Peppers & Rogers Group combines a global perspective, deep expertise in customer strategy and decades of experience serving top companies. Read our latest insights and thought leadership on the customer economy.
March 2010
C-level executives have enormous demands on their time and focus. But if they're concerned about the operational performance of their organizations, as most senior executives are, then it would serve them well to pay greater attention to customer management issues, especially on a more granular level.
Customer loyalty itself is not always easy to define. Suppose we have a consumer who considers himself to be loyal to a particular retail brand of gasoline, but he stops at a different brand's filling station because it is more convenient at a given time. This customer clearly has attitudinal loyalty but is not (this time) behaviorally loyal. Has he become less loyal than he was? Or suppose a business that buys all its office furniture from a particular contractor decides to put the next set of furniture purchases out to bid. Does this act constitute the customer's "defection"?
Continue reading "Customer Loyalty: On-off switch or volume dial?" »
The quintessential question of every organization's sales force strategy is deceptively simple: How many reps does the company need to hire? A sales force sizing strategy can help when determining the optimal sales capacity needed to properly service the marketplace.
Talk to a Gen Y about privacy today, in almost any developed country, and you're likely to get the old raised eyebrow dismissal. Privacy? WTF? (Gen Y's are people who are a chronological age of between 10 and 30, or thereabouts - born after 1980.) Now I have thought long and hard about this reaction, which is near-universal among Gen Y folks. My conclusion is that the deep concern all of us in my own generation - the Baby Boom generation - have about protecting our personal privacy is likely to become less and less consequential as the population ages. In fact, I predict that the whole idea of protecting privacy, as a must-do activity, may actually fade out of public concern entirely once the older generation leaves the scene.
The old credit card business model, in which companies make money off of consumer error, is finished. With new regulations taking effect, the credit card industry needs to shift its strategy to be more customer focused.
Continue reading "The Making of a Trustworthy Credit Card" »
Customer experience management is a key driver in terms of CRM, but not the only one. Recent developments in technology have unleashed a growing number of new customer management trends. Here are a few of the most important:
Continue reading "Customer Strategist Phil Winters:
10 Customer Management Trends to Act on Today" »
I've been following some of the debates in the airline industry about the new ways to engender loyalty: social media as the new loyalty vehicle versus costly frequent flyer program (FFP) miles. While social media has already become an essential ingredient to airline's customer programs, the FFP will continue to be a foundation for one-to-one customer engagement.
The New York Times' website has a number of interesting blog discussions going on at any one time, but over the weekend Dick Cavett and David Brooks posted a back-and-forth discussion on the erosion of trust in our society - speaking about what Brooks suggested might be a lack of "social trust" that could account for people's lack of support for any positive solution to our country's current problems (like overspending).
Cavett referred to Martha's and my book Rules to Break & Laws to Follow, pointing out that Chapter 7 was all about trust, and doing a very serviceable job of linking this problem to the political issues involved. He even surmised that our advice to Toyota, at this time of stress, would be "to do more to re-woo disaffected customers than just customary apologies and reform -- to do something 'extra' and original. Something like five years of free maintenance, a paid vacation, school tuition? Maybe fun-designed safety helmets?"
Continue reading "Trust - A Political Role as Well as a Business Role" »
There is a major shift in the value proposition for telecom operators today because voice revenue, which has been the core revenue source of telecom operators, is on the decline. There are many signs in the market that shows voice is on its way to becoming "just another application" on data network like messaging or gaming. For example, 8 percent of international voice traffic is now carried by Skype.
The main obstacle that stands before the widespread adoption of voice as "just another application" is the cost of mobile access network which is rapidly changing with the evolving mobile access and backhaul networks. In five to six years, mobile broadband will be readily available everywhere and that is going to change the game totally for the telcos. Simply put, operators will have to find different ways of making money.
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