Enterprise networking using Salesforce Chatter
Continue reading "Enterprise networking using Salesforce Chatter" »
If CRM has been a struggle or a passion for you then Infosys’ CRM blogs is the place to be in. Come join us as we discuss the latest trends, innovations and happenings which will have a bearing on CRM.
January 5, 2012
November 23, 2011
Atom of CRM - Part 2
By Richy Yati Mishra
In the last part, we discussed about how CRM is bound by the feeling of the consumers. To understand the same, we tried to focus on the 7 O's framework of consumer behaviour on which the marketing managers rely on for establishing a strong relationship with their customers. In this part, let us try and analyze on the basis of the 7 O's framework how the atom of CRM - feeling plays a key role in the relationship management of the customer.
November 17, 2011
Atom of CRM - Part 1
By Richy Yati Mishra
Customer Relationship Management... Some say it's a strategy and some say it's a process. It is an art or even could be science of understanding the customer behavior. However, in essence what is common is that we need to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors; we need to develop a strong relationship with customer. And through this the overall goal is to find, attract and win new clients, farm and retain existing clients, get the old clients back and reduce marketing expenditure.
November 12, 2011
Steve Jobs is synonymous with Customer Delight
We all talk, debate, advocate for Customer Satisfaction, as the key to business success. Steve Jobs was a true example for always aiming at and also achieving Customer Delight, through his innovative, yet user-friendly/exciting products, from Apple, like iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, to name a few.
Continue reading "Steve Jobs is synonymous with Customer Delight" »
September 8, 2011
CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites
Social commerce is being talked about as a game changer for organizations in the near future. The adoption will be quicker for those operating in B2C domain. Social Commerce in itself is an umbrella under which many sub-models can be defined. One such model that is gaining popularirty are the emergence of Group buying sites like Groupon, Snapdeal.com and others.
This business model has seen lot of growth in recent times. Be it the incessant amount of funding for start-ups or the craze among customers, this concept has caught the eyes of all alike. Being a customer for few of them, somehow I couldn't resist myself in analyzing the model from CRM standpoint. Thanks to my passion with stuffs that brings value to customers :).
August 24, 2011
DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2
By Praveen Kadayinti and Archit Agrawal
This blog has come in two parts where we are discussing about internet banking models and CRM. In the previous blog (Part 1 - find here) we have discussed about two such models. We will highlight a third model in this part and analyze our views.
Model III
A new market has also been identified online where prospective lenders and borrowers meet online, thus reducing transaction time and costs involved with traditional banking methods. Currently banks act as middlemen, collecting funds from individuals who have a surplus (providing an interest rate), and disbursing to people in need (charging an interest rate). The difference in interest rates funds the operation as well as helps the bank make a profit.
Continue reading "DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2" »
August 18, 2011
DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 1
By Praveen Kadayinti and Archit Agrawal
This blog will come in two parts where we discuss in internet banking models and CRM. We will discuss on two such models that we come across in this blog.
Here, we look at some of the disruptive Internet based banking models that have come up in the last few years, and analyze how traditional banks will have to change themselves to cope with these new models. Traditional banks will have two options; either follow the curve or lead the curve. Leading the technology curve may result in cannibalization of their existing business products but following the curve might reduce the banks to insignificant players if the market grows exponentially in favor of the early adopters of technology.
Continue reading "DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 1" »
August 10, 2011
CRM for the 'Common People'...
While the technology advancements are significantly impacting the CRM space, I wish to look back at the basics of CRM and the needs of the Customers, especially the 'Common People'.
July 5, 2011
How to 'Friend' your customer? - Social Media CRM strategy
by Sinoi Daniel Mathai
The most compelling reason for a customer to want to 'friend' you on the social web is when a connection based on similarity in values and interests is established.
As touted often, a significant benefit Social CRM enjoys over Traditional CRM methods or even traditional channels is the intimacy of the relationship a business can establish with its customer. The level of engagement and experience one can have with an existing and a potential customer is unmatched compared to other sales/communication channels. Getting into the friend's circle of a customer is thus central to the strategy for a business targeting customers on social media. However, getting into the special, sought-after zone is, biblically speaking, similar to a camel passing through the eye of a needle.
