Michael Maoz

I’d like to report that communities, forums, Twitter groups and the like were sure-fire business improvement tools, but you know as well as I that this is not true. There is a lot of nuance that goes into getting Social CRM right. Years ago (six) I was writing about a topic I called the “Intent [...]

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It’s amazing that most websites attact any customers at all. Maybe it is more correct to say that the sites themselves would never actually attract a customer, but the business leaves them no other choice if they want to buy goods and services, or look for information. It’s hard for most of us to say, [...]

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I am in the middle of a few different discussion threads with clients and colleagues about the definition of ‘business value.’ It started over Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing. Clients who do care in any way about SaaS usually come from the business and not from IT, and are hoping to get [...]

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Sitting through planning meetings on improvements to the customer experience, it becomes clear quickly that management is intermittently focused on customer excellence. They are digging into sales forecasts and projections, and working with the CFO on how to further reduce costs. And they are thinking about the inventory of applications that has gathered like odd socks [...]

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I spend a lot of time watching customer service operations. Service reps answer phones, chat with customers on the internet, and answer emails. Yes, and shop on eBay and do Sudoku puzzles and talk to friends, babysitters and children. I don’t find the shopping and extraneous talking productivity killers. In fact, they can be refreshing [...]

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I am writing a series of research pieces with some colleagues at Gartner on Customer Centric Web Strategies. What we are focused on is the hodgepodge of applications that most organizations have cobbled together to serve customers. Portals, order entry, inventory, chat, email, pricing, marketing content, search, customer service knowledge bases: a mess of data [...]

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Since I’m on vacation today, I’m going to say it: the forecast for CRM applications: partly Cloud-y. Forget the camp, though, and hear what my clients are struggling with. The line of business responsible for customer experience, customer service, and sales is just looking for the functionality to be successful. They have no intrinsic interest [...]

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So much came so easy to so many for so long that now, with the tires going soft but the wheels still on the bus, there is the tendency to pull over and wait for a miracle. Enough analogies with the car industry, but the reason I allude to them is because what happened in [...]

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I get a lot of calls that ask about the source of customer defection, or customer churn. It is a great question, and once you figure out how to keep a profitable customer a customer for life, you have a fairly renewable revenue stream. But here is the rub: almost no one wants to just [...]

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