Social media-enabled service is a trend whose value seems painfully obvious: if someone’s asking for help from your company on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Google +, it’s a smart move to respond to them for a number of reasons. First off, they’re customers, and they have a problem. That should be reason number one. Second, … Continue reading »
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A holiday idea: practicing the business of kindness (BBC-style)
While running around doing Christmas shopping, I happened to hear an episode of the BBC’s “Global Business” on the local NPR station. It was about what they called “the Business of Kindness.” What they really were talking about was the idea of building relationships with customers, with suppliers – with all the people one does … Continue reading »
CRM’s Forgotten Features: Web-to-Lead Forms
By Chris Bucholtz (Here’s number four in our five-part series on features in CRM that can expand your ROI – but which frequently go forgotten or ignored. Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found here, here and here.) When many first-time users envision CRM, many of them see this: a system that allows them … Continue reading »
Curing Pain Points in CRM Requires a Diagnosis First, then Treatment
By Chris Bucholtz I learned long ago that, for businesses to make significant changes or significant investments, it requires significant pain. I learned this while covering the telecommunications industry, a collection of enormous corporations that saw change as an opponent of revenue. Back in the 1990s – around 1996, and the signing of the Telecommunications … Continue reading »
ServiceSource: Understanding the Nuances of Coaxing Customer Renewals
By Chris Bucholtz We’re increasingly moving toward a subscription economy. Technology’s making it possible, pressures on cash flow within businesses make it critical, and the need to make each customer just a little more profitable make it ever more viable. But this economy puts a lot of businesses of all sizes into a new business: … Continue reading »
Success vs. Change: Why Thriving Companies May Need an Extra Nudge Toward SCRM
By Chris Bucholtz It maybe apocryphal, but I’ve always sensed there was a grain of truth in the story of a group of Silicon Valley engineers who were taken on a tour of the launch facilities at Cape Kennedy in the mid-1970s. These engineers, who were working on powerful digital computers that would eventually evolve … Continue reading »
Guest blogger Greg Ciotti: Fix Service by Making it Personal, Surprising and Slow
(Editor’s note: The saying goes, everyone talks about the weather, but but no one ever does anything about it. Customer service is a lot like that: it’s been discussed to death as a key to customer retention and customer experience, and yet it never really seems to change all that much. Why is that? I’ll … Continue reading »
CRM’s Forgotten Features: Workflow
(Editor’s note: here’s the next chapter in our ongoing project to identify ways CRM users boost the ROI of their CRM investments by making greater and better use of features that often are ignored. This will manifest itself it a white paper, wrapped in a bit some insight, on how to avoid letting these features … Continue reading »
Ignoring input from users: a great shortcut to go from CRM decision to adoption failure
By Chris Bucholtz A couple of years ago, while researching an article for the now-defunct Forecasting Clouds website, I had an enjoyable conversation with an integrator about the best way to select a CRM application. One of the things we talked at length about was the composition of the CRM selection team – the people … Continue reading »
Two critical SCRM traits – enthusiasm for engagement and a lack of excuses – as embodied by… a maritime museum?
By Chris Bucholtz Back in March I presented a webinar on the topic of customer service and social media and how the two were converging to become both more important and more capable. While that’s a great topic, the best part of the webinar was the question and answer period. I had several really great … Continue reading »