Continue reading "How to 'Friend' your customer? - Social Media CRM strategy" »
June 24, 2011
Avoid mistakes of traditional channels on social media
The sad part is that I have already started getting the same vibes. Leveraging social media for your CRM initiatives makes sense but don't treat it in the same manner as other channels. If we observe,introduction of a channel as a customer touch point has always been governed by the following reasons: uniqueness, growing usage by customer and the proposed benefits it brings for the organization.
Continue reading "Avoid mistakes of traditional channels on social media" »
March 17, 2011
Improved Prepaid Customer experience and Assured Monthly Revenue through Innovative Business Models
Today the number of customers having the prepaid mobile subscriptions in the world is quite large. This is increasing day by day since more and more customers are availing the mobile services. Most of the customers prefer to buy a prepay subscription in order to control their spend. Prepay is also beneficial proposition to the telecom operators since their risk is reduced and the money is collected in advance. Hence most of the telecom operators are trying to introduce newer ways to attract customers to their prepay offers.
For the prepay products, the customer decides in the manner in which he/she would like to recharge his account and hence there is no guaranteed income for the telecom companies every month. In order to generate the guaranteed income companies keep a limit on the period till which the customer can remain connected to the network without recharging his account. The companies also adopt a way to wave off the balance and free benefits after a period of no recharge by the customer. For prepay customers, the telecom companies terminate the call / data session immediately when the balance goes low/zero. But this impacts the customer experience.
Some of the factors that drive customer experience for the prepay customers are:
1. Seamless service without going out of balance
2. Controlled Monthly Spend
3. No hassles to recharge manually and submit the customer identification document copies each time
4. Benefits comparable to post-pay customers
5. Per second billing
In order to increase the assured revenue from the existing prepay customers, telecom operators have adopted new business models which are similar to the post-pay models. Some of the models adopted by the operators are:
Have an agreement signed with the Customer, while purchasing the pre-paid service, for the Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), to top up the pre-paid minimum balance as and when it goes low. This EFT amount could be fixed (say for a month), so that the service providers do not deduct beyond that value.
Deduct a fixed amount every month from customers bank account towards recharge based on customers calling/spend pattern after customer consent on a fixed day of the month.
Deduct a fixed amount from customers bank account every time the customer goes low on his/her balance.
Offer additional benefits (e.g. free minutes) to the customers who are willing to adopt above two modes of payment over the regular prepay customers.
Per second calling rates.
Now with mobile micro payments being allowed, the customers can easily top up their pre-paid amount by initiating the fund transfer, through an SMS, from their bank account to the service provider (in many situations, the customer finds it difficult to go to the PoS or online to top up the pre-paid amount, in this situation, SMS based mobile fund transfer would serve handy)
By implementing the above mentioned models, telecom companies can achieve customer loyalty and retention even for the prepay customers and this results in increased assured revenue for the company.
February 14, 2011
Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?
I am in no way going to contradict this statement. We are social and the same can be seen of different species in the world. But an interesting piece of news: Ford car that tweets just gave a new insight into the whole social paradigm. It took me to a whole new world of interactions and the change it can bring about in future relationships. We have seen it in films, cartoons and sometimes even we talk subconsciously to the objects!
Continue reading "Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?" »
February 10, 2011
Social CRM - will horseless carriage syndrome help the uptake or block the evolution?
February 3, 2011
Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attutide to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 2 of 2)
January 27, 2011
Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attitude to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 1 of 2)
January 25, 2011
Social CRM - can organizations actually rely on the ideas from customers for future innovations?
Co-creation has been an interesting topic for last couple of years and we have heard so much from C.K. Prahalad on this who firmly propagated that future of competition is going to be based on the ability of the organization to co-create with their customers. In my view, ultimate value of the social technology paradigm (in the context of CRM) is actually going to be the creation of new customer experience possibility which seems to be in the core of this co-creation theory.
To me it is clear that creation of new customer experience is going to be the light at the end of the tunnel that will drive the future of the social CRM. However, the important question is if this customer experience creation will happen by the organization or will it be driven by the customer community. Is co-creation really sustainable and can organizations bet on it for their future innovation?
January 17, 2011
Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?
Continue reading "Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?" »
January 15, 2011
Mobile Number Portability (MNP) - A Good Test for Customer Loyalty
One thing, which we as subscribers, do not prefer, is change of our personal mobile number, especially when we are using it for a few or more years, as we would have shared it with our family & friends and other service providers (e.g. banks, insurance companies, schools, book stores, membership clubs). Any change in our personal mobile number, really causes a lot of inconvenience to us and others, as it really takes a good amount of time and meticulous effort to communicate the change in our mobile numbers and others duly updating their address books/records, for future communication.
