Posted by S Swaminathan on Mon, May 17, 2010
With digital marketing taking centrestage, it time to reassess and evaluate age-old marketing techniques and adapt them to new digital world. Here's how Domino's Pizza is doing it.
Domino's Pizza is using the persuasive power of socially connected consumers who have huge influence over each other; the key idea here is how they harness that power and put it to work for thier brand—with rewards, of course, for the consumers in question.
Domino's Pizza has developed a widget that consumers can place on their social networking profile, blog or other online presence, which their friends can then click on in order to order a pizza. For every order, they get 0.5 percent of the sale.
Read more here
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Fri, May 08, 2009
The complaining customer - we just can’t stand them! Well, most of us can’t stand them. The reality is that business organizations should love them. Shep Hyken comments that "A complaining customer tells you where you can improve. They actually come forward and show us where we make mistakes. But, most of the time, people hate to hear the complaints. First, a few facts you should know about people who complain. Most of the time, when people have a complaint, they complain to everyone else rather than the person or people who caused the complaint. If you resolve your customers’ complaints, you will keep them most of the time. But first you have to know there is a complaint. So, how can we find those complainers? Well, most likely customers won’t tell us, so, we have to ask them. It is that simple. Call them up or ask them in person. Actively solicit feedback to find out what they are thinking."
And most criticaly use Customer behaviour data to spot Customer service failures as they occur. Customers are constantly leaving behind a data footprint of "failed brand promises". Direct data analytics to spot incidents of customer promises "not met". The crux of " Analytical marketing" is using data to drive an improved customer experience. Imagine if a bank were to call you up and say " I am sorry sir ,we are one day behind schedule on your cheque book request,please accept our apologies and your cheque book will be with you tomorrow morning". Or better still build predictive models to find customers where "service levels are likely to slip" and then proactively monitor that customer's transactions to create a moment of delight.
And when you find a problem or complaint, resolve it on the spot. No company is perfect. So find out what those imperfections might be. And, when you hear about a problem, fix it. And make sure you give that customer a reason to come back so you can do it right the next time. Take that moment of misery and turn it into a MOMENT OF MAGIC.See what Shep Hyken has to say about ‘The Complaining Customer’http://www.hyken.com/Article_11.html
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Thu, Apr 30, 2009
In this down economy, organizations must maximize the value they get from every available resource. Often CRM has been thought of as a long term strategy and companies have looked for long term returns from these investments.What gets missed out is that there are many ways to get "quick wins" from CRM. Too many CRM initiatives have failed becuase too much effort was spent on creating effective capability and not enough effort spent on "finding and extracting short term profit opportunities". Have a look at this interesting article from Mc Kinsey which talks about how you can use CRM to drive short term profitability enhancement.Take a look at what Mc Kinsey calls Tactical CRM !!
Also with the advent of software-as-a-service (SaaS) technologies, your organization can easily and cost-effectively extract greater value from your CRM - and demonstrate greater value to your customers. Often building organization capability takes years ,but using the SaaS technologies allows you to bring in a specialist team along with a customized technology application.
See what Michael Zirngibl, CEO, Angel.com has to say about ‘Extract greater value from existing CRM applications'.
http://www.dmnews.com/Extract-greater-value-from-existing-CRM-applications/article/126869/
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Apr 26, 2009
Airmiles, the rewards program owned by British Airways, is launching a new company devoted to managing white label loyalty programs for other businesses.
It is interesting to see how the core proposition of a Loyalty program,which is to enable "profitable growth from loyal customers" can get quickly re directed to an entirely new business model. Why would a business transfer its core strategic diffrentiator on a platform and make it available to others?
The Mileage Company, which went public this week, will run the existing Airmiles program and British Airways' frequent flier program, BA Miles. Andrew Swaffield, managing director of The Mileage Company feels that since the recession has really started to bite around the world, loyalty points are more valuable to customers, and loyalty schemes are more valuable to businesses who are looking for ways of keeping customers loyal and ensuring they don't lose them to the competition.
The Mileage Company will use some major lessons gleaned from 20 years in the business to drive strategy for its new clients. It will stick to the tenets that successful reward schemes must be simple and consistent, with rewards that are attainable. The Mileage Company will use its particular expertise in the travel arena to woo new clients from that industry. Retailers and service providers also have shown interest in working with the company, Swaffield said, particularly those with higher-income customers. Airmiles' recent success could help encourage new clients to climb aboard with The Mileage Company.
See what Lauren Bell has to say about ‘Airmiles to help others manage loyalty programs'.
http://www.dmnews.com/Airmiles-to-help-others-manage-loyalty-programs/article/130696/
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Customer loyalty is such an overused term today. Every brand wants it and the common thinking seems to be to just launch a card based loyalty program to buy customer loyalty. In fact recent reports from Forrester find an increasing emphasis on customer experience and a payoff in terms of customer retention. It is of course much harder to truly create a strong customer experience. Inadvertently companies make it more difficult for customers to engage and do business with them. How often in a bank, the relationship manager does not have a single view of all your financial investments with the same bank!! But make no mistake about it, building a superior customer experience is a difficult task and often “silo” based organization structures come in the way. Here is an interesting article by Christopher Musico on how to improve customer loyalty using improved customer experience