The quality of customer experience depends on the details, but not in the way that contact center executives might expect.

There are plenty of formulas for calculating customer value, but should that calculation be left solely to mathematics? True value is not as simple as how much a customer spends with an organization. Once a company knows the profitability of its customer in hard dollars, then the real work begins. They must add to the calculation such factors as loyalty, the availability and quality of customer data that can help build that value, and the effects that various customer touch points—from marketing campaigns to sales calls to call center experiences to Web self-service—may have on building or destroying value. The type of weighting of these factors will be unique to every organization. But a company must understand what specifically comprises customer value for its operations before it can be truly successful in creating and executing a strategy to build that value.

Some people say that hosting customers at events is yesterday’s strategy, that there’s no ROI, and that customers—pressed for time— would rather focus on the business at hand. UPS would disagree. The logistics and delivery company finds that hosting customer events gives its senior staff an opportunity to learn more about its high-level executive customers.

A commitment to privacy will help companies build customer
relationships based on trust. But how valuable are those
relationships? To find out, we've devised a metric called
Return on Customer<SUP>sm</SUP> (ROC), which quantifies the
value a company creates from its scarcest resource —
customers.

The fundamentals haven't changed. Successful marketing is still determined by how well companies know their customers. But today holistic marketing — carefully tying campaign budgets to customer behaviors — can reveal the customers who truly drive revenue.

Capturing a customer’s business is often called a “win.” But in any endeavor, some victories are sweeter than others.

Lilly Critical Care Europe has been advancing medicine for emergency-care doctors since the 1940s, when it became one of the first companies to mass produce penicillin.
Recently, however, it found itself in its own critical-care situation.

It's hard to believe anything would trump profit in the current shareholder-driven business climate. But recent events indicate that large enterprises are putting customer loyalty at the top of its list of corporate objectives.

As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, customer retention continues to be one of the most important yet misunderstood areas of customer strategy.

The GM financial group provides customizable communications for its agents to serve customer needs while maintaining the GMAC brand.