It is for this reason, many subscribers like us, end up staying with a specific service provider, even if we are little dissatisfied with their services (e.g. Quality of Service, Price and Customer Service Support). At times, this specific situation allows the service providers to take their customers/subscribers for granted.
One big relief to this problem is the excellent feature Mobile Number Portability (MNP), which allows subscribers to retain their existing mobile numbers when they switch from one mobile service provider to another.
Continue reading "Mobile Number Portability (MNP) - A Good Test for Customer Loyalty" »
January 14, 2011
Social CRM - managing the accountability challenges for the customer interactions on social media
Enterprises need to start taking the social media transactions no lesser seriously than the regular customer engagement transactions when it comes to issues like privacy, response liabilities, customer identity theft, information misrepresentation etc. I recently came across various cases that clearly highlight the need for the same. I will share some of them below in this blog.
Electronic social media platforms is intensifying the visibility, reach and speed with which sentiments and specifics related to customer experience travel the globe. I recall reading a news article sometime back in 2009 where a district judge in Boulder, Colorado (USA) approved the validity of the use of social media tools like twitter and blogs to cover the court trail cases. It highlights how the speed of information dissemination across various walks of life inclusive of personal, business and even legal eco-system is becoming 'cooler' option that allows influence of the information be 'here and now and across'.
January 13, 2011
Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers
Social CRM - so much is being said, debated, discussed and speculated but sad part is that much of it is more of the same. I guess that's temporary phenomenon because there is little that is available and there are too many to talk about it, another side of the social networking power - gets everyone to talk, share, express, couldn't have been any other way. But I suppose we may re-live the experience of dotcom days, may be in slightly different shades of color. As I said earlier, more than what is being talked about, I'm excited about stuff that is still to be discovered and to be talked about. Here is one of such side-effects of the social CRM revolution - emergence of 'Social Customer Experience Designers' - a creative specialist community that will have power to revolutionize how social technologies are put to use between enterprises and customers.
Continue reading "Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers" »
January 11, 2011
Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?
The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.
Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.
So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that.
Continue reading "Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?" »
December 22, 2010
Avoid the Customer's Hammer!
Gary Lemke at CRM Advocate has recently been blogging about "Hammer Lady" and what kind of grievance redressal options can be given to customers when they are disenchanted with traditional channels of customer Service. Hammer Lady is a famous disgruntled customer of Comcast who took a hammer to the nearest Comcast office and destroyed office equipment before inquiring if she finally had their attention. It transpired that her phone connection had been out for a week and she couldn't get anyone at Comcast to fix it.
Not all customers would take such a drastic step when they feel they haven't received the service they deserve. Some may fret and fume; others may bad mouth the company or product to friends and colleagues. Some others may be more patient and follow through with the published escalation channels, if available. But in today's age of social media, the "hammer" can also be taken into cyber space and what was earlier a potential loss of goodwill restricted to a few acquaintances of a disgruntled customer can quickly take up a frightening form on the internet, thanks to social media.
If companies today want to avoid such pitfalls they need to quickly establish effective grievance redressal mechanisms to reach out to disgruntled customers before they take out the "hammer". Such mechanisms may take many forms but to be successful it has to have a few necessary ingredients.
Credibility. It is not something that can be built quickly but sustained service mechanisms to deal with unhappy customers can lead to success stories which can then be leveraged to build a culture of service excellence. Your claims on service delivery may also be taken seriously through widespread marketing and well publicized awareness campaigns. A Money Back Guarantee or a 5 Year Free Service offer can help.
Make it Easy. Your Grievance Mechanism is not going to win you any fans on Facebook if the web link is hidden deep in the bowels of your website that generates an auto reply about "looking into it" and vaguely mentions that it is "glad to receive the feedback". If you already have a Facebook page, YouTube channel or other frequented forums on your website use them to address miffed customers.
Dedicate Resources. If your regular service folks couldn't solve the customer's problem in the first place, it wouldn't make sense directing the same customer back to the same service team. So don't just change the channel, change the people, change the process, change the training and only then will you be able to change the results.
