E-Commerce Blog

Earlier in my career, I covered the telecommunications industry. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differentiator. Worse yet was the service aspect of these businesses. Perhaps because they were in constant churn-and-acquire mode, the resources devoted to service suffered. When something went wrong with a customer’s service, the resulting process often punished the customer.

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Managing the Exceptions - Using CRM to Salvage Damaged Relationships

This fall has not been kind to T-Mobile. First, the mobile operator had to account for mountains of lost data that Sidekick customers had stored on the infrastructure of Danger, the Microsoft-owned company that developed the Sidekick device. Then there was the nationwide service outage for millions of U.S. T-Mobile customers a few weeks ago. Now, it looks as though employees at T-Mobile UK have been selling competitors the names of customers whose T-Mobile contracts were about to expire.

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Can T-Mobile Get Its Groove Back?

Several years ago, while selling software in the British telecom market, I met the CMO of a smallish network operator. He described the issues his business was facing, and when I asked him his churn rate, he replied, almost casually, that it was “about normal for our industry: 37 percent.” He must have seen my jaw drop, as he quickly abandoned his blase tone. However, his brutal honesty gave a young salesperson stark insight into the industry’s attitude toward its customer base.

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Differentiating Your Company in a Tough Market

For years, retailers could afford to be sloppy about running their businesses because customers kept buying. No more. Stung by the worry that shoppers — who cut spending by the most dramatic amount in at least 39 years this the holiday season — may not start spending again for a long time, stores are making drastic changes. They are cutting out marginal suppliers, hiring outside experts to keep inventory lean, holding special events for those who are still buying and making extraordinary efforts to gauge customer satisfaction.

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Retailers Pull Out All Stops to Rope Shoppers In

Have you noticed your inboxes are filling up faster lately with promotions from businesses desperate to get your attention? If you’re like me and getting bombarded with multiple promotions, then your first inclination is to just tune them out, click delete and move on to the business of the day. When the economy is down, businesses tend to get desperate, and the knee-jerk reaction is to increase the frequency and volume of their customer communications. It seems like a simple solution just to e-mail customers more often, but that’s the opposite of what you should do.

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Keep in Touch With Customers - but Not Too Much