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Does data-driven decision-making work?

April 24, 2011

You bet. Recently, a study at the Wharton School demonstrated that companies that adopt “data-driven decision-making” average 5-6% high productivity than those that did not. The academics studied 179 large companies and found that data-driven decision making was often the difference between success and poor performance in their industries. Here is what the study does [...]

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Best Customers – Grow or Save first?

April 22, 2011

Most times, when we discuss the nurturing of Best Customers, we focus on expanding relationships and share of wallet. After all, when we are successful, we can see clear increases in revenue and profit. But a recent post on the SurveyMethods blog suggests that we might be better served by focusing on saving customers at [...]

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Customer loyalty — does anyone care?

April 21, 2011

Bruce Temkin, of the Temkin Group, just released his 2011 report on customer loyalty. Of the 143 companies surveyed, only 24 or 17% received a strong or very strong loyalty rating. The rest were average or below average. Among the top performers were retailers; the lowest performers included health plans, banks, cable and internet providers. [...]

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Data is only valuable when you use it

April 20, 2011

We all know that we need to collect customer feedback and use it to improve our processes to drive increased conversion rates, retention and loyalty. Then why are so few of us doing so? A recent article on MarketingWeb highlighted that close to 95% of large companies were collecting data, yet only 10% use the [...]

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2 Ways to Make Money On The Phone

April 1, 2011

No one focusses more on customer satisfaction than American Express. AmEx has recently invested heavily in their contact center, in order to personalize customer experience on the phone. AmEx recently took all the controls off their reps, allowing them to spend as long on the phone with a customer as the customer wishes. They also [...]

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Lies your CFO told you

March 29, 2011

Have you ever heard these before? 1. Marketing spends money like a drunken sailor 2. When revenue gets tight, it is time to cut marketing 3. Customers would have bought anyway I am sure that there are many more lies but these are three of the most common objections that Marketing faces from Finance, particularly [...]

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Customer retention is not advocacy

March 23, 2011

We often assume that customers who stay with us the longest are “loyal” and therefore potential advocates for our company. Not the case. Recent research by www.surveymethods.com has shown that retention is not a sign for advocacy by itself. Rather, the only time that a customer could be considered an advocate is when they are [...]

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Individual employees drive retention

March 22, 2011

Customer satisfaction surveys are used frequently to gauge the willingness of a customer to recommend a particular brand or service. That metric is used to determine the likelihood of that customer being retained. Recent research suggests that a company should be asking also whether the customer would be willing to recommend a particular employee, since [...]

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Are you waiting for perfect data?

March 15, 2011

Don’t let the quest for the ultimate customer data derail your marketing plan! It is remarkable how often clients tell me that they are just six months from being able to use customer data that has been cleaned and scrubbed to to perfection.  Usually, when I check in a few months later, I hear the [...]

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Can you find ROI in customer experience?

March 14, 2011

One of the greatest barriers to a customer-centric approach is the difficulty in establishing a clear ROI for the effort. Lacking financial justification, customer-centricity simply becomes the “fad of the day” for the CEO, sure to drop off the next time the business falters in any way. Why is this so? Tweet

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