Customer Behavior and CRM Advocate

Gary Lemke over at CRM Advocate  does some nice work.  Every day he asks a thought provoking question related to CRM and asks readers for their “take” on the issue.  Over the years he’s exposed me to a lot of good thinking and I encourage you to take a look at his blog. A few [...]

The Howard Moskowitz Factor

In a Ted Talk from 2004 that I watched a the other day, Malcolm Gladwell spoke about Howard Moskowitz.  You might recall the New Yorker writer made a name for himself with the publication of The Tipping Point and several other works that focus on the unpredictable things that people do in the course of [...]

The meta customer experience

Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media.  Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor.  Generally speaking the people behind these sites have a gripe that has a fragment (or more) of truth in it and it [...]

Experience is in the eye of the beholder

Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It’s a mixed bag, really — some people [...]

The IP your customers can give you

I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be to last week’s column on customer experience.  Maybe I hang around with vendors and other analysts too much because customer experience is a hot topic among us and it’s generally seen as a good thing.  But judging by last week’s mail and some further digging at the [...]

Customer experience as IP

Thanks to all of you who took the time to comment on yesterday’s post.  The response was very positive both in emails and in comments.  The experience showed me that there are at least two schools of thought on the subject.  One side is the vendor and analyst camp, which is supportive of the customer [...]

Can Customer Experience Block Progress?

Customer experience reared its head in my life this month.  My phone service went out which was not a catastrophe for me because in addition to the landline (which went out) I have a cell and a nifty VoIP line that lets me talk through my computer.  Parenthetically, I love my VoIP line because — [...]

Sell specific benefits

I was in a conversation with the CEO of a CRM company the other day discussing the latest moves in the industry over ideas like SaaS, single tenant and multitenant deployments.  It has occurred to me and I said this to the CEO, that we spend far too much time and brain matter on the [...]

Customer experience or service product?

There is a difference between a customer experience and a service product and it is worth noting the distinction.  We seem to obsess about the former and almost ignore the latter and that’s too bad because I think there is money to be made in the difference. The distinction reminds me of the big discussion [...]

Customer experience or service-product?

Last week I made the suggestion that we have over done our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool — something that I stand by.  The idea of customer experience looms large and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM.  But if our interpretation of customer experience is off [...]