Is the customer always right?
If we truly believe in customer “relationships”, then the concept that the customer is always right is unfortunately flawed, because very few people are ALWAYS right. Customers can be irrational, selfish, irresponsible, and even unprofitable. As in any relationship, sometimes there is … Read More»
How Social Technologies Contribute to a Better Customer Experience
This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya During each interaction with a brand, organization, or institution, the person on the other end of the interaction has a perception of how things went. Over time, the accumulation of these touch points deepen the customer's … Read More»
Optimizing the Full Spectrum of Customer Interactions
This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing a movie for the first time to my 5 year old son - a movie that incidentally, I first saw when I was 5 years old. In it, an iconic message was communicated via a channel that … Read More»
Trust: It matters (more than you think)
"Organizations are no longer built on force, but on trust" - Peter Drucker "Technique and technology are important, but adding trust is the issue of the decade" - Tom Peters "Mistrust doubles the cost of doing business" - Professor John Whitney, Columbia Business School "As you go to work, … Read More»
Six Things Customers Want
Often, when asked a question by media, existing customers, or prospective customers, I find myself answering with some version of "It depends." What's the biggest priority in 2012? Should we begin a Social CRM initiative? What's the first thing we should do? Which software solution should we … Read More»
Customer Relationship Innovation for the Emergent Social Business
Speaking at an event hosted by SugarCRM and IBM Social Business this week, I informally polled the audience. "How many of you are NOT on facebook?" No hands were raised. "How many of you have a twitter account?" Most of the room raised their hands. "LinkedIn?" Most of the room again raised … Read More»
Networks, Signals, Reputation and Delight
The era of mass marketing, sales driven information gathering and sharing, and being "just good enough to win" is being shattered by the rapid emergence of a smart, networked, and increasingly demanding generation of empowered customers. In the fragmented and fast moving world of concepts, … Read More»
In pursuit of True Relationship Value
Relationships. How do we measure the value of a relationship? It's not an easy question to answer. Customer Relationships. How do we measure the value of customer relationships? We have an answer. But I think it's the wrong one, or at the very least an incomplete one. If we were all in a room … Read More»
Three New Required Roles for your company: (#2) Social Anthropologist
In the first post of this series, we talked about listening for what people are saying about you, your brand, your market, your products and services, or market needs that your organization has an answer for. I intentionally didn't dig into all the things you can do with that data - some are passive … Read More»
Traditional CRM vs Social CRM: Expanded
Brent Leary, widely recognized expert on Social CRM, does a great job of summarizing the difference between Traditional CRM and Social CRM in the Inc. magazine Article below. I've added some of my additional thoughts. Traditional CRM vs. Social CRM By Brent Leary Traditional customer relationship … Read More»