Expert Advice

The economy is finally recovering. This should mean that projects that were sidelined for the past year or two can come off the bench, and there might be more money to go around. As a project manager, are you confident that you will be able to put the right people on these projects? Not only that,...

Companies considering CRM systems often view them as a way to improve customer satisfaction and retention, boost sales and accelerate employee productivity. However, as with many technology-enabled business process, success is a complicated and interdependent proposition. When companies are winning...

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...

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...

For decades, organizations have been dealing with the challenges of driving better, more effective customer service. Traditional CRM solutions have focused on presenting consolidated customer information, but they still rely heavily on employees to resolve customer issues. This means that the custom...

Organizations with the most loyal customers not only measure and monitor employee interactions with customers, but also share that feedback with employees. This creates a closed-feedback loop that allows customer-facing staff members to understand the impact of their interactions on customers, enabl...

Online measurement has become increasingly focused on the integration of online behavior with customer marketing touch-points. Taking a complete view of the customer acquisition life cycle will often generate numerous potential integration points that can be profitably exploited. The goal of every...

Today, loyalty programs come in all shapes and sizes, and they give retailers, financial institutions and hotels opportunities to reward their best customers like never before. New loyalty solutions help track customers' spending trends, including when and how much they are spending. Targeted market...

As the systems that run the way we work and live become smarter, the workplace as we know it is undergoing dramatic and dynamic change. The challenge organizations face is embracing the rapid shifts in today's world for their own advantage rather than resisting them. In the face of this challenge, ...

Small projects, though often overlooked, can make up the bulk of the portfolio and are crucial to a company's success. They might not involve large sums of money, but the fact is that if managed improperly, these small projects can add up to some major costs in the long run. The good news is that ...

Aretha Franklin didn't intend it, but she offered a powerful business lesson when she sang "R.E.S.P.E.C.T -- find out what it means to me." Customer relationship management has evolved into customer experience management, and respect is the biggest part of providing an excellent customer experience....

The concept of "the funnel" is a sacred cow in marketing. The basic concept of leads progressing through a series of steps of escalating interaction until they finally make a purchase is intuitive. At the macro level, it is fairly easy to model the funnel and assign labels to each step -- awareness,...

The last 10 years has brought sea changes to the customer service industry from both operations and technology standpoints. Organizations have moved away from traditional domestic live phone support toward new technologies and business models such as interactive voice response, intelligent scripting...

These days it's hard to have a conversation that doesn't eventually roll around to the state of THE ECONOMY. What's amazing is that, at this point, no one needs to use adjectives when they refer to THE ECONOMY. We've stopped bothering with words like "bad," "down" or "tough." We all know how things ...

Driven by competitive pressure to improve the customer experience, organizations are moving toward an online self-service model that pushes the boundaries of electronic information presentation, or e-presentment. Yet as they embrace this model, new challenges await, including how to ensure customer...