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.
Three Perspectives on “CRM” Reveal Limited Win-Win Thinking
Earlier this year we invited CustomerThink members to take a short survey on their perceptions about CRM. One of the key questions was simply...
Pat Sullivan Is Back To Shake Up Small Business CRM
He's baaaaaack. Pat Sullivan, the CRM industry pioneer who launched ACT! and SalesLogix, has joined the board of directors of Infusion Software, effective July...
Net Promoter and ACSI Smackdown
There's a lot to like about the Net Promoter Score that Fred Reichheld developed. Business executives are jumping on it as an easy to...
CustomerThink Retreat 2007: Advisors Chart the Future
On June 5-6 at the Seascape Resort in Aptos, California, 16 of CustomerThink's global Advisors gathered for our annual Retreat. Each year we get...
Highlights From Global Study of Call Centers
The June 15 issue of BusinessWeek summarized a few interesting findings from a global call center study, covering 2,500 call centers in 17 countries....
SugarCRM Rides the Open Source Wave
Traditionally, to win in the software business, you've got to spend big in sales and marketing. SugarCRM, as part of the open source movement,...
Google This: Who Will Buy Salesforce.com?
The media is abuzz about a Google-Salesforce partnership. (Personally, I'm more concerned about whether Paris Hilton will spend any time in the pokey.) The...
Unica’s Vision: “Marketing So Relevant, It Feels Like Service”
Yuchun Lee When I first met Unica co-founder Yuchun Lee several ago, he told me his goal was to create a billion dollar business....
FrontRange: Back From the Dead To Contend for SMB Leadership
As the large-enterprise CRM space has consolidated to the Big Two (Oracle and SAP, how boring), the SMB market has been a fragmented, muddled...
Can CRM Stop “Middle-Age Spread”? (Lessons From Google and Toyota)
It's commonly believed that, as we get older, it's only natural to get a bit thicker around the middle. But the real reason we...
CRMGuru Is Now CustomerThink
In case you missed the announcement last week, we have changed the name of CRMGuru.com to CustomerThink.com. Long-time members may recall that our email...
Web 2.0 Powers Up People
Q: How do you hype interest in the Web, again? A: Put 2.0 on the end of it! It reminds me of the hype that...
Six Easy Ways To Lose Your Clients
Customer-centricity is like art. As a customer, you know it when you see it, or rather, when you feel it. You get those warm,...
Sell More by Showing Your Customers Some Love!
In my last blog, Why I Hate Sales Reps, I said my pet peeves were reps who don't listen, don't care about my problem,...
Why I Hate Sales Reps
OK, I don't hate all sales reps. But now that I've got your attention, let me explain. Sure, selling is one of the most challenging...
China in the Customer Management Groove
It's hard to believe that we've just completed the fifth annual China Customer Management Forum, held April 5-6 in Shanghai. It seems like just...
You Can Love Your Bank: An Interview With First Direct’s Marcus Golby
The U.K.'s First Direct set out in 1989 to turn around people's dissatisfaction with banking by giving them a purely telephone service alternative. In...
Why “CRM” Must Die for Customer-Centric Business To Thrive
As we ring in the New Year, it's time to bid farewell to "CRM." Why? Because after more than a decade it still doesn't...
Build a Customer-Centric CxO Team: CRM Resolutions for 2007
In the 2006 Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa, the aging fighter, gives some sage advice to his son. It's not whether you get knocked down,...
The Next Generation of Customer Management? Customer Experience Management
Since I founded CRMGuru.com in January 2000, interest in CRM has blown hot and cold. Now Gartner says that the good times are rolling:...