Some companies are already innovating in this area. Just last month, SBI Life, an Indian State run Life Insurance Company announced "SOLVE", an SMS based customer care initiative for prompt grievance redressal by guaranteeing attendance to redressal within 24 hours. Customers are able to register their grievances about SBI Life's service by merely sending SMS 'SOLVE' to 56161. The message along with customers' mobile number, date and time of message is automatically registered at the central server of SBI Life's central processing centre. A special customer service team exclusively trained and dedicated for the SMS SOLVE service, calls the customer, takes note of his grievances and addresses it.
It's early days yet though. Watch this space.
December 18, 2010
Long Distance Calls at Local Call Rates - BSNL's attempt to retain Land Line Customers in India: The Customer Really Benefits
Personally, I used to be facinated by the invention of the Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, in 1876, which laid the foundation for telecommunications (communication over a distance). Since then, the last few generations have seen the rapid growth and advancements of the telecommunication networks, in the area of switching, transmission and end user devices.
The telecommunication network evolution started with the Land Line Telephone Neworks, where the telephones at home/offices used to be connected to the Local Telephone Exchange, through the Local Loop. The Land Line Telephones evolved from the Pick the Cradle and Speak type of telephones, to Rotary Dial Telephones to Push Button Telephones, which are still in use.
In the last 125+ years, the telecom service providers across the World, have invested heavily in building and operating their Land Line Telephone Network Infrastructure and have progressively grown a significant volume of Customer base. However, the tremendous growth of Mobile Phones, in the last few decades , has not only affected the growth of Land Line Phones, but also reduced the existing Land Line Customer Base, as Customers have progressively started to move towards mobile phone, due to the flexibility it offers, especially communication on the move.
September 8, 2010
Facebook or own community ( part 2)
August 19, 2010
Facebook or Own Community ( part 1)
The first question that comes to mind is are brands big enough for anybody to move from a user friendly, loved by all Facebook, to a community that is no doubt 'walled' , or the other way to put is .. Would the brands any day be able to create something that is as attractive as Facebook that can ever scale up to 500 Million users? I think while these are valid arguments, the way one needs to look at these is with a different view; no brand owned community would ever be Facebook like or should even think of competing with it, the focus of the two are very different and more and more examples that I read about suggest is that they are ecosystem partners and can co exist without hurting each others' motive.
August 9, 2010
Using Personality & Horoscopes in enriching CRM
Continue reading "Using Personality & Horoscopes in enriching CRM" »
June 24, 2010
Look what Google did to your TV!
Google is at it again. With the launch of Google TV, they are set to do to the TV market what they did to the search engine market a decade ago - revolutionize it. If adWords took online advertising to new heights, the ads that Google is looking at in the TV space is set to take the advertising industry on to a new plane altogether.
April 27, 2010
Single Survey - Multiple Interactions
How many times do we actively participate in a survey? Whenever one is requested to complete a survey, we first think about the time it is going to take and try to avoid it, even if we start answering the questions, we have several doubts on the data we can provide, then again based on the very recent experience or mind frame we are in at that point of time, we might not even provide accurate data. So it is not a hyperbole if I say conducting customer surveys is very challenging task for any organization. Even after addressing the challenges, one cannot expect accurate responses from customers since a customer's response depends on his/her frame of mind while responding to the survey. Most of the customers might not respond to the survey. The reasons might be that the customers might be unhappy with the time, channel of the survey and the list doesn't end there...
March 11, 2010
Self Service for Cards Dispute Resolution – A means to increase profit margins and customer satisfaction
by Vinod Nag
A “dispute” in the context of credit cards pertains to questioning the validity of a card transaction. Most dispute complaints begin in a similar fashion - the card holder communicates with the card issuer bank through one of the channels – telephone, e-mails, direct mail (posts) etc. The customer service representative will then collect the necessary details and determines how this enquiry has to be dealt with.
March 10, 2010
Improve Customer Experience through a well planned Online Self Service Strategy
We have seen the tremendous rise in internet usage in the recent past. Even with such fast growth, internet penetration is only about 25% of the world population with a large scope for further growth. Also, commerce over the internet is growing due to increased transaction security and ease of operation. Companies should take advantage of this online channel for trade to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost of operations through a self service facility. But in order to take the full advantage of online channel, companies should conduct a detailed study of the various factors involved before embarking on their online strategy.
