asked him his churn rate, he replied, almost casually, that it was "about normal for our industry: 37 percent." He must ...

Software as a Service CRM implementations require more than just SaaS to succeed. SaaS customer relationship management must be integrated with other applications and data sources. The goal of SaaS CRM integration is an integrated view of customer data, which unlocks its inherent value and increase...