mThink

Forrester Research senior analyst Andy Hoar delivered a fascinating keynote at the Rakuten Linkshare Symposium last week.  His theme was the continuing evolution of e-commerce and the insights he brought will have a lot of consequences for the performance marketing sector. Some of his points restated things that anyone that has been paying attention already [...]

I’m confused why we refer to this world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, MySpace, etc., as “social” media. From everything I’ve experienced, it should really be called “anti-social” media. The sad reality is that social media has devolved into a series of faceless and impersonal interactions through PCs, smartphones and tablets, whereby [...]

Two and a half years ago, a team of marketing executives met in their downtown Atlanta headquarters to chart the future of their brand in the uncertain frontier of interactive marketing. What makes the story unusual is that the brand is one of the most recognized trademarks in the world, with a market value of nearly $100 billion. Even more remarkable is the nature of the online initiatives that were set into motion and are only now starting to come to fruition.

Customers want the best your company has to offer. To deliver, you need an integrated customer experience across all touch points throughout your organization. This requires a complete and consistent view of your customers. First-generation CRM promised these capabilities but has often fallen short. Historically, high cost, complexity and drawn-out implementations contributed to nearly a [...]

Proven to Deliver Customer Intelligence for Marketing, Sales and Service In a business climate that punishes the inefficient and slow-moving, enterprises need agile strategies, clear-sighted decision making and the ability to focus scarce resources on the activities most likely to drive success. SAS helps you achieve all these goals, with integrated software and services that [...]

Applying adaptive CRM capabilities to CRM and other customer-facing systems enables the enterprise to learn from their customer interactions in real time to continuously refine the best next action or best next offer. Adaptive capabilities enable customer-facing systems to capture details about a customer interaction where they were not able to do so before, pumping [...]

After wrestling with first-generation customer relationship management solutions that were difficult to use, customize and integrate, organizations have learned the importance of having a CRM solution that is flexible enough to fit the way they do business – a solution that enables improved customer loyalty and profitability and supports innovation across the whole organization. This [...]

Customer-first. Customer-focused. Customer- driven. Customer-centric. Customerobsessed. The words have been bandied about in the management lexicon in the last few decades as though each new wave of strategists were the first to realize that revenue comes … from customers. That fact seems self-evident, but what has been less clear is how to fully capitalize on [...]

This paper looks at the merits of preconfigured solutions in CRM and whether or not the absence of customization is actually harming customer service. The disconnect between customer relationship management (CRM) applications and the reality of customer experiences will also be examined. As technology and automation become more pervasive, the customer is feeling more alienated [...]