Archive

Remember the bad old days of customer self-service? Automated systems would present you with five or more different options -- any one of which could lead to five or more other options. With touchtone systems, accidentally pressing the wrong number at a prompt could result in instant death by discon...

With a variety of options available for training their revenue-seeking professionals, today's sales leaders need to carefully select the methodology that will most directly impact their bottom line. Ongoing Aberdeen research of over 500 companies surveyed in July and August of 2009, which will be pu...

There is a lot of unspoken information in last week's announcements by Sage and Salesforce.com about their respective contact managers. Each is creating a disruptive innovation that affects the other, and the symmetry of these dual and dueling announcements is frankly beautiful in a funny way. To r...

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....

Zappos, online shoe emporium extraordinaire, has been expanding its line of merchandise in recent years -- offering clothes, watches and other jewelry, and even housewares. For the consumer, the shift has appeared effortless -- just more categories to explore on the Web site. Behind the scenes, thou...

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,...

Imagine this all-too-common scenario: A customer needs to add a new line to his cellphone plan. He's had a number of reception and phone issues, and he will stay with his current company only if offered a very good deal. However, the agent -- unaware of the prolonged dissatisfaction and insensitive ...

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is...

The greatest obstacle small business operators face in adopting business process management is themselves. That factor could account for the underutilization of BPM by small businesses -- and the reason BPM vendors have targeted the small business sector as a huge potential market. Of course, the ab...

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...

Last week I was doing some research for a speech, and I remembered something from a weekend stint at a cooking school that I decided to run down. I was trying to make a point about customer experience when it occurred to me that the idea has ancient roots. Hospitality law is a body of law that deal...

One business sector weathering the current economic downturn is that of business intelligence. In fact, Hans Hultgren, director of the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence program at Daniels College of Business, told CRM Buyer that business intelligence is growing and will continue to do so. "...

In November 2008, Aberdeen published a study titled, "Lead Nurturing: The Secret to Successful Lead Generation." The survey captured the challenges and strategies from 213 organizations and found that on average, 16 percent of the total leads that are deemed "sales-ready opportunities" actually clo...

Beagle Research did some market research earlier this year that we are now announcing. The project aimed to understand some of the nuances involving scheduling appointments for services and walking in. What we discovered was in some cases reassuring and in others surprising, and I present some of ...

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 ...