Continue reading "Improve Customer Experience through a well planned Online Self Service Strategy" »
February 18, 2010
Relationship Management in Sales
Any product or service company would initially like to sell their products or services to acquire customers and in the long run, the focus would be to increase the revenues. While the company in the long run would aim at building a strong revenue base, the representative at the Point to Sale is bound by daily, weekly, and monthly sales targets. So where does that take things?
February 9, 2010
Customer Complaints and the Role of CRM
by Anshul Tiwari
We are living in an age where there is not only an abundance of information but also a massive flow of this information at an unprecedented rate. In this highly competitive and information rich world, the consumer is more aware than ever before. Steps have been taken both by the governments and NGOs in different countries to ensure that the consumer does not get exploited. A number of consumer awareness programs and campaigns have been taken up in earnest and every effort is made to make people aware of their rights and responsibilities.
Continue reading "Customer Complaints and the Role of CRM" »
February 4, 2010
Mantra for Growing Business
Sometimes I really wonder what matters most to the customer; is it cost of a product/service or the actual service element associated with it?
Consider this scenario – you go to a shop; you see that nobody is there to serve you; you wait for a few seconds/minutes and then call for someone. When someone appears, you ask for something and you do not get a proper response. Instead, the person just ignores you and goes to another customer just like that or with a curt response.
Or look at this scenario – you go to a shop and shopkeeper is on phone. The other sales men are busy and don’t make it a priority to serve you as a customer. You ask for something and even after waiting patiently you don’t get any response/service from anyone.
January 28, 2010
More power to the call center agent
I recently called customer service of a leading telephone company for updating my billing address. I was surprised to receive response that I will need to go to the nearest office of the telephone company and fill out a change of address form. At another instance, I called the same company to change my call plan. Again, the agent expressed his/her inability to help me out, I was asked to submit another application – and, I was also required to provide my photographs and various other documentation, which I had already submitted when I enrolled with the company.
January 15, 2010
Relationship in the context of CRM
The most important element of CRM is “Relationship”, and surprisingly, it takes the backseat too often. Is it not important that we invest time in our customers, we partner with them in times of need and we lend a helping hand to them in changing dynamics ?
January 14, 2010
Social Media ... an eventful year for Digital Consumers
The year 2009 has been quite an eventful one, and would be remembered for a long time for the action packed days..we’ve seen it all the … Government bailouts, companies being bought or dissolved, CEOs getting sacked etc etc..inthe middle of it this there has been something that has seen a tremendous growth - A beast called Social Media, digital consumer today has fuelled the engines of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other similar portals so much so that if you were to look at the following stats you would agree there is that there is something that is happening around us that neither the end customer nor the companies around can afford to ignore.
Continue reading "Social Media ... an eventful year for Digital Consumers" »
December 16, 2009
Is Predictive Analytics the key to better outcomes and improved customer experience in the stock market?
by Vinod Nag
Stock market investment is always a challenge for anyone, regardless of whether a person is an expert in finance or wants to make an entry into the stock market but does not have any clue about how it works. It is not easy to play a blind game with the market and win. However, to play a wise game, it is important to understand how a company is performing, how are its scrip placed, is it over valued, what is the current market trend, how is this industry sector doing, are there any external influence like change in government rules, market corrections so on and so forth.
December 15, 2009
CRM @ Personal Touch
Though CRM is mostly equated with technology and how software applications can be used to increase customer profitability in sales, service and marketing operations, there is no denying the fact that strong personal relationships can far outweigh any competition from super efficient CRM systems and processes.
That is true even more so in today’s world where we expect less and less from corporations which hide behind Interactive Voice Response Systems, Policy Disclaimers and Terms of Agreement and carefully scripted support calls where even the most enthusiastic agent is probably appraised on how quickly he or she can get you off the call (Did you hear the sigh as well when you actually replied ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’).
November 24, 2009
Building a Loyal Customer Base
In this post and in a few forthcoming ones I intend to dwell upon key factors that builds a loyal customer base.
Clear customer focus and a customer centered/driven value-chain are hygiene factors to build loyalty in today’s cluttered market place. Customer centric processes are not only mandatory in CRM functions like Sales, Marketing and Service/after-sales support but also in the core functions like order processing, manufacturing and product development.
