While I get to see and hear about hundreds of product announcements, this one is particularly interesting. The race to leverage computing power to synthesize incredibly huge amounts of disparate data in real time to meet the needs of customer demands is the next frontier of customer relations. Today at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global [...] Read the article

Location, location, location. The concept immediately brings back to mind college marketing classes and textbooks; clear lessons from industrial age distribution models. The focus has slowly faded away, however, over the past couple of decades with the invention and growth of a digitally connected, flat economy in which we can buy anything… from anyone… from [...] Read the article

Seth Godin does a phenomenal job of providing insights. Below is something he wrote that I wish I did, but I’ll be saving this and committing it to memory. In many ways, it’s marketing 101, but the clarity with which it’s presented is something every marketer can benefit from From Seth’s Blog: The best approach [...] Read the article

I’ll never forget meeting some people in a remote village of Laos (Southeast Asia) a few years ago. The village had no electricity. Not only was it a journey across culture and geography, but a journey back in time. Our translator helped us to ask about how they lived. They told us how they farmed, [...] Read the article

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If we truly believe in customer “relationships”, then the concept that the customer is always right is unfortunately flawed, because very few people are ALWAYS right. Customers can be irrational, selfish, irresponsible, and even unprofitable.

As in any relationship, sometimes there is mis-alignment of expectations and lack of a compelling value proposition for both sides. The opportunity for value exchange changes and evolves over time. The duty of an organization is to continually listen, show empathy, gain a deeper understanding of needs and jobs, and provide a product or service offering that provides significant value for their customers, or better yet, provide a platform for customers to co-create their own products and services, and support each other in their mutual journeys and jobs to be done.

To fail to recognize that some customers are...  Read the article

Ashley Verrill – a expert with CRM reviewer SoftwareAdvice.com – interviewed me recently for the second edition of CRM’s Next 5 in 5. This report was an update from predictions five of my industry cohorts made about technologies that will change CRM in the next five years. Special thanks to Ashley for the conversation and for providing the edited snapshot of our discussion below:

Ashley: You’ve talked a lot about how the importance of advancements relative to contextualizing CRM — such as Mobile, Big Data and Social – are a little over amplified (though still important). From your perspective, are there any products or services out there that have actually made real innovation and change to how we use CRM systems?

Brian: Digital networks have significantly transformed how we as people interact with other people, information, and increasingly devices and machines. More and more of our lives are moving into the digital realm. Where we are. What we are doing. Who we know. What we say or think or like. The technologies that capitalize on this increasing wealth of information are the ones that will endure past the hype. These innovators will advance our capabilities in three primary ways: ...
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This is undoubtedly the right direction, and frankly the only direction for corporate survival and growth, in my opinion. A key and often underrepresented component of developing meaningful and profitable customer relationships is TRUST. I’ve written more about thathere.

So how are we collectively doing being customer focused? Do “what we say” and “what we do” actually line up?... Read the article

Social Media, Big Data, Marketing Automation, and Mobile are the only things that matter now, and all the “cool kids” are heavily investing in gamification and customer experience initiatives.

Of course none of the above are true, but if we are to believe the media around us, you’d think that if you’re not doing all or most of the above, you’re going out of business next year.

It brings to mind the ridiculous valuations of the dot com bubble, or the real estate boom, or those that invested millions in CRM or ERP, only to see... Read the article

I was recently invited to keynote a series of executive events hosted by NICE Systems. For those unaware, NICE serves over 25,000 organizations in the enterprise and security sectors, representing a variety of sizes and industries in more than 150 countries, and including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies.

At the start of each session, I encouraged contact center and customer experience executives from American Express, Disney, Coca-Cola, Staples, eBay, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, Discover, and several other organizations to commit with me to ask great questions together for the balance of the afternoon.

We are in an era where asking great questions, and collectively pursuing answers together is a necessity. The accelerating pace of technological innovation is disrupting every industry, every best practice, and democratizing opportunity across the globe. The concepts of the learning organization continue to gain traction and has fueled much of the Enterprise 2.0 / Social Business movement over the past decade.

I asked the respective...

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