Customer Management

The Unifying Theme: Know Where You are and Measure What You Achieve In nearly all the issue areas discussed above, there is a common theme - know where you are and measure what you achieve. Many mistakes in CRM are based ... [full story]

Service: The Most Common Contact of All In most companies customer-side data, such as complaints and comments, or supplier-side data, such as records of service delivery, are rarely matched with customer value and transaction data. If matching is carried out, it ... [full story]

E-Marketing and Multi-Channel Marketing: Seamless or Seamy? In Chapter 00, we considered whether opening up an e-channel for customers used to dealing with a company through branches, mail or call centres meant that the same experience should be offered through different ... [full story]

The New Call Centre Challenge It seems just a few years since the idea of the call centre was introduced - even though it is more than twenty. Back then, call centres were the marketer's dream. They allowed companies to handle ... [full story]

Understanding the Customer - Instantly! In the 1980s, database marketers had a dream. It involved receiving calls or visits from customers and being able to profile them precisely, using information given previously plus new information gathered during the contact. The idea ... [full story]

The Magic of Customer Knowledge: Dare We Outsource It? The theory is wonderful. Take a data warehouse, add smart analysis tools, a structured approach to managing inbound and outbound customer contacts, including self-managed Web contacts, and give the cauldron an almighty ... [full story]

Retailing: To R or Not to R There's no doubt that one of the main determinants of success in retailing is good customer management - or CM. But when that little R for relationship creeps into the middle, to create CRM, ... [full story]

Know Your Bad Customer: A New Set of Requirements Today, many companies are prone to serious forms of attack from customers, not just hacking, though there is a relationship between this and the move to more remote forms of doing business, ... [full story]

Managing Branch Customers: The Local View of CRM Many banks are now focusing on achieving CRM objectives in branches. The objectives are classic - up-sell, cross-sell, retention, with a strong focus on efficiency. In this area, banks have much to learn ... [full story]

Competing for Share of Wallet Getting customers to shift their value between suppliers is particularly difficult when the service is binary - when customers either have to be 100 per cent with one supplier or another. This is one reason why ... [full story]

Segmentation, Not Stereotyping At the heart of most CRM programmes is a segmentation exercise - classifying customers so that they can be managed better. However, on a recent project, we started to discover some of the risks of segmentation. The project ... [full story]

A Single Vision of CRM, a Single Customer View? When companies started to realize that they might have been just a little misled about the costs and benefits of CRM, one of our authors renamed it 'Clever Repackaging Mechanism'. This was ... [full story]

CRM: Just Like the Corner Shop? It's not unusual to hear senior managers claiming that their company is aiming to recreate the 'customer intimacy' that was characteristic of the corner shop in earlier generations. Of course, most corner shops sold to ... [full story]

Building Loyalty and Relationships into Products One of the authors of this book is well known for his researches into 'wealth management'. The research showed that the conventional approach to wealth management was to identify a customer's various investment attitudes and ... [full story]

Branding in an Era of CRM In the market for CRM and related ideas, supply exceeds demand. Dot-coms have collapsed. The mobile telephony companies are much less bullish. Many large consultancies and marketing service agencies were at the time of writing ... [full story]

Managing Customers: Challenges for the Future Merlin Stone and Bryan Foss For many of the authors who have contributed to this book, its contents can be viewed as the culmination of twenty or even more years of work in the disciplines ... [full story]

Achieving Commitment Via 'Symbolic Action': The Part-Time Acting Role Symbolic action is defined as 'people's interaction and communication in the course of which they generate, convey, and infer meanings and significance'. [7] Pfeffer [8] states, 'it is the symbolic identification with ... [full story]

Executive Sponsorship in the Initial Phase The biggest challenge for sponsors in the initial phase is that of gaining understanding, consensus, commitment and the required action to the programme and its goals, expressed by Floyd. [5] Each of these is of ... [full story]

The Executive Sponsor Role: Director, Scriptwriter and Producer Much of the practitioner literature stresses the importance of top management support for any programme. This is often recognized by organizations and theoretically solved by the creation of an 'executive sponsor' role and ... [full story]

A Range of Roles and Types of Leadership Conventional wisdom suggests that good, effective leadership is core to any successful change. However it is also true that there are a multitude of theories on leadership and on the variety of roles ... [full story]

The Rise of People, or Stakeholder, Power The word 'organization' presents a rather depersonalized and abstract view of an entity, almost hiding the fact that its key constituents are its people or employees. An organization's key assets - its people - ... [full story]

The Challenge of Change Whatever style is selected, there will always be many challenges faced by those involved in driving the programme, including the executive sponsor. The literature highlights many issues inherent in any change programme. These include resistance to the ... [full story]

The Process and Style of Change Many writers and academics portray change as a process. Several authors developed more sophisticated models of the change process based on the new, broader view of organizations and change. Beer, Eisenstat and Spector developed a ... [full story]

The Historic View of Organizations and Change The traditional view of organizations, particularly within academic literature, has been that they are places of great rationality, where matters are discussed openly, impartially and objectively, and decisions are made in a similar manner. ... [full story]

Ensuring ROI This is a more significant part of most projects and programmes than is normally allowed for. It requires the programme team and the stakeholders to act together in an integrated plan, releasing previous costs through commitments to implement timely ... [full story]

Managing process and application change When a new application suite is purchased, or applications are integrated to create parts of the new business process, there can be a desire to over-customize applications to fit existing operations. It is important to identify ... [full story]

Setting up and managing sub-projects within the programme A traditional project office can provide the supporting and administrative role required to release substantial productive time for the programme manager and boards. There are well-developed models for good practice of traditional project ... [full story]

Risk management plans The overall programme and each subsidiary project require a risk management plan, with prioritization of risks by probability and potential impact. The risk management plan must be active, focused on identifying and mitigating selected risks. These plans are ... [full story]

Objectives and measures The new objectives (both operational and transformation-related) are developed and cascaded through the same design process. It is important that these objectives and measures reflect the organizational and project dependencies required for success. Too often projects adopt standard ... [full story]

Business cases Business cases should be developed using the evidence resulting from the CMAT assessment or subsequent detailed analysis of priority project areas. Cases must be sufficiently realistic to be achievable, formed as a plan of activities, expenditure and dependencies for ... [full story]

Where are we starting? What do we do next? CMAT provides the required evidence-based diagnosis of intention versus reality and effect. Based on this diagnosis and external benchmarks, a stakeholders' workshop should develop and decide the priorities, responsibilities and potential return ... [full story]

Architecture board The leader of the architecture board is normally a member of the full programme board. The role of the architecture board is to achieve a level of consistency and synergy across the enterprise systems and data structures. This is ... [full story]