CRM

Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

This next B2B Marketing Thought Leader Interview is with Bill Odell, vice president of marketing at Helpstream, a Social CRM solutions company. Bill is responsible for the company’s overall marketing and go-to-market strategies and oversees all product marketing, partner marketing and corporate marketing activities. Bill has 20 years of experience leading marketing for several innovative, category creating technology companies, including Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Compression Labs – the developer of DirectTV – and Interlace Systems.

Guest Post by: Maria Pergolino

The next interview in the B2B Marketing Thought Leader interview series is with David Taber. David is the author of the new Prentice-Hall book, "Salesforce.com Secrets of Success," which covers the people, policy, and process issues surrounding effective CRM solutions.

Much of the story work I’m familiar with involves asking people to tell stories about their experiences on a particular topic. I do some of this myself. But I’ve also done work with a completely different class of story. This story is created out of the spontaneous meeting of two people - a customer and a customer-service rep - over the telephone.

Have you ever filled in a survey card in a hotel room? I haven’t either. But more times than I could count I have wanted to let a hotel know about something I liked about my stay or wasn’t happy about.

by: John Caddell

Auto-renewals of long-term contracts have a lot to like about them, at least for the seller of a product. If the customer doesn’t have the bandwidth or energy to reopen negotiations, a contract rolls over for another period–one year, three years or more. The supplier wipes his brow and relaxes, with that client’s business in the books.

by: John Caddell

Let me point out two problems:

1) Customer service is quite a difficult job and even the best reps are prone to burn out in time–it has turned into a low-pay, high-turnover McJob instead of the vital, even exalted position it should be.

2) Most managers & leaders are disconnected from their customers, with the result that their decisions often ignore or even defy customers’ wishes.

by: John Caddell

1. This article in the Wall Street Journal that discusses Delta pulling its call center back to the US from India.

2. This post by Felix Salmon (off his usual topic): “How To Succeed In Customer Service.”

by: John Caddell

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

A few days ago, I received further confirmation from my bank -- Chase -- that its brand is all about abusing me.

by: Yann Gourvennec