Tag: Business

Customer Engagement

My adventures in buying a dining table and lessons for retailers

Recently, me and my wife decided that it was time to buy a dining table. My wife always wanted to buy a 6 seater wooden dining table. I wanted chairs without any cushions. We had a budget in mind (INR 20K). Now, if you have bought a dining table in Bangalore anytime in the recent past, you would know that it is near to impossible to get a dining table which met all the three conditions above. Still, we visited a lot of stores just like other married couples. After having seen what’s on offer almost in all the shops […]

Customer Engagement

What the hell is RoE?

Today, I read the blog post by David Johnson titled – “Forget About RoI, start thinking about ROE”. The title intrigued me and I read his post. Basically, he argues that it is time we started thinking about customer engagement in terms of Return on Experience rather than the traditional RoI. His idea is to find ways to “Enchant” a few customers while dealing with them, thus providing enough fodder for them to start talking about their great experience online (and offline). I think this is a great idea for any organization that serves consumers. He argues that if an organization starts […]

Customer Engagement

Unselling – To sell more, stop selling

Today, I read the book – “Unselling – Sell less to win more” by Peter Bourke. In the book, he argues that selling does not work anymore as people get defensive whenever someone tries to sell something to them. He also goes on to argue that the alternative is to “Unsell”.  He also provides examples of situations where you can use the concept of unselling principles. All-in-all, I think that the book is an interesting read, if only to get some interesting situational ideas. I had also written a blog post about the same concept in Dec 2010 titled – […]

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 […]