Niall Budds
Rumors of My Departure are Greatly Exaggerated!
I like to think that every company that is trying to build solid customer relationships these days understands the importance of uniquely identifying and understanding their customers' status and behavior. Then again every week I come across an example of a brand that,...
When Firing the CEO is Not an Option
I have been participating in an interesting dialogue on LinkedIn lately about what happens when, as the new head of marketing, your CEO asks you to assess and "fix" marketing within a notional 30-day period. The range of posts and reactions has been...
Embracing Digital Customer Interaction
With so much discussion about the importance of an effective online interaction strategy, it's surprising how many companies have yet to fully embrace the power of digital strategies and tactics. Many are "digital capable", meaning that they have the ability to plan and...
Three Missed Marketing Opportunities for Mortgage Lenders
Those of you who have read my occasional blogs will be familiar with my ongoing frustration with my mortgage lender. I wrote in the past how little they seemed to know and appreciate me for my many years of business, and seemed unprepared...
Marketing Accountability
At the recent Forrester Customer Experience Forum, Principal Analyst Dave Frankland spoke about the four tenets of breakthrough marketing accountability: organizational alignment, cross-functional business processes, value-based metrics, and communicating results. In addition to these core components, here there are some other things which are...
Do Not Solicit at 36,000 Feet!
As a frequent flyer one of my pet peeves is the presentation of credit card offers by flight attendants on behalf of their financial services partners. I feel bad for the flight attendants having to sell this stuff, presumably to get commission to supplement...
Measuring Marketing Efficiency
At Quaero we are often asked to help marketing organizations that feel like they are “inefficient”. Sometimes what I find is that they are, in fact, fairly efficient, but that their marketing investments are not “effective”. In other words they execute well but do...
Evaluating Marketing Performance: The Importance of ‘No’
I recently worked with the marketing team in a large global organization. They engaged us to help them to become (in their words) more “efficient”. Their hypothesis was that both the efficiency problem and its solution lay somewhere at the intersection between their processes...
You Can’t Gauge Your Business Success Without Effective Measurement
A large retail bank had a problem. Its customer service division was concentrating so much on operational efficiencies, such as shorter hold times, quicker speed to answer and more calls per agent, that it was failing to effectively capture and share the customer interaction...