Category: Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement, Strategy

What retail industry can learn from networks

I was reading a blog by Om Malik on his discussion with Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder of Juniper Networks. They had a long discussion on the future of networks. What stood out for me was how much can retail chains learn from the way the networks are evolving. There are quite a few parallels that we can draw from networks/clients to retail industry. For example, lets equate network providers to retail chains, the bandwidth to the inventory on offer and clients (mobile and otherwise) to the retail outlets. In such a comparison, the following aspects come out of the entire discussion: […]

Customer Engagement

Helping Google improve its search results ….

Simple solutions for the troubles Google is facing on its search results:  Add a spam button to the search results which users can use to indicate that the result is a spam and change the search algorithm to be influenced by users marking a search result as spam. In true Google tradition, it can roll out a beta version and check if this works to improve the usability of the search and then continuously improve the beta. What else do you think can solve Google’s trouble on the quality of search results. 

Customer Engagement

WOW !!!

Imagine the following situation: “You have just finished your meetings in a city and want to fly back home. You board a flight and just before the flight can take off, the flight attendants come out and enact the safety measures on-board the flight.” Now let’s stop here and think about this. –       How many of the passengers do you think actually watch the flight attendants go through the routine? Not many, I am sure (including me). –       Is it important for the passengers to know this information? Definitely.   –       How many of the flight attendants do you think […]

Customer Engagement

How to increase customer loyalty? First, Stop annoying them !

Everyone in sales knows the importance of customer loyalty and the importance of repeat business. Still, we go out and make it difficult for the customer to do business with us. Worse still, we downright annoy the customers. I had one such experience with a start-up: myPNRstatus.com. They had a novel idea which they are trying out. You can enter the PNR number of the railway ticket and they claim to send you SMS’s on the status of the PNR (if wait-listed, they claim to send you an update everytime there is a change in the status) and also keep […]

Customer Engagement

Choosing your customers

Today, I read a post by Seth Godin with the same title and was struck with just one thought – How many times do sales people see this point-of-view. My take is that this is a blindspot for most of us. I would like to re-iterate the questions again: How much does this type of customer need you?  How difficult is this sort of person to find… How difficult to reach How valuable is a customer like this one… How demanding? If we are able to build our sales strategy based on the answers to these questions, selling would become […]