Merlin Stone
Merlin Stone
Professor Merlin Stone is Research Director at The Customer Framework. He is a leading expert in customer management, including customer recruitment, retention and development. His work focuses on improving customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty and trust, and also customer research, data analysis, systems decisions and supplier management needed to support improved management of customers. He is well known for conference speaking and thought leadership research.
Business Intelligence Self-Service – The New Democracy of Analytics.
In my last blog, I explored the balance between the new digital marketing analytics and the more conventional CRM analytics. This blog was based...
How the RDR changes financial services customer management
In my last blog, on whether managing customers in financial services is really so hard, I did not mention the question of intermediation. One...
Is customer management really so tough in retail financial services?
I have been reviewing the situation – in Fagin's famous words. We have worked on lots of marketing projects in retail financial services, not...
Segmenting by goodness and badness
A constant theme of CRM in any market is empowering customers. Many readers of this blog will remember working in offices where the walls...
Social media in banking – time to experiment?
I have just finished reading an article (no names, no pack drill) claiming that banks need to get serious about social media. This includes...
Mobile payments – tomorrow or the day after?
There seems to be a new announcement every day about the impact of mobile technology on payment systems, about a new development in that...
How to identify ‘good customers’
In the private sector, good individuals are broadly defined as a mixture of the characteristics below. These aren't all necessarily business traits either, personal...
Customers vs risk
In the last few years' turbulence, two critical issues have come together for financial services companies - risk and customer management. It' is not because...
How the Web influences relationships between customers and companies
In two recent research projects, I've been focusing on how the web has influenced relationships between companies and customers. My conclusion has been that...
Trusted advisor – the right role for Banks?
A recent study of corporate banking showed how low corporate clients rate their banks as trusted advisors. In his popular Financial Services Club blog,...