In a challenging economy, many organizations incorrectly choose to arbitrarily cut customer marketing programs to preserve income levels. In actuality, the better strategy would be to invest in your customers to make your customer portfolio stronger now and in the future. This is when an organization should be identifying, understanding and catering to your best and high potential customers thus increasing their value to your organization. You still spend less, but it is skewed toward your better customers. If you don’t, your competitors will be targeting and possibly wooing your best customers during ...

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My company has the opportunity to work with a number of outstanding sales professionals who are excellent at selling products. They understand the sales process and excel at getting customers to buy specific products and solutions. Many companies hire these superstars thinking they will help their services business skyrocket at the same pace the product sales would. However, they quickly learn that there are subtle, very important differences, when it comes to selling a company's services versus their products. Many of these differences are so subtle that even the most knowledgeable and high powered sellers can't see what ...<< MORE >>

Organizations continue to be challenged by data warehousing and integration implementations.  Given the need to merge single source applications and garner the benefits of a “single” view of the truth, data warehouses serve to consolidate and streamline information flows that impact multiple constituents and offer data integration among disparate sources of data.  Some organizations have turned to data marts as a prescribed way to reduce costs and challenges associated with larger scale data warehousing implementations.

Data marts are said to be a subject-oriented and organized to ...

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Community banks are uniquely positioned to manage their customer portfolio in a focused manner due to the very nature of their business. The market for community bank services is usually well defined with a majority of their customers coming from the area immediately surrounding the bank or branches. Community bank services also tend to appeal to a certain segment of the population. This population is not interested in all the services a national or regional bank offers and is typically seeking a more stable, personal banking relationship. Conversely, some national bank customers are not interested in the limited services offered by a community bank such as limited ATM locations. This very nature makes it possible for the community bank to outmaneuver the big banks by better targeting customers in their community.<< MORE >>

What do AT&T, Staples, infoUSA, Directv and Disney World have in common? Not much when it comes to customer experience. Which one of these companies rates in the Good, Bad or Ugly category? Who is the customer experience superstar? Read more to find out.<< MORE >>

Few consulting “tools” are more widely abused these days than so-called best practices. It’s no wonder most banks, supermarkets, airlines, retailers, and consulting firms look astonishingly similar—they’ve been busy copying each other’s best practices for decades. What’s most alarming is how ingrained their use has become in the language of consultants and clients. Best practices have joined the long list of meaningless phrases like scalable strategies, seamless integration, and transformational initiatives.<< MORE >>

The business intelligence (BI) train is leaving the station. If you are not already implementing a BI solution, planning to implement one or have completed an implementation, you risk being left behind. BI is something that you cannot afford to be without in the very near future. BI crosses all industries and company size, but is it extremely important to companies in ‘data rich’ industries like financial services, retail or telecommunications.<< MORE >>

If you'd like to raise your implementation success rate, there are some key guidelines to follow. The first is to have a clear vision of how the technology will improve your customers' experience with your organization.<< MORE >>

An effective business intelligence (BI) strategy is one of the most powerful tools available to companies today. It enables companies to better monitor and track the state of the business by providing the user with actionable information which can lead to better decisions. BI provides for data consistency since it is accessed through a common platform versus the disparate applications (ERP, CRM, HR, etc.) the data is derived from. Thus the information is timelier as it is typically accessed in real-time or near real-time. We can discuss the benefits of BI all day, but we want to discuss several myths about BI that may be keeping your organization from pursuing it.<< MORE >>

A business strategy is something that is considered sacred by most companies. Offsite meetings with top executives are held to prepare and discuss the strategy. The business strategy usually goes through several iterations before it is presented to the Board of Directors for review and approval. Sales are discussed. Marketing plans are floated. Production/Purchasing is scheduled. IT gets new hardware and software. Data is…<< MORE >>