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.
Study: Social Customer Service NOT the Answer to Consumer Satisfaction
A new US study by Parature (recently acquired by Microsoft) found social media not a significant factor in customer service satisfaction. The phone is...
Value Creation — Doing “What Matters” to Customers
This week I hosted a delightful dinner meeting in Coronado to celebrate the release of my new book Hooked On Customers. In addition to...
Connecting the Dots Between Employee Engagement and the Customer Experience
I recently participated in a group discussion organized by NICE on trends and best practices in employee engagement and how it relates to the...
Why Reps Can’t Sell. It’s the (Selling) System, Stupid!
Two words for sales reps trying to get time with Pete Sattler, CIO of International Flavors & Fragrances: Lotsa Luck. You'll need it, because...
Davinci’s analytics-driven chat powers up Digital Experience strategy
Since starting my business in 1998, I've shifted more and more of my computing to what we now call The Cloud. Email distribution, accounting,...
Analytics help Western Union deliver loyalty-building service experiences
A few years ago my son was traveling abroad and ran out of money. We scrambled to figure out how to transfer funds and...
Facebook and Twitter: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?
It's being interesting to watch the development of Facebook and Twitter over the past few years. Both trying to navigate a tricky move from...
Is G2 Crowd the Death Knell for Forrester and Gartner?
A death knell is the ringing of a bell to announce a death. This is also called tolling the bell. --Wikipedia OK, so maybe I'm…
Shopping Experience: New Normal is Mobile, Omni-Channel, and Mostly… LOW Prices!
I've been following the retail analyst reports over the past few weeks. One summed up the holiday shopping season as "ho hum," due to...
Black Friday proves that (low) price really can be delightful. Will retailer greed kill a good thing?
Most of the discussion around a delightful Customer Experience (CX) has been about company-customer interactions. Like the unusually great customer service you get from...
Omnichannel Customer Service: Phone still king for first and second contact
Zendesk just announced the results of a global consumer study on omnichannel customer service. The results show plenty of room for improvement, despite years...
5 questions for Wil Wurtz about “The Customer Profit Maxim”
Wil Wurtz has two decades of experience in customer management, and has seen the rise of CRM (as founder of the Dutch CRM Association)...
Say goodbye to social silos. SAP Jam adds “work patterns” to support a collaborative business
"Social" is a term that can be used in so many different ways. In our personal lives, being social means connecting with other people,...
Reviews 2.0: OpenTell’s authenticated customer feedback changes the game
There's no question that the so-called "social customer" has changed the balance of power. I think Dave Carroll, the creator of the famous United...
Marketing and IT, in the name of CX, why can’t you just get along?
In recent months there's been a lot of commentary about how much technology CMOs will be purchasing in the coming years, which could make...
Eloqua charts course as part of Oracle; Predictive analytics gaining momentum
I attended Eloqua Experience this week in San Francisco mainly to see what had happened to the trendsetting marketing automation firm, post Oracle merger....
Facebook hijacking “likes” to sell ads. Is this what social media has devolved to?
I get it. Social media sites need to make money. Actually, any free website needs a revenue stream, and a common strategy is selling...
Predictive Analytics is the Future of B2B Digital Marketing
Over the past 10 years or more, B2B marketing has essentially been defined by process automation, including lead generation, nurturing, email campaigns, and so...
Friendly: The most important quality in Customer Service
A few years ago in a Customer Experience study we asked customers to write about "memorable" experiences. The responses were split about 50/50 positive...
Good news! Technology a problem in 35% of CRM projects
That's what Forrester just discovered in a study of CRM project risk, done in partnership with CustomerThink. Why is this "good news?" Well, CRM technology…