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 [...]

Karl let me know that the results from his survey are available - you can find them on the Rexer Analytics site - so I thought I would take a look and blog about them. Karl collected 348 responses from individuals in 44 countries and I found the results worth a read. A few highlights:

CRM/Marketing [...]

I live in Palo Alto and a new Mountain Mike’s Pizza has just opened up near us. Much as we like MM pizza we have two problems - we like wholewheat dough and, as several members of my family are lactose/milk intolerant, soy cheese. If you have visited or live in Palo Alto you will [...]

Delivering the best value proposition using segmentation is a multi-step journey with 6 main steps and some critical differences from other analytic approaches:

Define Segmentation Objectives
The first step - deciding why to build a segmentation scheme - is important but often overlooked. Reasons may include declining financial performance, changes in strategy or market trends - the [...]

Nina Shikaloff discussed an analytics technique that I had not heard of - Impact Modeling. Impact Modeling is a decision modeling technique. Decisions on acquiring customers - what to offer for instance - managing customers and handling difficult customers are all important and it can be tricky to identify better ones. Impact modeling is about [...]

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

A colleague attended the Aberdeen CMO Summit last week and took some great notes. I am going to have a couple of posts this week based on her notes. First up, some lessons from Paul DePodesta (of the Padres). Paul focused on some of the challenges of moving from judgmental to more analytic decision [...]

Last thoughts from the CMO summit based on comments made by various Aberdeen folks and speakers. Fundamentally, companies cannot allow their marketing to stand still. Marketing cannot afford to keep doing what it’s doing - lots of companies focus on acquisition for instance even when their data suggests that retention and selling to existing [...]

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 [...]

Ginger Conlon had a little piece on mobile marketing that caught my eye. This post highlighted the growing importance of mobile devices as both a customer support channel and as a marketing vehicle. I completely agree with this assessment but I think it means that, for both customer service and marketing, we will have to [...]