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Not every buyer-seller experience starts with a customer expecting to be delighted. There are lots of purchases we make because we're forced to make them -- something we need breaks, or an outside entity requires us to buy something. We're not buying because we want to, or even because the purchase ...

If you're a vendor, the idea of providing visibility is a winning notion. It's what's driven social CRM-related software tools and analytics to their current prominence within the market, and it's why the "Internet of Things" is so alluring. The problem that these technologies purportedly solve is a...

When people talk about the customer experience, the thinking gets lofty quickly. The word "delight" is dropped a lot, people cite things like the American Girl Store or Nordstrom -- and soon over-the-top seems like what the norm should be. The experiences provided by the very best at creating experi...

If you're in business, you're going to face a customer relationship issue that's your fault. It happens. We're human -- and though we may strive for perfection, the best we can do is get close to that goal. When your business errs, the first people who are likely to hear it are your customer service...

"Customers do not want a relationship with your business, they want the benefits a relationship can offer to them." Mitch Lieberman, managing partner at DRI and an all-around bright thinker, first said this around 2009. He wasn't trying to smash anyone's illusions about the value of CRM. He was tryi...

It's no easy feat keeping a good CRM blog going, but I've been keeping track since 2007 of those that succeed. In Monday's column I presented the first 10 of this year's top 20 winners. Now, here are the other blogs you should be keeping tabs on. First up: Forrester, which has an array of bloggers -...

When you write regularly about CRM, you realize what a challenge it can be to keep a blog going. The same themes come up again and again, and the technology does not radically change from release to release. So being a great CRM blogger requires something else -- the ability to understand the always...

One of the phrases CRM vendors love to toss around these days is this saw: "CRM makes every employee a salesperson." I'm sure the VP of sales loves this vision, in which he suddenly is served by a quadrupled or quintupled number of salespeople, many of whom he doesn't have to manage and to whom he d...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence...

Companies that sell direct have it easy. They have control over hiring their salespeople, control over marketing messages, and control over service and support. There's only one entity to blame if the buyer's unhappy, and that's the seller. When you mix in an indirect channel, however, things get a ...

Technology and social media give businesses new ways to interact with customers, to build stronger and longer-lasting relationships, and to create two-way conversations that lead to better products and happier people at both ends of the conversation. They also allow dumb businesses to expose their i...

The buyer-seller relationship we most often think of is one in which all the responsibility is loaded on the seller. The seller convinces the customer to buy, then provides support and further marketing to keep the customer loyal. Not every selling relationship works this way, however. When both end...

There's always a lot to digest after Salesforce.com's annual bacchanalia, Dreamforce, which drew 135,000 registrants this year. Some of it is about Salesforce's announcements, but a lot more of it is about the implications of those announcements, the people who attend, and what goes on around the sh...

There's one thing in the post-industrial world that's never affected by economic slowdowns, changes in customer preferences, or technological advances. In fact, production of this commodity seems to pick up when there are disruptions, and each year an increasing quantity is produced, regardless of m...

CRM technology often gets blamed for the failure of customer initiatives -- and sometimes it's deserved. In many cases, though, the technology works exactly as advertised -- as far as technology can work. Still, CRM is a discipline, not a technology -- the technology merely helps business scale up t...

CRM technology is all about collecting data -- which means it should go hand-in-hand with the trend toward increased use of analytics. Often, though, what is analyzed is not what's important. In CRM, many of the most compelling data are hiding in plain sight, but businesses are looking elsewhere. Th...

One of the phrases CRM vendors love to toss around these days is this saw: "CRM makes every employee a salesperson." I'm sure the VP of sales loves this vision, in which he suddenly is served by a quadrupled or quintupled number of salespeople, many of whom he doesn't have to manage and to whom he d...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

Building a customer relationship -- the kind that lasts a long time -- is a not an easy thing. There are lots of occasions where things can go awry, touch points where signals can get crossed and communications that can unwittingly turn a customer off. In a lot of cases, the proverbial "customer lif...