Bob Thompson
Bob Thompson
Bob Thompson is CEO of CustomerThink, an independent research and publishing firm focused on customer-centric business management, and Founder/Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink.com, the world's largest community dedicated to customer-centric business. Thompson is a popular international keynote speaker, blogger and author of Hooked On Customers: The Five Habits of Legendary Customer-Centric Companies.
IBM launches Voice of Customer Analytics (VOCA). Will it be friend or foe to EFM vendors?
Acronym watchers take note. VOCA—Voice of Customer Analytics—is coming, courtesy of Big Blue. In "voice of customer" circles, EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) is the most...
Understanding social media using Sentiment Analysis: Is this a new science or a new fad?
Guest post from Jennifer Major, Business Development Manager, Communications, Media and Entertainment Practice at SAS UK We've seen the blunders big companies have made by...
Underwhelmed by Salesforce.com’s Chatter = Vaporware 2.0
This week Salesforce.com unveiled Chatter -- "a new secure enterprise collaboration application and social development platform." This is a significant announcement that brings Enterprise...
Consona Targets High-Tech with Knowledge Driven Support
Consona is an interesting company, formed from the acquisition of numerous ERP and CRM vendors over the past few years. That can make it...
What makes customer-focused companies different?
Being customer-centric is easy to say, hard to do. Walker Information, a loyalty consulting firm, says it comes down to three things: Leadership: companies are…
Google Trends Smackdown: Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social CRM
This year social media has been a huge topic on this site and others. "Social CRM" has been a hot topic for debate, including...
Where is the Customer in Enterprise 2.0?
Web 2.0 is about collaborative web applications that enable users to easily share content and network. This site is an example, because anyone can...
RightNow CX Takes the Road Less Traveled
At the RightNow Summit this week, held once again at the fabulous Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs, Founder/CEO Greg Gianforte unveiled RightNow CX—"the customer...
Real Social Selling? PeopleMaps Has an App for That
One of the great debates in the blogosphere is whether selling can really be social. Mostly what I've seen so far is social media...
Social Media in Business: Hype vs. Hope
Bob Thompson and five members of CustomerThink's 2009 Editorial Board discuss 1) social media hype, 2) what is social CRM and 3) how...
Social CRM technology is alive, well and ready for work!
There's been plenty of spirited debate lately about what exactly is Social CRM. I'm sure some of the vendors watch in bemusement as industry...
GM’s Saturn is scrapped: Why did customer-centricity fail?
One time or another, we've all complained about cars and the car buying process. Why can't American car companies compete better? GM tried with Saturn....
Forrester Finds Choice and Confusion in Lead Management Automation Market
Earlier this year I wrote an article about B2B marketing and learned that the technology is evolving quite fast in the Web 2.0 era....
Social CRM: Strategy, Technology or Passing Fad?
With all the chatter that has been stirred up in recent weeks, it's clear that "Social CRM" is a hot topic. It's less...
Salesforce.com Launches Hype-as-a-Service, Erodes Trust
Salesforce.com does a lot of things well, and has been a positive force for innovation in this industry. Recently the company announced the "Service...
Visible Technologies Upgrades Platform to Mine Social Listening Posts
As social media usage has ramped up, it's become increasingly clear that there's value in all that chatter. If only you can identify what's...
Challenges Creating a “Social Business”
Tools don't make the carpenter, a new paint set won't help you paint like van Gogh, and a $10,000 bike won't enable me to...
Sales Performance Management: Because You Get What You Pay For
Our research has found a strong correlation between customer-centric business success and an organization rewarding its employees for doing the right job. Of course,...
Salesforce.com launches PIM for the Cloud… but Why?
You gotta give it up for Benioff crew. They know how to execute, even in a bad economy, while looking for the Next Big...
Jigsaw Data-as-a-Service: The Next Billion Dollar Player?
At the recent CRM Evolution / SpeechTek conference in NYC, I caught up with Jim Fowler, the irrepressible founder/CEO of Jigsaw. For those not...