November 9, 2009
"Zappos and the way to ride the Social Marketing wave"
Not sure if you all noticed this quite development over the last weekend, Amazon finally after all the regulatory checks was able to close the acquisition of Zappos, this company as we know became a billion dollar company form a shoe store.
Continue reading ""Zappos and the way to ride the Social Marketing wave"" »
November 3, 2009
Social Media – Feedback is essential and an important ingredient of SCRM. Use it to benefit
Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.
Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.
Scene-3/Act1 John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.
Scene-3/Act2 John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.
October 23, 2009
Bill and Sell
A bill sent to a customer from the telecom service provider is a powerful tool of customer communication. Hope you agree to this fact. The 'Power of the Bill' can be unleashed in multiple ways. Mainly, for the operator’s revenue increase by means of cross selling and up selling. Cross selling and up selling can be effectively increased through the bill. The target product segment can vary, and cross selling and up selling strategy would differ based on the product segment- whether it is 3G mobile, Wifi Broadband, WiMax and so on.
October 8, 2009
Is Customer Experience a lone ranger?
I have a theory. In the English language, 'Customer Experience' is possibly the term with the most variety of definitions. I wish to add to this record and hence this blog.
There are two dimensions of Customer Experience that I need to lay emphasis on while defining CEM– firstly, it is measurable and secondly, it isn’t an engine that runs in isolation to generate success. I’ll elaborate on both these dimensions…
October 5, 2009
Social CRM –Measure it, harness the benefits in tandem – A Balanced Scorecard Interpretation
With the evolution of Social media on a rapid scale, what with Salesforce now coming out with Service Cloud 2; is it already time to think how much of this can be measured?
In the good old days of CRM and other evolving concepts/strategies the innovation, acceptance, implementation, integration, feedback, service quality etc. took time, effort and a lot of money. Over the years all of these have been dealt with and there are many a ready-made solutions and excellent products made available. We have seen CRM mature over the years. The TCO, ROI, scalability, flexibility and high-performance were critical factors to success and these were taken care of. The measurement per se, of CRM has been lost in this mêlée somewhere though not completely and it came in late. Measuring the CRM success via the Balanced Scorecard model is one way.
September 24, 2009
Making the customer experience
by Sheetal Sharma
With the customer at the focal point of all business activities, a great amount of business energy is being devoted from a strategic perspective towards satisfying a customer’s needs. The telecommunications arena is no different. In fact, in a stiff market place as that of telecom, the customer truly rules. Innovative strategies, new technologies, products and plans are being developed and evolved constantly – keeping solely the customer in mind.
However, efforts are being made only from the CRM perspective – which is essentially uni-dimensional. The reason being that CRM deals with the ‘what the company thinks of the customer’ piece. The significant piece of ‘what the customer thinks of the company’ tends to get overlooked, which results in the jigsaw puzzle of Delighting the Customer never really getting complete!
September 23, 2009
Who is in charge of customer relationships? Not companies, it is customers!
I recently came across an interesting post in the ittoolbox blog, where the author has used the word CMR (Customer Managed Relationships). It really set me thinking. All we are doing in most CRM applications is maintaining customer information in various forms (interests/interactions/orders/service requests etc). But not relationships!
Yes, the customer maintains the relationship and he/she is in charge and has the power to churn/chose the product/service provider. As they say, 'The customer is not an idiot. Customer are aware of what products to buy and from whom to buy.
Continue reading "Who is in charge of customer relationships? Not companies, it is customers!" »
September 8, 2009
The Lost Customer Relationships in the Indian Retail Industry
Recently I visited a supermarket, after my shopping when I was about to pay my bill, the cashier offered me their membership at nominal joining price and showed me a few benefits for enrolled members. The same incident is repeating at every retail outlet. Every retailer is trying to tie the customer by issuing a membership at a nominal price and showing them a few benefits. Same is the case with Loyalty programs, instead of building true customer loyalty these loyalty programs are becoming sales campaigns which only aim at increasing revenue from customer. With so many programs and memberships customers are treating these as sales pitches rather than relation enhancement/building programs. Companies are forgetting the basics of building relationships and are actually trying to tie customer to their outlets through memberships and Loyalty programs. Customers are humans and not mindless creatures to stay still if tied to something.
Continue reading "The Lost Customer Relationships in the Indian Retail Industry" »
Follow us on
Survey
Poll
Infosys on Twitter
Recent Posts
Categories
Archives
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009