Customer Engagement

Insights

Blog

Customer Feedback: If You Aren’t Going to Use It, Don’t Ask for It

Lisa Nakano March 30, 2015
  • 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

Kate Leggett March 26, 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

Lisa Nakano March 23, 2015
  • 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

Robert Peterson March 10, 2015
  • 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
Blog

Why Marketing Must Measure More Than Leads: Four Tips for the New, Customer-Focused Reality

Megan Heuer February 26, 2015
  • 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

Megan Heuer February 5, 2015
  • 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?

Robert Peterson February 4, 2015
  • 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

John Donlon January 23, 2015
  • 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

Robert Peterson January 13, 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

Ellen Carney January 2, 2015
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 […]
Blog

No One Cares What You Have to Say About Yourself: Why Marketing Plans Need Customer Advocacy More Than Ever

Megan Heuer December 23, 2014
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 […]
Blog

Events and Advocacy: A Missed Opportunity?

Robert Peterson December 19, 2014

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

Kate Leggett December 17, 2014
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

Jacques Begin December 16, 2014
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 […]
Blog

Which Social Media Intelligence Vendor Is Right for You?

Jacques Begin November 13, 2014
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 […]
Blog

Leveraging Technology to Empower Advocacy

Robert Peterson November 3, 2014
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 […]
Blog

When Social Media Intelligence Is Neither Social Nor Intelligent

Jacques Begin October 28, 2014
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 […]
Blog

The State of B2B Customer Experience in Europe

Robin Whiting October 23, 2014
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 […]
Blog

A Customer-Centric Organization Built to Last

Meta Karagianni October 14, 2014

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?

Blog

B2B Content: Three Common Mistakes

Jessica Lillian October 9, 2014

B2B organizations typically spend a significant amount of money producing and managing content. How to make sure that the money is well spent?