Category: Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement

Selling is not about selling anymore….

Though everyone around us have been telling us that the we are going through a techtonic shift in how people buy, one does not realize the magnitude of the change until it hits us. So, today, I was talking to one of my friends who sells enterprise software for a living. He was complaining on how difficult life is becoming, with ever increasing quotas and ever demanding customers and prospects. If you feel the same, i believe that you are now affected by this giant shift in the buying patterns of your customers. Now, the question is what does this […]

Customer Engagement

Future of customer service in a social world

In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call. The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call). This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on […]

Customer Engagement

Customer centricity & Chief Customer Officers

In the recent times, we have started to see a lot of organizations pay a lot more attention to their customers and have inducted Chief Customer Officers into their C-Suite. The rationale being that organizations need to be much more customer centric and need to understand their customers better and having someone responsible for this will go a long way in creating the necessary f0cus within the organization to achieve great customer service. However, in my opinion, having a Chief Customer Officer in place does more harm than good! Listening to customer’s and acting on it becomes someone else’s responsibility […]

Customer Engagement

New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman! Imagine the following scenarios: I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon. I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone. I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone. I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company. I can buy any consumer durable […]

Customer Engagement

Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button

Vinay Iyer recently wrote a very interesting post about the importance of Capturing the real 360 degree ‘Voice of the Customer. You can read the post here: Dear Facebook: Please Give Us A ‘Sympathize’ Button. There are some very interesting things that he talks about: Find smart ways to “mobilize the promoters” and “recover the detractors. He also explains why context is key in any form of survey done with the customers. Though, I agree with all of his suggestions, I still think that this is a reactive way to engage with your customers and could work for simple transactional situations. […]