What CRM Experts Say

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

It may be the big shots in marketing that create your brand character, but it’s the worker bees who make it come to life. Inherent to the concept of brand is the promise of a customer’s satisfaction. That promise comes down to the interaction with the individual customer.

Said differently, the dedication to each customer’s sat¬isfaction must come from the top, and it must be under¬stood by every employee as a strategic product. Else, events will turn around and bite you in the butt, because it’s usually the lowest-paid employees who have the most contact with your customers—and thus have the greatest ability to affect customer satisfaction.

Happy customers tend to stay longer and buy more. Unhappy customers don’t. Here are two illustrations from everyday life (and your customers live in everyday life).

By Art Hall
Alvarez & Marsal Business Consulting, LLC

Call center executives often struggle with the difficult challenge of doing less with more. With the right strategy in place, it is absolutely possible to improve operations with minimum resources to deliver maximum impact to the bottom-line.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

The success of marketing innovation correlates with the success of implementing change. Marketing may realize that all systems and processes must be retooled to become more customer centric. However, if the cultural change is not managed successfully, these will be just empty words. Here are the four hard and-fast rules to enable change without disabling innovation:

By Art Hall, Manager, Alvarez & Marsal; President, CRM Association, Atlanta Chapter

Recent studies predict the global CRM market will double within six years and CRM adoption across every segment will continue to rise mostly fueled by the explosiveness of on-demand CRM delivery models.

"CRM Market Fertility" - the percent of companies deploying or plans to deploy CRM, stands at 38% compared to 18% to 25% historically. On-demand CRM offerings with a set of rich functionality set is making it possible for small to midsize businesses (SMB's) to afford and implement a CRM solution.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

For the most part, I think a lot of us greatly underes­timate the power of customer satisfaction. We sometimes don’t define it in terms of profit and loss, but we know it’s a factor. We base decisions on self congratu­latory information. Dissatisfaction augers the hole in the bottom of our customer base.

Here are two examples and four suggestions.

By: Jeff Pedowitz, President & CEO, The Pedowitz Group.

Today’s business schools have come a long way since the day I graduated. The programs are more involved, internships are more prevalent, and the case study programs continue to impress. With all the improvements, I find that today’s graduates are still lacking some key skill sets that will ensure their success on the job in years to come. Additionally, professionals that have been in the field for more than five years are also lacking key skills that threaten their job security.

In this article, we examine 5 critical things that every professional marketer needs to master.

By: Scott Hornstein, Principal Hornstein Associates.

The rubric of “customer relationship management ”offers two promises: The first is to enable marketers to find those who are ready to buy right now and close the sale quickly; the second is to create a repurchase preference. The bottom line: It’s more profitable to have happy customers who stay longer and buy more.

The majority of marketing strategy and investment is solidly behind promise No. 1. Should we pick the low hanging fruit? Absolutely. If we don’t, someone else will. It also seems that most companies have yet to warm up to promise No. 2. Do companies bombard their customers with ongoing repurchase solicitations? Absolutely. Are these finely targeted? Not usually. Look in your mailbox—are companies targeting you or trolling?