CRMOutsiders

Research firm Gartner has issued a new report noting that it expects IT budgets to increase significantly in 2013 and 2014, led by both cloud computing and CRM initiatives. The reasons given are pretty simple: cloud will provide for cost savings and other long-term efficiencies. Gartner posits that CRM investments will increase due to an … Continue reading »

Who says you can’t go home again? When I first started this blog back in 2007, I had no idea what it might become. Now, after six years, hundreds of posts, and a few “owners” later I am back working with a lot of the team I knew while initially launching CRM Outsiders. One of … Continue reading »

I’ve written a lot about CRM and customer service. Bad service can sabotage even the best CRM strategy, but adapting service to cope with the evolving customer and, more importantly, evolving customer expectations is difficult. It’s doubly difficult in businesses where the view of service persists that it’s a cost center. (Hint: it’s no longer … Continue reading »

Last week, I spoke at Social Business Atlanta. My talk was on the three P’s of avoiding social CRM failure (the article that started that train of thought rolling can be found here), so I served as the voice of caution and/or the source of comic relief for the event. The other speakers were among … Continue reading »

Building a customer relationship starts not with CRM but with a good product or service, and the ability to deliver it. That’s the foundation of your business. If you fail at that foundational aspect of your business, no CRM program’s going to save you. That said, I have just identified a company that is on … Continue reading »

Will Rogers once said, “when you’re in a hole stop digging.” He certainly did not have social media in mind, which is a pity when you think about it: he would have killed on Twitter, and he could have checked Yelp! for customer reviews of Wiley Post’s flying abilities. However, it is a saying that … Continue reading »

Here’s a scenario for you: a company gets a social analytics tool and starts messing around with it. Initially, as is the case with most businesses, early applications are akin to “ego surfing,” where the company looks for mentions of itself (a handy exercise if you want to find issues to direct to your support … Continue reading »

Social media-enabled service is a trend whose value seems painfully obvious: if someone’s asking for help from your company on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Google +, it’s a smart move to respond to them for a number of reasons. First off, they’re customers, and they have a problem. That should be reason number one. Second, … Continue reading »

There was a great post this week on 1to1 media’s blog about an airline wrecking a guy’s guitar.  Yes, again – this time it was not United, but Delta Airlines, and they managed to squish Dave Schneider’s 1965 Gibson ES-335 guitar between a service elevator door and a rail on a loading dock. They squished … Continue reading »

You want to learn about CRM, or you want to refine and expand your understanding, but you don’t know where to start? Well, the blogosphere’s one good place to start learning, but it’s become a crowded, confusing place, clogged with blogs of disparate quality and written by people with motives that are less than mostly … Continue reading »