Customer Engagement

What ails travel distribution in India

Today, I read an interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly titled – The trouble with travel distribution. In the article, authors, Robert Carey, David Kang, and Michael Zea go on to explain what ails the travel industry. Broadly speaking, they talk about the following: The ecosystem is completely fragmented. No trust between the players (airlines, hotels, travel agencies, aggregators). Instead of working as one integrated supply chain, they are fighting with each other on topics like how much should each of them pay each other and who owns the customer, which results in each of the participant trying to woo the […]

Customer Engagement

Great Customer Care

This is a very simple idea which is very powerful when done. But as I’ve seen in most large organizations, its the simple things that do not get done. So, I intend to atleast try setting up an internal meeting with the different stakeholders and pose this question – “How can we make it fun for the customers to do business with us?” Let’s see what comes out of it.

Customer Engagement

The idea of Customer advocacy

I came across a nice article by Jeannie Walters titled – Community Managers as customer advocates. I completely agree with her when she says “This emerging role is really the first line of advocacy for customers. These people are engaging and interacting with customers, former customers and future customers daily. If the C-level isn’t asking for constant feedback from them, they are missing out.” My day time role is as a customer advocacy manager at a large multi-national software giant. So, I was very much interested in the post. She does have a few interesting points to make: When I took this role early […]

Customer Engagement

The secrets to building fierce loyalty

I have been following the blog post series by Sarah Robinson – “28 days of building fierce loyalty”. She has some really good folks come and talk about the secrets to building fierce loyalty. So far, we have had some very interesting posts. When I started thinking about folks who have inspired fierce loyaly, people like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, Lady Gaga, Madonna and a lot of others. I realize that they all shared a few characteristics: Fiercely passionate: They were all fiercely passionate about a cause and were totally committed and driven by the cause, a […]

Strategy

Why is Facebook planning to go public now?

I just read about the plans of Facebook going public with a 10b$ share offering. I am sure that this is going to generate a lot of press and noise around this IPO. The question to ask is this: Why go for an IPO? Why now? In my opinion, the investors of facebook have realized that The dizzying growth rates in membership is no longer sustainable. The scope for breakthrough innovation is also reduced which could add substantial value to the company. Other players (Google+, Twitter) are catching up fast. The valuation for the company will only fall going forward […]