Around 20 years ago, academics and consultants Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema identified three ‘value disciplines’ or models followed by top-performing companies: operational excellence, customer-intimacy and product leadership. The second, essentially an advanced form of customer-centricity, is usually the one that’s hardest to emulate. One of the difficulties with the customer-intimacy model is that it […]
Subject: Customer-centricity
How Customer Participation Builds Loyalty
Customer word-of-mouth is a hot topic in marketing today. Positive customer-to-customer reviews, whether verbal or written, are powerful marketing tools because they have more credibility with customers than company-generated marketing. In addition, once customers help spread the word about a company’s products, they are more engaged and committed to that company. Customer participation, on the […]
Customer Loyalty: Easy Does It
Customer effort research has been around since the 1940s but the debate gained momentum following a 2010 article, ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers’, in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). In particular, the HBR paper raised interest in how CE and, in particular, customer effort scores (CES) could be used as an indicator of customer loyalty. […]
Servitization: Implications for Sales and Marketing
There has been a growing trend in recent years for suppliers to differentiate their products through services, rather than solely through products. Consider the case of Apple, whose market share has consistently come under assault from cheaper tablets and touch screen phones competing with their iPad and iPhone. Nevertheless, it has managed to stay ahead […]
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Multichannel Strategies for Better Customer Experience
Businesses need to adopt a multichannel mindset when interacting with their customers, because customers use multiple channels and expect relevant, consistent experiences across all of them. This research seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround multichannel delivery and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are key […]
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Managing Customer Relations When Demand Exceeds Supply
What happens when a business has more orders that it can fill? While the situation may seem to be a happy one, resolving the dilemma effectively is key to maintaining a happy and profitable customer base. The decisions must thus be made carefully: which customers should be served first? The high-margin customers might seem the […]
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If the Price is Right: Charging for Online Content
Plummeting advertising revenues have led many online content providers to experiment with additional sources of revenue. Most often, firms aim to compensate for a loss in advertising revenues by charging consumers for access to online content. However, such a choice is not straightforward since subscription fees typically deter customers, further reducing advertising revenues. Acknowledging the […]
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Failed CRM Initiatives and How to Avoid Them
Despite being well-managed and well-resourced, a large number of companies have failed to see adequate return on CRM investments. This is a definite concern as many invested heavily prior to the recession (between 2000 and 2005, $220 billion was spent on CRM solutions) and will be planning to invest further as the world economy improves. […]
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