Archive for the ‘ December 2009 ’ Category

Social networks or cyberspace anonymity: those who do and those who don’t

The world of social media seems to be dividing up into two groups: Those who do and those who don’t. Those who do are happy to be out there, presenting themselves, promoting themselves, adding this new medium to their portfolio of communication. They leverage perceived risk with opportunity. Those who don’t prefer to remain cyberspace-anonymous, worry about misrepresenting themselves, prefer traditional means of communication, resist with all their might. Perhaps they even resist against better judgement. Perhaps[ READ MORE ]

Organisations in Cyberspace: Permission Asset CRM considerations

One of the changes that Cyberspace has brought about is building a permission asset for your organisation. It's the basic principle of asking for permission to approach your customer regarding future commercial opportunities. We have all seen it before: "May we please contact you regarding the following in future:". And then follows list with topics such as customer feedback, new product evaluations, Christmas cards, updates regarding your offering, newsletters, blogs and such. In my opinion, there is intentional permission and circumstantial permission. This article is about how deal with this important distinction[ READ MORE ]

Amazon.com: Mitigating fear of losing…… control

Doing business has come a long way in the past 20 years or so. Only two decades ago Cash was King and there were no credit cards to speak of. Really, we were all still in the stone age. Buying something meant handing over your money and taking home your product. Today, at the end of 2009, most of us don't even see our money anymore. It might as well be Monopoly money. Many households pay their bills by direct debit or internet banking. Some of the products or services received are of abstract nature such as mortgages, electricity bills, council tax and such. Electronic money for abstract products. Now in the early stages of internet trade, Amazon.com understood very wel[ READ MORE ]

Teleportation of customer data for CRM

CRM is all about matching what is in the head of your customer in your CRM architecture. You need to be able to get to the right customer data when you need it. This could be information regarding quotations, orders, complaints. service outages, moves, contact persons just to name a few. Phew.... I was joking the other day with a friend of mine how great it would be if you could just teleport the information in your customer's head into your own CRM databases. All information about ongoing orders, quotations, previous conversations, the customer's likes and dislikes, his perception of sales conversations, the way he felt when your order was delivered. Just like that. Teleportation of customer data. Break it down on one end, build it back up in the other. Now we all know this is not possible. But it's a good end-point vision. After all, if we had all customer data available at our fingertips, an intelligent conversation with the customer would be relatively easy. There would be opportunity for upsell of other products, there would be opportunity to anticipate the customer's wishes and surprise instead of disappoint. [ READ MORE ]

Not enough customer information? Time to get paranoid.

There’s a saying that goes: ”if you’re not paranoid, you don’t have enough information”. It is derived from the premise, that even when you think you have everything under control, there is probably something you don’t know about which could and will bite you in the backside when you least expect it. Recognise this from your adventures in CRM world? Sure you do. Of course, if you lived by this rule, you would never be able to relax again. So you don’t live by this rule. Ironically though, this saying represents the exact most current challenge that all of us in CRM-land are facing. The fear of being confronted with something customer related that we don’t know about. How do you have an intelligent conversation with your customer if you don’t have the relevant information[ READ MORE ]

Are we collecting numbers…. or real people?

We all know that social media is a hot topic. I started out carefully on Linkedin a few years ago, added Facebook, Twitter… and for a while I got into this frenzy of collecting people in my network, friends and followers. Some people I meet take pride in having several thousands of followers on Twitter. Sure, [ READ MORE ]

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