Sandlines

So it seems that there are plenty of people out there who care about customer service. Please, someone tell the companies who are cutting back on this function as times get tough.

Thanks to e-Consultancy

I read an excellent report over on e-consultancy this week about Customer Engagement.

It seems that an ‘engaged customer’ is more likely to:

• recommend a company’s products or services
• convert more readily
• purchase readily
• stay loyal

Those would seem to be ‘good’ things to aim for, wouldn’t you think? Well, the panel agreed. Only 1% of the companies questioned felt that Customer Engagement was ‘not important’, while 87% described it as ‘important’ on ‘essential’.

At the same time, only 55% of companies surveyed said that they had a defined ‘customer engagement strategy’. More worringly, about half said ‘No’ when asked whether the worsening economic situation has encourage them to place more emphasis on customer engagement.

As Jim Sterne (Chairman of the Web Analytics Association) pithily puts it: “We know the house is burning, we just can’t be bothered to call the fire brigade.”

Tags: customer engagement, e-consultancy, Jim Sterne, Web Analytics Association

It's good to talk…

Updating my previous entry, I’ve just received an email from Vodafone apologising (just five days after the original complaint and after several phone calls and emails have gone between us) for their treatment of me as a…

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Bye Bye Voda?

Maybe I’m just becoming (an even grumpier) grumpy old man, but one of the things I’ve noticed as we’ve talked ourselves into recession is a steep decline in customer service.

Why is this? Some thoughts:

• as companies are becoming stressed…

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Tags: customer lifetime value, customer service, recession, vodafone

Who moved my nuts?

Many, many moons ago I helped start Associated Newspapers online efforts. Back in those days (mid-90s) there was much debate about how traditional publishers could embrace online media - but essentially two models were emerging: replicate the…

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Tags: asda digital newsagent, associated newspapers, charlottestreet.com, iGIZMO, iphone, magazine, time out, zinio

Sandlines, you will not be surprised to hear, likes his gadgets. Always has.

So although I can probably muster a nominal link to a marketing discussion in here somewhere, you’ll know me well enough…

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Tags: flexible OLED, folding screen, gadget, mobile, samsung

… or at least that was the overriding message, it seemed to me, at the excellent Entrepreneurs in London event where I spent the day yesterday.

Huge thanks to Fresh Business Thinking who kindly invited me to join them - and…

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Tags: Ben Way, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs in london, fresh business thinking, hermione way, recession

I’m a bit of a marketing geek - I freely admit it. In fact, my hiring policy has been based around an idea that a good friend of my wife shared with me a few years back. She believes that…

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Tags: geek, google, google book search, market research, survey

Facebook? No thanks.

Thanks to Dylan Fuller who, over in the Local Search Summit on LinkedIn drew my attention to this article. It seems that P&G are no longer interested in running advertising on Facebook. Ted McConnell, GM of Interactive marketing over at…

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Tags: banners, C2C, facebook, gmail, hotmail, linkedin, p&g, proctor & gamble, social media, ugc, user generated content, vodafone, web 2.0, Yahoo!

I’ve posted before about better pin-pointing of location from devices on the move - and it’s a subject that has long been close to my heart. But thanks to AdViking to drawing my attention to Greg Sterling’s post last week about…

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Tags: EPIC, feedjit, firefox, flu trends, geode, google, mozilla labs, windows 7

Last week I got into a discussion that started over on LinkedIn about whether simply placing ads on social networks sites was enough to claim that you are engaged in Social Media Marketing (SMM). The question was linking to a post…

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Tags: hulu, linkedin, social media marketing, windchimes, youtube