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.
The future of customer-centric business in The Netherlands — Klantgericht Ondernemen 2022
On June 6 in Rotterdam, I was honored to present the opening keynote at Klantgericht Ondernemen 2022, a conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of...
What Really Drives Customer Loyalty? It’s Not Just About the Experience!
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." —Albert Einstein Customer loyalty is at the heart of a truly customer-centric business strategy.…
5 Opportunities to Profit from Social Selling
After a recent conference, I wrote that Sales 2.0 was finally ready to engage with Customer 2.0. One of the five points I shared...
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: My AT&T DSL Customer Service Experience
Despite what the title of this blog post implies, AT&T service representatives all did a good to excellent job helping me solve (maybe) problems...
Facebook’s #EpicFail — Lack of TRUST by Users and Investors
On the eve of the Facebook IPO, it's interesting how much negative publicity has been surfacing. Users don't trust Facebook to respect privacy. Investors...
People: The Secret Sauce in Customer Experience Success
There is a tremendous opportunity to innovate the customer experience with digital or social technology. One of my favorite examples is Tesco's Virtual Subway...
Study: Social customer service adoption growing despite uncertain ROI (#scrm)
This just in... Sword Ciboodle has released results of study conducted by analyst Esteban Kolsky. It confirms what I think many suspected: Good news: companies...
DocuSign Revs up Revenue Engine with Collaboration, Content and Technology
About 10 years ago at one of the early Dreamforce events, I met Mark Organ, then CEO and co-founder of a young marketing automation...
Marketing tech needs Don Draper to be more Cool, not just Critical
At Forrester's Customer Intelligence Forum in LA, they opened the conference with an interesting exercise -- Asking the audience to vote whether a well-known...
Macy’s Marketing Transformation: From “Mad Men” to “Math Men”
Last week I had the pleasure of attending Forrester's Customer Intelligence Forum, where the theme was "how to create engagement in the age of...
Starbucks is customer-centric because it listened
Lately I've noticed an increase in discussion about "customer-centricity." If ever there was a more nebulous term than CRM, this is it. Is customer-centricity...
Survey: Brands consumers love (Apple, Coca-Cola, Amazon and Google) and what drives loyalty
ClickFox just released results from a brand loyalty survey. It won't shock anyone that Apple was the top pick, followed by Coca Cola in...
Is Social Software the Cure for Business as Usual? Take the “Red Pill” to Find Out!
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. —W. Edwards Deming News flash: Your company is slowly going out of business. Just like…
Consumer communication preferences: Email still king, but here comes texting!
ExactTarget just released its 2012 Channel Preference Survey, based on nearly 1500 respondents who completed a survey early this year. The full report is...
Sales 2.0: Growing up and finally ready to engage with Customer 2.0
One word to sum up my experience at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco: Fabulous. This coming from someone who uses "pretty good"...
Study: Salesforce.com users not happy with SFA analytics
According to a hot-off-the-presses study by Dimensional Research, only 19% of Salesforce.com users are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their current solution for SFA...
If the Customer Experience is so important, how do you explain the success of Ryanair?
I've been hearing about Ryanair for the past few years. Mostly horror stories about bad service and how the airline would never make it. So...
Five Guys: Great $5 Hamburger, Free Peanuts and a Perky Experience
I first heard about Five Guys a few months ago while watching a TV special about potatoes. That's right, potatoes. Further proof I have...
Forrester: Your website #CX still #FAILS after all these years
That's right, your website. Unless you happen to be among the happy 3% that earn a passing score, based on Forrester's website user experience...
CRM and CEM: Managing the Yin-Yang of Customer Relationships
I entered the CRM industry in 1998 after a career in the technology industry, mostly with IBM. CRM seemed like an exciting concept, because...