Customer Relationship Management

Once you know about customer value, your best customers’ migration path and what would lead those customers to defect, you enter a whole new acquisition game, writes Graham Hill.

Is your bank’s marketing strategy still powered by the old rules? asks Alan See, who explains that under the old rules, marketing uses a “spray and pray” approach to business development that reaches a large number of the wrong targets.

Howard Barrett asks you to imagine a world where advances in technology and changes in lifestyle and attitudes lead to a seismic shift in the way in which consumers interact with suppliers.

Every analysis of customer churn shows the same result: A staggering 70 percent leave because of poor service. So, asks David Rance, why don’t telecom companies focus more on customer service as a route to customer retention?

When you’re evaluating alternative marketing strategies for a group of customers, customer lifetime value is extremely valuable for understanding the return on investment, writes Mei Lin Fung.

The contemporary business ecosystem—with the customer at its hub—demands that the enterprise—nay, the extended—value chain be involved in the strategic planning of a brand holder, writes Paul Greenberg.

CRM cannot be implemented within an organization without any effort in cultural change management, aserts Silvana Buljan. That’s because, rather than being just another system implementation, customer relationship management means a substantial change in the company’s culture, she says.

The best way to approach customer contact is to work to eliminate the need for contact at all. That was the message from Bill Price, president of Driva Solutions and first vice president in charge of global customer service for Amazon.com, speaking before delegates at the CustomerThink Leadership Summit in June.

The overall performance of any organization is the result of the performance of the processes that conform to it; and the performance of any individual process is the result of the performance of the activities that make up the process. It all adds up to getting things done, writes Rafael Rodriguez.

Every company is absolutely convinced that it is customer centric. But this conviction, says Lior Arussy, is the No. 1 threat to any executive trying to launch a customer strategy in his company.