Strategy

Context: Customer Data's Secret Sauce
January 31, 2013

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales organization in my company.

Is Your Storytelling Smothering Your Customer Relationships?
January 24, 2013

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernst made my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss). Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range of crimes against language, ranging from tortured grammar to made-up words to an impenetrable lexicon of jargon.

Reading the Signals: 5 CRM Lessons From Moneyball
January 17, 2013

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball spring training, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used data to build a competitive team.

Loyal Customers Are Not to Be Trifled With
December 13, 2012

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers' relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returning customers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? Thus, it makes sense to foster loyalty in these customers.

The Social, Mobile Challenge to Customer Service Consistency
October 19, 2012

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with it. I mean, who would hear about it, right?

Quit Trying to Control Your Customers
October 11, 2012

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly, to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about what journalists are looking for from the companies they cover. Usually, these are straightforward discussions -- journalists want access and they want honesty. They want to hear a good story.

Dreamforce: The Aftermath
September 26, 2012

t's over, Dreamforce that is, and I have gotten some needed sleep on the flight back to Boston. As I contemplate Dreamforce 2012 and its meaning, I have three observations. First, it was what I expected it to be. If you refer back to my post just before the show opened my expectations were more than met. You might wonder about the timing of that post but I was under NDA and unable to say much until then.

Dreamforce 2012: Revolution Is Out
September 20, 2012

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells -- this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal the epicenter of the CRM industry for a week. That give Salesforce a chance to make a serious splash.

CE: Our Next Great Customer-Focused Buzzword
September 07, 2012

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. But the ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almost impossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon. That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which often results in confusion over what they actually mean.

4 CRM Lessons to Apply as You Move to Social CRM
August 30, 2012

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era.

Sage Charts Its Course
August 22, 2012

Pascal Houillon, the CEO of Sage North America, has been at the job for a bit over a year. He took over the reins at last year's Sage Summit where he famously introduced a new branding exercise. Houillon's idea was to make Sage a more prominent brand by de-emphasizing the individual product names, in many cases renaming them.

Mobile CRM: Cost Center or Profit Maker? Part 1
August 21, 2012

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Hasen is, and can so plainly see how easy it would be for Comcast to lighten some of its customers' suffering.

Injecting That Personal Touch Into SMB Communications
August 18, 2012

In today's economy, there are many tools designed for sustaining small and mid-sized businesses. Web conferencing is a tool that an increasing number of companies find very useful. Over the last few years, Web conferencing and online meetings software have taken off as communication tools with several benefits, like reducing cost of travel and enabling long-distance meetings.

Fixing Customer Complaints in a World Gone Social
August 16, 2012

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in all things, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fully embrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days. After all, if you work in service, you have customers coming at you through a wider variety of channels than ever before.

Chick-fil-A: Stop Trying to Control the Conversation
August 09, 2012

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run by people. And choosing wisely when elevating people to leadership positions is critical.

Do You Remember All the Cool Things Your CRM App Can Do?
August 03, 2012

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff together. It's not that I'm good at it -- I've just learned to follow the directions. If only CRM were as simple.

Sowing the Seeds of CRM Adoption
July 20, 2012

When people ask me what I write about, I say "CRM," but I could just as easily say I write about adoption. Adoption failure is the arch-enemy of CRM, the great CRM investment-waster, the adversary to those who want to organize, rationalize and economize their customer data and how it's handled. We've known this for years, and yet as an industry we're still combating resistance to the use of CRM.

Social CRM Evolution vs. Mobile CRM Revolution
July 13, 2012

CRM technology -- along with the way we use it -- is going through an interesting patch of development right now. In part because mobile devices are now delivering on their potential, there's a renewed vigor around mobile CRM. At the same time, social CRM continues to gain attention and energy.

Tools for Crafting Social CRM Connections
July 09, 2012

Adaptu serves people in all stages of life, from young people just getting married and buying a home, to more mature investors planning for their children's educations or their own retirements. "Tracking our more public users allows us to create content, crowdsource ideas, and offer solutions that we wouldn't normally get the chance to talk about," said Jenna Forstrom, Adaptu's community manager.

Banks and Travelers: What Sends Customers Packing
July 05, 2012

Travel always seems to elicit great customer service stories -- that is, great stories from my perspective as a person who writes about CRM; not great as in "my experience while traveling was wonderful, stress-free and restored my faith in humanity." As fodder for columns, they're great. They're object lessons in how to sabotage customer relationships.