Last week I was invited to attend Chordiant’s European Customer Advisory Board. This session was held in lovely Munich in the middle of Oktoberfest and was both informative and a lot of fun. While I can’t share everything - some of it was for customers only - I thought you would appreciate what I could [...]

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign Management.
She starts off with three great principles:

Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects — both explicit and implied.
Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.

All of [...]

Three articles on loyalty caught my eye this week. First 1:1 had a nice piece on Loyalty Equals Growth for Sony. Sony is a company to which many people are already loyal so it was interesting to see that a formal loyalty program was still a priority for them. Talking about their combined CRM and [...]

I just finished reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs and I can’t recommend it too highly.
This is a tremendous book laying out a systematic approach for better customer service. Predicated on the idea that customers want your product to “just [...]

One of the things I like to do on the blog is bring attention to those companies applying the principles of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver useful, smart enough systems. I recently came across Strategy DirectorTM from Stratagem Portfolio Services. This uses EDM to deliver analytics and strategy support for collections.
The product is built on [...]

Erik Klein from the WebSphere Commerce group at IBM and Scott Young from a consultant. Erik started by discussing the inhibitors to moving to multi-channel and customer-centric. These include:

Siloed business units
Applications that don’t integrate or support multi-channel operations
Redundant data in multiple systems, no single version of the truth

The different domains - web, store and enterprise [...]