Category Archives: Customer Services
Gartner Points to Marketplaces as Key 2012 Trend
Recently, Gartner highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2012. Amongst the usual suspects of Cloud computing, social user experience, and mobile applications, App Stores and Marketplaces were highlighted for the first time. According to the report:
“Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus.” (more…)
Proactive Customer Service for Transportation Operators
As a long-time practitioner of Complex Event Processing (referred to as “CEP”) technologies, I see the world in a different way – seemingly difficult problems can easily be solved by this technology. Whenever I hear of a business problem needing timely responses to critical events, I think “CEP!” Whenever a customer asks how they can get their business users more involved in operational decisions and influence outcomes, I say “CEP!” And whenever I read an article where the author asserts that companies need to modernize to be more proactive and customer-centric, I think “I need to call that guy and tell him about ‘CEP!’”
Here’s one case: (more…)
Know Thy Customer
There has been much discussion, particularly in the UK, about banks restricting the use of their investment and retail arms. The thinking process behind this is that investment banking is much riskier and so by drawing a clear line between the two, consumers will be better protected if another financial crisis should hit. (more…)
My Dry Cleaner Rocked My World: A Loyalty Lesson For Big Companies
Shocked! I was simply blown away the other day by the most unlikely of companies – our dry cleaners.
Here’s what happened:
I went in on Saturday to pick up my dry cleaning. This establishment is owned and operated by a family. I was greeted by the mother/owner who asked how my wife was doing. I told her it was the day of her baby shower so I was staying away and running errands. She asked me to hold on for a minute and disappeared only to return with a bag in hand and said it was a gift for my wife.
My Dry Cleaner Really Loves Me!
She told me that last time my wife was in, she noticed that she was pregnant and looked up our last name on several registries, found an entry and bought something off it. (more…)
Global Customer Support TweetFest – You’re The Winners!
Last week the Global Customer Support team successfully completed a week long TweetFest Competition, using the official Support Twitter handle: @INFASupport, and the #INFATF hash tag.
Every day we posted a topic to which we solicited feedback from our followers and the results were amazing. We had a daily prize and then one grand prize at the end of seven days. We had approximately 100 responses from across the globe, as people participated in the discussions, mainly telling us what they wanted and expected from the Global Support team. Some of the topics we covered included suggestions and areas to improve around support, services and products. Here are the questions we asked: (more…)
Difficult April – Amazon, Sony and 4G Networks Ohh My!
Verizon’s 4G network goes down, cripples Thunderbols
Amazon failure takes down sites across the Internet
With PSN Still Down, Sony Says Data May be Tainted
These headlines are just some examples of the new levels of complexity with systems that rely on many services to stay up, have constant attempts to exploit security holes and thousands if not millions of consumers demanding “right now” service.
Sometimes I meet customers and talk about how CEP can help them proactively monitor their operations so they can get one step ahead of problems. Once in a blue moon, a customer will tell me they don’t have problems. It’s not polite for me to disagree out loud, so I say “I disagree” in my silent voice and then probe on. (more…)
Headlines Of Hilarity – Man Gets $16M Cable Bill
Would you be surprised to hear that his bill amount was not remotely close to the biggest billing mistake? One man in Texas got a bill 2,000 times the national debt!
Could there be an easier application of CEP (Complex Event Processing) to correct such silly errors? Some studies suggest that consumers are overbilled consistently in categories ranging from utilities to grocery stores. Watching for large deviations in current billing against historical norms can provide for easy identification of probable future issues. (more…)
Do You Trust Your Data?
Recently I was talking to a prospective customer who shared some challenges they faced recently– they had asked five people for a report and had gotten five different answers. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon situation. In fact, at times it seems as though making business decisions and managing business processes is a bit like using an “origami fortune teller” — you hope you get the right answer, but you’re really leaving your fate to chance.
Harnessing Social Media With Informatica
Improving sales and service through customer centricity requires listening to and understanding your customers. And where are customers speaking these days?
You guessed it—social media. Just think about it. Each day, customers tweet 50 million times on Twitter and update their Facebook status 60 million times. Add in LinkedIn and user reviews and YouTube and blog commentary and more and you’ve got a customer data gold mine and a new frontier for marketing.
Customer Retention and Monitoring Customer Life Cycle Events
In my previous post, I talked about how poor data quality associated with the product and service life cycle, especially across the accuracy, completes, timeliness, and currency dimensions, could impact the ability to execute opportunities for proactive customer retention. But retention opportunities are not limited to interactions with the customer in reference to the life cycle of the product; the customer’s own life cycle events will also present opportunities for positive interactions. As an example, a month before my son’s birthday, he gets a letter from a local toy store with a $5 coupon. (more…)
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