Expert Advice

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. Customer retention isn't flashy, and it doesn't earn extra pats on the back from executives or big promotions -- which...

Social customer service has now become a key point of contact between brands and their customers. Consumers, particularly within the Millennial demographic, take to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks when they have a problem with a company. Sixty percent of 18-24 year olds go to social medi...

Some things in life are fleeting -- the lifespan on the mayfly, the appearance of a rainbow, the pure white of the first snow of winter. Some things in your CRM system are fleeting too -- namely, the quality of your data. Did you know that every year, somewhere between 25 percent and 40 percent of ...

We all know by now that social media is important for business success. It plays a role in sales, marketing and support. Then there's the idea of social CRM -- on a basic level, the inclusion of social media-generated data in the customer record -- which can help shift the way a business interacts w...

Perfection is elusive, if not impossible to achieve. Businesses are made up of people, and people are imperfect. They make mistakes -- mistakes involving internal operations and mistakes that affect customers. How many have planned for those inevitable instances when people prove fallible? Not many....

The personality inventory known as the "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" is premised on the idea that different people process information in different ways. Some people are verbal processors. Others are visual processors. Some people respond more strongly to images -- others to text. The most effective...

Pretty much all CRM deployments need some degree of customization, the exceptions being those rare situations where businesses have very simple needs. Customizations can be as simple as the modification of a field to accommodate a local convention for addresses, or as complex as the addition of work...

So you have your CRM application in place and humming, collecting information about customers and potential customers and organizing it -- but how are you using it? Most companies pour it back into sales, marketing and support to keep feeding those machines, which is the way you realize the value fr...

If you're a dedicated skeptic like I am, you probably know the way a psychic's cold read works. Start by asking a broad question that fits almost anyone -- like, "Have you lost someone you love?" Allow the mark to fill in the blanks, and then ask further leading questions based on information fed to...

New tools are available to help with service level management, but they require a new perspective on how IT infrastructure components should be managed. The key is to embrace a new ideal of managing every infrastructure component from the perspective of how it impacts end-user service levels. By inc...

I was talking to a friend of mine whose company had a rough first quarter. As is often the case, both sales and marketing came under scrutiny; several salespeople were let go, and marketing is now under a microscope. In trying to perform a post-mortem on the problems, we struck upon the issue of sal...

Back in the old days -- like around 2003 -- the rate of what was termed "CRM failure" was unacceptably high. You often heard it bandied about that 70 percent of implementations were failures. That was an estimate -- companies were not coming forward to confess their CRM disasters, so building a scie...

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership and the concept of return on investment. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value." The T2V test is simple: From the time you begin ...

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said ...

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world...