8
Exceeding Expectations or Solving Customer Problems: What’s More Important?
Let’s say you set out to improve your company’s customer experience to drive better organization performance (kudos to you). What will be more important in attaining that goal: exceeding customer expectations or solving customers’ problems? That’s the question that came to my mind after reading Robert Passikoff’s recent article on Forbes.com, “The Final Frontier: Customer Expectations.” Passikoff points to a shift in the past 15 years: customer expectations have increased significantly, rising 24 percent in all categories. That number has increased even more in the MORE>>
31
20 Tips for Driving More Website Traffic
One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. ~ Jared Sandberg Many businesses assign a large portion of their marketing budget to building, upgrading and optimizing their corporate website, only to find they’re not receiving the results they expected once the project is completed. A common error is to assume that once the website is built and running live on the internet, the customers will start streaming directly to the site. This MORE>>
24
Retention vs. Revenue: Today’s Prepaid Maintenance Plans
Prepaid Maintenance Plans (PPMs) have traditionally been used as a customer retention tool by dealers, and rightfully so. Paying up front for services is a guaranteed way to get customers back into the service lane. But the pricing and structure of many PPMs administered by third parties did not make the plans very profitable for the dealerships, and even more important, for the customers. The new generation of self-administered, self-managed PPM plans offer many benefits beyond customer retention—mainly, more revenue. PPM customers frequently purchase additional MORE>>
13
Using Customer Loyalty Data to Reward with Relevance
People respond to what is relevant to their needs, desires and motivations. With the help of customer loyalty data, companies are learning about the behaviors of their customers and acting on that knowledge to identify their best and highest-potential customers and personalize their communications. They are beginning to understand how communicating with (not at) their customers in meaningful ways can encourage the customer to consistently choose their brand and ensure long-term growth and success. Where personalization was once defined as a greeting which used the MORE>>
6
Restaurants Drive Consumers to Dine Out with Calculated Email Offers
When Pei Wei Asian Diner introduced the Caramel Chicken entrée, the Chinese food chain took advantage of the occasion to beef up its email database. Pei Wei, which is owned by P.F. Chang’s China Bistro, worked with email provider ExactTarget to create a multichannel campaign centered on email to help spread the word. The effort included in-store signage, online ads and social media messages that invited consumers to sign up for Pei Wei’s email list for a buy-one, get-one free offer. To get the offer, MORE>>