Customer Engagement
Insights
Blog
Customer Feedback: If You Aren’t Going to Use It, Don’t Ask for It
- Too often customer feedback stays in silos and isn’t shared broadly across the company
- Regular, reliable communication about what is being done with customer input and feedback will increase credibility
- We must respect customers enough to create the structure that enables us to act on feedback
Blog
The Forrester Wave: CRM Suites For Large Organizations, Q1 2015
The CRM market serving the large enterprise is mature. A great amount of consolidation has happened in the last five years. For example, Oracle, focused on providing consistent end-to-end customer experiences across touchpoints, has acquired a great number of point solutions to round out its customer experience portfolio. SAP, like Oracle, aims to provide consistent end-to-end customer […]
Blog
Shout It From the Rooftops! Six Ways to Show Customers You’re Using Their Feedback
- As customer experience practitioners, we use feedback to improve our offerings, solutions, structures and teams
- Make sure that customers know how and where their feedback will be used within the organization
- Begin every feedback session by talking about what has been done with feedback from the last session
Blog
A More Meaningful Customer Rewards Program
- Customer advocacy plays an increasingly critical role in B2B
- B2B companies should consider what drives customers to participate in advocacy activities
- A customer rewards program should be structured around recognition and influence
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Why Marketing Must Measure More Than Leads: Four Tips for the New, Customer-Focused Reality
- Demand creation success is limited by the quality of the overall customer experience, especially post-purchase
- Marketing is taking on new responsibilities in support of customer-lifecycle-focused objectives
- There is increased focus on post-sale marketing support for customer engagement and customer advocacy
Blog
Customer Experience Mapping: Why and How to Get Started Now
- Customer experience mapping is the first step toward taking stock of customer experience activities
- While 64 percent of B2B companies have a customer experience function, just 43 percent are doing customer experience mapping
- Taking a fresh look at new methods for customer experience mapping can help organizations achieve better retention, loyalty and advocacy
Blog
Can Customer Advocacy Be Demand Creation’s Best Friend?
- For customer advocacy to play a role in demand creation, it’s essential to understand the current state of the customer base
- Also evaluate customer advocacy processes, including sourcing, engagement, management and production
- A growing list of technologies is available to support customer advocacy processes
Blog
What Love Taught Me About Customers
- Marketing content must be written in a way that appeals to the buyer audience, using terminology that buyers understand
- Identifying buyer personas and understanding their attributes and preferences are the keys to effective messaging and content
- Marketers must never be complacent about gaining insight into what will resonate with buyers and customers
Blog
Seven Customer Advocacy Resolutions for 2015
- Investing in customer advocacy should be at the top of any marketer’s list
- Organizations should get a wide range of internal resources involved in advocacy efforts
- A commonly ignored strategy is finding new ways to leverage existing customer advocates
Blog
Mobile Measurement Isn’t Keeping Up With Mobile’s Importance To Insurance Business Performance
The wild west of mobile in insurance is getting tamed. Mobile is no longer just a fun experiment—it’s now a crucial element in the customer and agent experience. We first published our mobile insurance metrics report in August of 2013. At the time, we were struck by how dependent insurers were on a single metric […]
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No One Cares What You Have to Say About Yourself: Why Marketing Plans Need Customer Advocacy More Than Ever
Have your marketing results been a little lackluster lately? Are your carefully scripted product videos or clever infographics being met with a collective yawn? There’s a reason for those shrinking response rates, but you may not like it. Allow me to be blunt: No one cares what you have to say about yourself. Across all […]
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Events and Advocacy: A Missed Opportunity?
Events and advocacy really have a symbiotic relationship; events support advocacy and advocacy supports events. Find out more.
Blog
Forrester’s Top Trends For Customer Service In 2015
As 2014 winds down, I have taken the time to pause, and look ahead to what top customer service trends are surfacing for 2015 and beyond. Good service — whether it’s to answer a customer’s question prior to purchase, or help a customer resolve an issue post-purchase should be pain-free, proactive at a minimum and preemptive […]
Blog
Social Media Intelligence 2015
We recently announced the release of the SiriusDecisions “SiriusView: Social Media Intelligence 2015,” a report that highlights several vendors addressing B2B marketing professionals’ social intelligence needs. In addition to completing the process required to develop such a report – including surveying vendors and attending demos – SiriusDecisions analysts spoke to a multitude of social media […]
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Which Social Media Intelligence Vendor Is Right for You?
Social media intelligence (SMI) solutions allow organizations to monitor social channels and conversations, respond to social signals and synthesize social data points into meaningful trends and analysis based on the user’s needs. SiriusDecisions’ recently published SiriusView: Social Media Intelligence evaluates and scores six vendors serving the social intelligence needs of today’s B2B marketing professionals. Selecting […]
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Leveraging Technology to Empower Advocacy
One of the (few) advantages of getting older is a greater sense of perspective. For example, when I consider the tools available to a B2B marketer in the 1980s vs. those available to a modern marketer, it’s just not a fair fight. Just a decade or two has brought new technologies that enable today’s marketer […]
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When Social Media Intelligence Is Neither Social Nor Intelligent
Over the last several months, my colleagues and I have immersed ourselves in the world of social media intelligence. We have watched countless demos, spoken to customers and surveyed vendors. We’ve found that overall, these social media intelligence vendors have increased their tools’ features and functionality while deepening the type of analysis and information that […]
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The State of B2B Customer Experience in Europe
Customer experience has become a higher priority in B2B organizations, driven largely by the results seen by organizations with recurring-revenue models that depend on repeat business. These companies have proven that investment in the post-sale lifecycle is a growth driver, which has prompted other businesses to seek similar benefits. This shift is driven by the […]
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A Customer-Centric Organization Built to Last
Moving toward customer-centricity is often an item on the CMO agenda. After all, what organization would say it doesn’t want to be customer-centric? So why is it so hard to make this happen?
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B2B Content: Three Common Mistakes
B2B organizations typically spend a significant amount of money producing and managing content. How to make sure that the money is well spent?