Below are some of our published articles on customer experience management.
- Contact Centre Crystal
ball gazing for 2009
With 2009 only a few months away I thought that it was time to make some informed
predictions about what is likely to be happening in the Direct Marketing and Call
Centre Industry’s over the next year or so.
- AHT the sometimes
forgotten Contact Centre ROI metric
As a great Direct Marketing (DM) professional you no doubt know your Return on Investment
(ROI) attributes, metrics and calculations backwards, but there always seems to
be one Contact Centre metric that flies below the radar for a lot of consummate
DM professionals, that being Average Handle Time (AHT) of Contact Centre calls!
- 7 great tips for Call Centre
resourcing
Trying to find and keep the best contact centre staff? Try these 7 sure fire ways
to find and keep the best call centre resources.
- Marketing
people are from Mars and Contact Centre People are from Pluto
5 Tips to bring the planets together!
Quite often our clients tell us that they would like things to be better between
their Contact Centre and Marketing Departments, so stronger business results could
be achieved.
Every situation is different and does need to be dealt with on a case by case basis
but I've listed 5 easy tips that you could implement immediately to ensure that
your relationships do not deteriorate
- 6 ways you
can use service to increase sales and lower costs in your contact centre
What if your Contact Centre and Customer Service Departments generated marketing
ideas and increased sales through plain old good service, while still reducing costs?
Impossible you may say, but it’s not just read on!
- 9 Call Centre
Reports
Every Marketing Manager Must Have
Being able to report, measure, review and interpret the results of your call centre
campaigns is paramount to the ongoing success of your direct marketing strategy.
But, did you know that 8 out of 10 businesses can improve campaign success through
improved call centre reporting and analysis?
- Call centre
execution:
7 ways marketers can improve conversions
The hard work is done, the calls are being made and now it’s just a matter of waiting
for the sales to roll in from the call centre, or is it?
- Call centre
campaigns:
5 set up questions every marketer should ask.
The campaign strategy has been set and the offer created. All that needs to be done
now is the selection and loading of the call lists. The campaign is ready to roll
and you can hand off to the call center. But wait, have you made sure that the call
center will be able to get the maximum value from all of your hard work?
- Customer
Loyalty Surveys:
Are you including all 3 critical elements
The starting point when designing customer loyalty programs should be understanding
what your customers care about and how well you are meeting their expectations.
Unfortunately, many attempts at customer satisfaction measurement fail to include
all three critical elements in the customer loyalty survey and so fail to provide
useful information to the business.
- 5 steps to effective
Customer Loyalty Programs
Increasingly organizations are becoming dissatisfied with their customer satisfaction
surveys and turning instead to designing and implementing customer loyalty programs.
The reason is simple, after 10 years of running national customer satisfaction surveys
the American Customer Satisfaction Index has, basically, not moved at all. This
is despite industry reportedly investing USD800,000,000 each year on improving customer
satisfaction.
So what to do?
- Will Customer
Experience Management
grow up big and strong like its rich cousin CRM?
In the last 12 months Customer experience management (CEM) has started to get more
profile but it is still just a good idea emerging into an area of marketing thought
currently dominated by CRM. A quick check on Google cites approximately 250 times
more listings for CRM as it does for CEM. According to Overture, for every one person
searching on CEM almost 90 search on CRM.
Yes, CEM is currently a poor cousin to CRM. If it is to grow up and become a powerful
business tool it must move out of marketing and directly link itself to business
outcomes.
- Generating higher profits by
managing customers as financial assets
"Your customer is your most powerful asset" according to Harvard Business
School Professor Frances Frei. Yet, how many organisations actually manage and monitor
their customers as a financial asset?
The road block that many organisation’s face, is that they manage customers as non-financial
assets rather than as financial assets. For this reason, they do not use the same
rigorous tools and processes to manage customers as they do to manage their other
assets.
- Taguchi Testing: Double your e-newsletter conversions
If you’re like most people you’d be happy to increase conversions a few percentage
points on each e-newsletter. Well, what if there was a way to double or triple the
number of conversions you receive?
Impossible?
There is way and the secret is to vastly improve your ability to test e-newsletter
elements efficiently and effectively. The way to do that is Taguchi design.
- Are you wasting your time measuring Marketing ROI?
If you’re like most of the people who measure the ROI of marketing campaigns
or other business initiatives you’re probably focusing on the wrong thing:
Tactical ROI.
- What drives Customer Retention?
Many companies would like to improve their customer retention but are unsure how
to make the changes in their business to improve this important profit lever.
- Customer Service = Customer Retention
We all hear about the bad customer service experiences that our friends have had
but for once I wanted to relate a good story and give credit where it is due. Customer
service is such an important and misunderstood part of customer retention that I
tend to go looking for examples of both excellent and reprehensible service. Last
month I found an example of the excellent type and I think it provides some valuable
lessons for us all.
- Personalisation - Is it worth
the effort?
There’s only so much time in the day and dollars in the budget! When trying to decided
how to apportion both, one of the topics I frequently get asked about is personalisation:
“is it worth the effort?” In my opinion the answer is YES.
- Why do companies make it so difficult
for customers to do business with them?
It always amazes me the trouble companies go to secure new customers and then just
throw them into a bucket labeled “Customer”, never looking at them again. Well that
bucket has lot of leaks and companies are themselves the ones hammering in the holes.
Many times you can improve customer retention by just plugging a few of those holes.
Here is a recent case in point.
- Why Communicate with your Customers?
In a world where customers control the relationship, if you want to continue to
have a relationship, you need to provide something of value to them and profitable
to you. In other words, you communicate with your customers to provide information
both relevant to their needs and profitable to you.
- Four Keys to Successful Competitions
In today’s marketplace, consumers are bombarded with competitions as companies fight
to attract new customers and retain their existing ones. Some companies are extremely
successful in achieving their marketing objectives through the use of competitions,
whilst others fail dismally. So why do some companies fail with competitions and
others succeed? It’s all due to planning and implementation.
- Strategic Uses for Competitions
Every year, companies spend millions of dollars running business promotion competitions
to improve new customer acquisition rates or increase product usage. While many
of these competitions appear successful, just as many could easily provide greater
returns. By changing your perception of competitions from being a tactical way to
boost short term sales to a powerful tool in your marketing strategy, you can reap
large returns.
