Group items tagged

Add in the easy-to-use nature of social networks, and the potential value of CRM accelerates even faster. The Social Enterprise as defined by Salesforce.com, heavily promoted at their DreamForce event last month in San Francisco, capitalizes on these factors which are critical for any CRM system to succeed.

Add in the easy-to-use nature of social networks, and the potential value of CRM accelerates even faster. The Social Enterprise as defined by Salesforce.com, heavily promoted at their DreamForce event last month in San Francisco, capitalizes on these factors which are critical for any CRM system to succeed.

1) Do bad customer experiences cause people to switch brands? In a 2011 research project conducted by CX application vendor RightNow, 89% of consumers said that yes, a bad experience has spurred them to switch brands. But in the brand-new study of business-executive perceptions that’s the subject of this column, only 49% of the surveyed executives said yes.  QUESTION: What steps do you need to take to close this dangerous perception gap? 2) While 97% of executives say CX is critical to the success of their company, and 91% say they’re committed to making their company a CX leader, only 20% would rate their own CX initiatives as “advanced,” with a dedicated CX leader in place, initial projects pushed to the optimization phase, and the overall project extended to new channels and groups . QUESTION: What are the obstacles preventing you from aligning your actions with your words? If you say it’s a “budget” issue, aren’t you really talking about strategic priorities rather than line items? 3) Most companies have a clear and direct understanding of the looming CX challenge and the powerful interaction of social media. The study found that the top two drivers for CX initiatives are (a) rising expectations from customers (59%),  and (b) the impact of social media on customers’ ability to broadcast good and bad experiences (37%). Now, even if you’re able to somehow rationalize those findings, here’s one that not even the most-accommodating executive can dismiss:

4) Being a CX laggard can cost those companies many tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue: executives estimated that the lack of positive, consistent, and brand-relevant customer experience can cause them to lose out on a staggering 20% in annual revenue.

Worse yet, all that money’s likely to wind up in the pockets of your competitors!

In the contemporary enterprise, almost everyone will need to have data-science skills of some kind.

“When most people think of a data scientist, they think of a statistician, a guy with ‘analyst’ in his title,’” Hanrahan says. “Or, someone who works in IT and manages the data warehouses. To do these jobs, you certainly needed programming skills; you probably needed advanced statistics skills, or some combination of those skills.”

“At the most basic level, you are a data scientist if you have the analytical skills and the tools to ‘get’ data, manipulate it and make decisions with it,” he says.