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Archive for January, 2010

 How Search Works With Social CRM

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

From Media Post

by Laurie Sullivan,

Search technology: Some companies will license it, while others build it from scratch. It depends on the egos of executives working at the company. Real-time search and social media have pushed technology to the forefront. Companies need sophisticated algorithms that can sort and index structured and unstructured data.

A recent Accenture report titled “Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service” ties it all together. Joe Hughes, senior executive from Accenture’s customer service and support business, confirms that enterprise companies have begun to build search engine technology that will integrate into software applications and consumer hardware to help marketers, advertisers, agencies and others sort through the mounds of data created by social media.

Hughes defines social CRM as the conversation data from social media networks. And as marketers continue to try and make sense of the mounds of data flooding in from real-time search, Twitter streams, Facebook status updates, and behavioral targeting tags, they will need a faster method to sort, index and access data. Wow, are you overwhelmed yet?

Marketers need technology that can move feedback from customers and call center agents between channels with as much automation as possible. That will become the only way to analyze the data. Natural language query processing will also become a focus, to search through documents of unstructured and structured data as the mounds of social media data continues to mount.

Last year, tools measuring buzz metrics in social networks emerged. This year, the focus turns toward integrating the social data into traditional CRM platforms from companies like software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Salesforce, which late last year integrated the feature, allowing people to search on that data in real time.

Until now, CRM packages did not allow marketers to view data collected on Twitter alongside traditional queries. But the real-time search movement has sent companies looking to improve search results back to the drawing board to build engines that can process structured and unstructured data, as well as sentiment analysis, taxonomy, classification and entity extractions, according to Hughes. “The strategy of combining structured and unstructured data will become more important,” he tells me.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=121505

 Study Finds Marketers Embracing Social Media Marketing In A Big Way

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

By Robin Wauters

From TechCrunch.com 

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Integrated marketing services provider Alteriantoday released the results of their seventh annual survey on social media marketing adoption.

The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide (actually, it was 98% North America and Europe and only 2% Asia Pacific and other regions).

Alterian found that 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010. Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.

Read the article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012101040.html

 GM puts focus on customer service as company rebuilds

Friday, January 15th, 2010

By JOSEPH SZCZESNY
Of The Oakland Press

The delivery of exceptional customer service is at the heart of the effort to rebuild General Motors Corp.’s reputation and image.

“GM, of course, is a dramatically different company than we were a year ago. And while we still have a long way to go to get to where we need to be, we’re making rapid progress in building a new company from scratch,” Mark Reuss, president of GM North America, told an audience at the Automotive News World Congress.

“Within the company, we’re simplifying the way we operate. We’re focusing on fundamentals,” he said. “Our new vision for GM is to design, build and sell the world’s best vehicles, and everything we do as individual employees and as a company is being re-evaluated now on its ability to support this simple vision.

“There was a time when GM did a great job being all things to all people, when we had a U.S. market share of 50 percent. We made refrigerators and locomotives and aircraft engines. Then, the U.S. government was concerned that we were taking over instead of going under,” Reuss said. “Well those days are gone, and that company is gone.”

However, GM has an opportunity to rebuild by doing something it hasn’t done in a long time — listening to customers and asking them what GM has to do earn their business, he said.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2010/01/14/business/doc4b4ef873858af426530835.txt

 Customer Service Will Be Nexus One’s Achilles Heel

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Google simply doesn’t have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to.

Tom Kaneshige, CIO.com From PCworld.com

Google’s comeuppance is at hand, as two of the most innovative Silicon Valley companies face off. I’m betting the veteran Apple iPhone clobbers newcomer Google Nexus One in the early rounds.

It won’t come down to cooler technology, nor better battery life. Wireless carriers? Nope, despite a great many iPhone owners and wannabe owners begging for Apple to end its exclusivity deal with AT&T. Google’s arrogance will lead to its downfall.

For whatever reason, Google is selling Nexus One directly to end-users. That means many users are turning to it first, reports IDG News Service, and the search giant doesn’t have the kind of customer support that mobile-phone users are accustomed to.

Wireless carrier T-Mobile lacks Nexus One support documents and refers people back to Google, according to a customer going by the name of Roland78. IDG News Service also reports that Google appears to be only accepting email customer queries and pledges to reply in one or two days.

Among consumers, that’s not going to cut it.

Read the rest of the article here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/186847/customer_service_will_be_nexus_ones_achilles_heel.html

 Barnes & Noble Tops Customer Experience List

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Jan 13, 2010

Elena Malykhina from Marketing Daily

Barnes & Noble is the No. 1 brand when it comes to customer experience, according to a survey released this week by Forrester Research.

Forrester asked more than 4,600 U.S. consumers about their interactions with companies across various industries as part of the “Customer Experience Index, 2010.” Participants rated the usefulness, ease of use, and enjoyability of their experiences. Forrester calculated the results for 133 companies in 14 different industries and found that retailers, hotels, and
parcel shipping firms ranked the highest for all categories, while health insurance plans, TV service providers, and Internet service providers ranked the lowest.

The second and third highest-rated companies behind Barnes & Noble were Marriott Hotels & Resorts, and Hampton Inn/Suites, respectively. Amazon.com and Holiday Inn Express rounded out the top 5. On the other hand, Charter Communications, United Healthcare, and Citigroup, among others, were at the bottom of the list.

“If you step back and look, a lot of the industries at the bottom haven’t had the need for competition in terms of consumers—including health insurance providers who traditionally competed for employees. Other organizations just haven’t grown up in terms of being customer-centric,” said Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin, who worked on the survey.

According to Forrester, only 13 firms had an “excellent” customer experience rating; 35 received a “good” rating, 40 got “okay” ratings, and 45 received either a “poor” or “very poor” rating. (See the complete survey results here.)

Read entire article here – http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/direct/e3i5b45383f2cd3f8b3848cb4869a779206

 L.L.Bean Still Tops In Customer Service

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

From article in Mediapost. By Sarah Mahoney

Customers of L.L. Bean aren’t just wearing their duck boots, they’re feeling the love.

The Freeport, Maine-based retailer once again landed in the No. 1 spot in the National Retail Federation/American Express Customers’ Choice survey, followed by Overstock.com, Zappos.com and Amazon.com. (All four ranked in precisely the same order as last year’s survey.)

QVC jumped into No. 5, followed by Coldwater Creek; HSN; Lands’ End, a division of Sears, and JCPenney. Nordstrom and Kohl’s tied for the 10th spot.

Read the article here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=120495&nid=109870

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