Graham Hill
How Customer Jobs, Journeys and Decisions are Reinventing Experience Design
The importance of looking at things from the customer’s perspective rather than the company’s, is a critical element that many companies forget when starting to improve their customer experience. However, there is growing evidence that overly-focusing on the customer during experience design can be...
How Marketing-as-a-Service Builds Trust and Engagement
Talk to most marketers and you get the impression that they know what makes their customers tick. They have piles of marketing research to prove it. But do they really? The recent fast.MAP Marketing Gap Tracker looked at the differences between what marketers think...
The Tyranny of Bad Customers
Hardly a day goes by without another flood of motherhood and apple pie articles extolling the importance of ‘putting customers first’, about how the ‘customer is king’ and other such ridiculous simplifications. Adopting a so-called ‘customer-focus’ has become a mindless mantra for the new...
Rebuilding the Internet Around YOU!
We live in an increasingly connected world, where much of our lives is being captured digitally as data: our transactions, our interactions, our movements. As more things become connected through the Internet-of-Things (IoT), even more data is being generated. This is the much discussed...
Big Data, Value-based Pricing and Ethics
Value-based pricing is coming of age. Powered by big data and real-time analytics, companies are now able to offer individual customers unique prices based upon their circumstances. Although there is still some confusion about what value-based pricing is and what it isn't, the growing...
How Customer Jobs drive Value-based Pricing
In an earlier post on ‘Value-based Pricing; Fair or Foul? I compared the economist’s view of value-based pricing with the moral philosopher’s view of it and asked whether it was ‘fair or foul’ for customers. Despite the analytical, economic and moral challenges of value-based...
Value-based Pricing: Fair or Foul?
As Accenture describes in a recent book on ‘Contextual Pricing: The Death of List Price and the New Reality’, the growth of big data provides companies with unprecedented opportunities to personalise their products, services and experiences for customers. Armed with detailed knowledge about individual...
Why Customer-Focus is NOT ENOUGH to Succeed
There is a popular myth that being customer-oriented is the secret of success in business. Sadly, although being customer-focused is essential for success, it is not enough to guarantee it. Success requires a company to focus on a range of actors in addition to...
How Contextual Marketing Turns Marketing into Service
Content has always been critical in marketing, whether a 30-second TV ad, a long-copy infomercial in a magazine or an HTML email. It is the marketer’s tool of choice to talk to the customer about what they have to offer and hopefully, to persuade...
T-Mobile: Three Strikes and You’re Out!
We have been customers of T-Mobile in Germany for more years than I care to remember. Too many years! Up until recently, we had six mobile contracts for different family members and uses. All in my wife's name. T-Mobile thought she was a great...
Proprietary Services are Dead! Long Live the Open Service Platform.
I have been having an interesting discussion with Dutch financial services expert Wim Rampen on his blog. One of the questions he asked me is should we build services around specific customer segments, or should we build service platforms where customers can self-select the...
Understanding Costs, Prices and Value is Critical to Success
Most intelligent businessmen would agree that high profits or perhaps more usefully, a high return on total assets employed, is the result of being successful in business. The implication, as UK Economist John Kay so eloquently writes in his book 'Obliquity', is that businesses...
How Stupidity, Short-termism and Immorality Ruined Marketing
Marketing as a business discipline is in serious trouble. Its effectiveness has decreased to the point where a less than 1% response rate is often seen as respectable in some marketing channels. Its relevance to business has declined as the CMO often finds himself...
Seven Simple Steps Towards Better Collaboration
In an earlier post on CustomerThink I described Ten Principles that Drive Effective Collaboration. And why just implementing collaboration technology would not improve collaboration. Worse, how it would make you into an 'Expensive Old Organisation'; with all the costs of the new technology, but...
Changing How We Manage Change
Implementing a new CRM, or other business system – even one with similar functionality to one it is replacing – is fraught with dangers. Experience suggests that without pro-actively managing change, a significant number of CRM system projects fail to deliver the expected benefits...
Ten Principles that Drive Effective Collaboration
Collaboration is a hot topic in business today. Companies are recognising that effective collaboration is critical to future business success. Many are hoping that if they just buy collaboration technology, a miracle will happen, and they will become collaborative companies. The bad news is:...
Customer Delight or a Brilliant PR Stunt? You Decide
There is an interesting true story doing the rounds of customer service blogs at the moment. In it, Peter Shankman a customer service writer, blogger and regular customer at Morton's Steakhouse jokingly tweeted to Morton's that he would like a Porterhouse waiting for him...
What’s Your Platform for Value Co-Creation?
A couple of years back I wrote a speculative blog post at CustomerThink entitled How Customer Co-Creation is the Future of Business. In many ways my prediction was right, Customer Co-Creation IS the future of business, but not exactly in the way I had...
Social CRM: What’s Right, What’s Wrong, What’s Next? Inside Scoop with Graham Hill
On March 24, 2011, CustomerThink Founder/CEO Bob Thompson interviewed Graham Hill in a wide-ranging discussion about Social CRM. Interview covers the following topics (click to jump to section in transcript): What is Social CRM? Has Social CRM become a "bulwark" of business? Social CRM as…
Social CRM at a Crossroads: Where to Next?
Social CRM has evolved from a novelty used by only a few organisations, to a powerful tool that practically all use. Much of this evolution has been powered by the hype cycle. Social CRM is now at a crossroads. It can go in three...