Customer interaction

Bruce Temkin has developed an approach around The 4 Customer Experience Competencies which really resonates with someone who comes from a traditional marketing background. It is not often that “Brand Values” are highlighted in such a way when the topic of customer experience is being debated.

Mental opt-out has been a hot topic around here lately.  With e-mail dominating business communication, many marketers have fallen into the trap of classifying email as a free marketing tool, leading them to contact their customers without giving proper thought to email frequency or relevancy.  Since there’s no financial investment in e-mail, what is there to lose?  As it turns out, the answer is a lot.

From: Chief Marketer Blog - Sell the Way Your Customers Buy

Every marketer's goal is to send relevant and engaging content to customers. But consumer buying behavior is evolving so quickly that the rules are constantly changing. In this article, the author discusses how marketers must realize that the balance of power has shifted to the consumer. Marketers need to quickly adapt and frame new programs that sell to customers in the way they now buy using the resources available across multiple channels.

From Think Customers: the 1to1 Blog - An Enterprise Approach to End Data Silos

Data silos still remain the main reason that keep many companies from integrating their analytics efforts into multiple channels or layering in-depth predictive analytics. In this article, Patrick Surry is quoted as saying that silos are a "fundamental fact of life with product-centric organizations. "I think that's a real big challenge that no one has figured out.”

Recently, while prepping for a customer meeting to present the advances of Portrait Dialogue 5, I was thinking of the time I spent in the mid-1990s as an imbedded account representative at Lotus Development for Barry Blau Partners (BB&P). At the time, BB&P was one of the preeminent direct marketing agencies in the U.S. and Lotus was still competing in the desktop tool marketplace (remember Lotus SmartSuite?) against Microsoft Windows.