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.
Listening to the Voice of Customers: Can You Answer These 5 Key Questions?
Seek first to understand, then to be understood.—Stephen Covey Effective listening to the complete voice of the customer is a foundational capability for customer-centric maturity....
Infosys launches AssistEdge to improve cross-channel customer service experience
Multiple channels has been a mixed blessing for customers and business leaders. Consumers want access to new channels like chat, mobile, social, etc. as...
How Amazon Wins: Innovation, Low Prices, and Free Cash Flow
In 2005, we (when we were named CRMGuru.com) awarded Amazon.com a customer-centric leadership award. In an acceptance letter, Craig Berman, Amazon's director of platform...
Why customer-centric Strategy is overrated and a culture of Execution is everything
Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast —Peter Drucker Over the years I've heard many times that " is a strategy" to compete, grow, differentiate, etc. And…
The biggest danger to CX is simply this … HYPE
There's a very interesting discussion going on the Customer Experience Management group on LinkedIn. You'll need to join the group to see the full...
Will you face up to your “Customer Cliff” in 2013? Or jump over the edge again?
The "fiscal cliff" drama has been great theater in the U.S. Too bad they couldn't sell tickets to help pay down our national debt. It's...
Report: Amazon.com leads, Apple slides, in holiday e-shopping experience
ForeSee just released its 8th annual study of shopper satisfaction with the top 100 e-retailers. Amazon.com came out on top again with an overall...
Killer App: Retailers find email outperforms social media advertising 3 to 1
Excuse me, the 1990s called and they want their headline back. It's always been interesting to me how quickly we declare the old ways "dead"...
Social CRM’s 15 minutes of fame is over, onward to Customer Experience!
In a remarkably short time, Social CRM has gone from the hottest thing around to… yesterday's news? I'm not going to say "Social CRM is...
CRM analyst throws down gauntlet to #CX vendor pretenders, misses mark
In a recent ZDNet post, CRM analyst Paul Greenberg recently threw down the gauntlet towards vendors claiming they were focused on customer experience, saying...
Yammer: Social is Open for Business
This week Yammer, recently purchased by Microsoft for $1.2B, announced the "Enterprise Graph" at its customer conference in San Francisco. Essentially this is a...
Contact Centers Take to the Cloud, Boost Service Quality and Innovation
How do you know when it's time to change your game? At Silverpop, a marketing automation solution provider, that realization came a few years...
Hubspot uses persona-based teams to align with buyers, accelerate growth
Yesterday I presented my ideas about Buyer Experience Management (BXM) at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I was delighted to...
B2B Sellers, Wake Up! Adopt Buyer Experience Management, or Get a Pink Slip from Customer 2.0
The traits in a salesperson that executives find valuable and strategic, namely focusing on solving a problem (13%) and on driving an end result...
Speed Thrills: SAS soups up analytics with in-memory technology
It's always fun to attend the annual executive conference put on by analytics leader SAS. Although there is some irony that this year's event...
From Big Data to Big Decisions: Three Ways Analytics Can Improve the Retail Experience
Despite our best efforts to collect and analyze data, good business decisions will always include elements of judgment, intuition or just plain luck. Many...
Honda car service experience shows how CRM and CEM can coexist nicely
Recently a brochure showed up in the mail reminding me that my Honda Civic needed 60K service. Along with fixing a few other things...
Buzzword Trends: “Social Business” on the rise, supplanting “Enterprise 2.0” and “Social CRM”
In the wake of Salesforce.com's aborted and just plain stupid attempt to trademark "Social Enterprise," I decided to take a fresh look at how...
Study: Giving consumers the “Right Stuff” more important than great customer service
There's a fascinating discussion in the LinkedIn group "Building the Customer-Centric Organization." Over 100 comments were generated debating what "customer-centric" really means and what...
The 5 Cs of a Great Patient Experience
Today is my birthday, so I'm dedicating this post to my mother, who is the reason I exist today. Unfortunately, at 90 years old...