What CRM Experts Say

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

In real-life I am a customer, and as a customer I’d like to suggest a strategy that will have you prospering in these crazy times while everyone else is scrambling. This strategy offers stability, greater profitability and increasing referrals.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

We discuss CRM and customer service issues from a lofty position. We speak of strategies and processes and successes—the articles and case histories I find are largely congratulatory.

What I don’t find are articles and case studies reflecting what customers think. Are they equally as delighted? To find out, I thought I’d ask some customers how they feel about some of the basic issues. I put together a survey and sent it to my database of family, friends, business associates, acquaintances and referrals… each and every one a customer of many companies.

By: Ronald S. Swift, Vice President, Cross-Industry Business Solutions, Teradata Corporation.

Designing customer experiences requires intellectual comprehensiveness as well as powerful analytical intelligence capabilities at the marketer or servicer desktop. Customers must be understood through detailed behavioral analysis. Individual experiences can then be differentiated thereby driving the customer’s strategic value to the business. With this in mind, here are ten imperatives:

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

I am convinced the thing we understand least about mobile marketing is the individual actually holding the cell phone in his hand. I’m equally convinced we need this knowledge if we’re going to make mobile work, just like the rest of the world has.

Mobile is the most personal medium ever invented, giving each of us the ability to instantly decide what we want (or don’t want) on our device. So, what does it take to get on this network of me?

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

It may be the big shots in marketing that create your brand character, but it’s the worker bees who make it come to life. Inherent to the concept of brand is the promise of a customer’s satisfaction. That promise comes down to the interaction with the individual customer.

By Art Hall
Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting, LLC

Call center executives often struggle with the difficult challenge of doing less with more. With the right strategy in place, it is absolutely possible to improve operations with minimum resources to deliver maximum impact to the bottom-line.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

Mobile marketing is tailor-made for political campaigns, giving them the ability to put a compelling message in each individual’s hand.

Mobile entertainment community Limbo recently conducted a 1-million SMS campaign for the Obama and Clinton campaigns, which produced some impressive results according to post-campaign research:

• 56 percent said they were happy to receive the messages (the 25–34 age bracket was happiest)
• 6 percent said they changed their voting intentions a lot
• 22 percent said they changed their voting intentions a little
• 14 percent came away with a more positive perception of the candidate
• 37 percent paid more attention to news coverage about the candidate
• 13 percent would have preferred not to see SMS advertising from political candidates

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

The success of marketing innovation correlates with the success of implementing change. Marketing may realize that all systems and processes must be retooled to become more customer centric. However, if the cultural change is not managed successfully, these will be just empty words. Here are the four hard and-fast rules to enable change without disabling innovation:

By Art Hall, Manager, Alvarez & Marsal; President, CRM Association, Atlanta Chapter

Recent studies predict the global CRM market will double within six years and CRM adoption across every segment will continue to rise mostly fueled by the explosiveness of on-demand CRM delivery models.

"CRM Market Fertility" - the percent of companies deploying or plans to deploy CRM, stands at 38% compared to 18% to 25% historically. On-demand CRM offerings with a set of rich functionality set is making it possible for small to midsize businesses (SMB's) to afford and implement a CRM solution.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

For the most part, I think a lot of us greatly underes­timate the power of customer satisfaction. We sometimes don’t define it in terms of profit and loss, but we know it’s a factor. We base decisions on self congratu­latory information. Dissatisfaction augers the hole in the bottom of our customer base.

Here are two examples and four suggestions.