Financial goals are best reached with long-term planning - be it savings plans, carefully arranged financing, or any and all forms of insurance coverage. When it's part of a plan and all goes well, the results intended are the ones achieved. All very good, right? But even the best laid plans at
Retailers are always trying to get closer to customers. But it’s not just about improving service to those customers – it’s about understand more about what products they are demanding so as to make better forecasting decisions around, for example, how much of a particular item is needed in stock.
Decades of Westernized television and cinema have featured fantastic imagined car technologies, including many that now actually exist. Think of the autonomous car from Knight Rider and today’s self-parking capabilities. Or the ongoing James Bond series with tracking devices that resemble the well-established GPS systems in our cars, phones and
When we talk about digital customer services, it’s all about creating online self-service capabilities for our customers. This is great for everyone! We’ve made it easy for the customer to get what they need; it’s cheaper and faster for organizations to deliver the service to the customer. Need a copy
Few of us can have missed the scenes of frantic shoppers searching for that ultimate bargain on Black Friday. This is something fairly new in the UK, having originated in the United States to refer to the Friday following Thanksgiving Day. Legend has it that ‘black’ refers to the first day of the
It seems like every retailer nowadays has a loyalty program. From the local coffee house to “big box” national retailers to almost any online merchant, everyone has a loyalty program. But do people really want them? It turns out the answer is yes – a resounding yes. But are those programs
Back in 2007, the NY Times published an article about “The Google Way.” The premise behind the Google Way is to give engineers 20% of their time to spend on new company related ideas and projects that interest them. For a while this became the management strategy du jour as
"Give the lady what she wants" and "The customer is always right" are quotes attributed to the venerable Chicago retailing pioneer Marshall Field. That customer-centered approach to doing business was leading-edge at the close of the 19th century and soon became a competitive advantage for Mr. Field's namesake department store empire.
Déjà vu. For me, this term immediately conjures images of Bill Murray waking up in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania on Groundhog Day – repeatedly. In French, déjà vu means “already seen” and while I usually fall solidly into the realm of skeptic in matters like these, I have to admit feeling a
You may notice that marketing is changing. Fewer credit card offers are hitting your mailbox. Fewer coupons for irrelevant products and services. There is a reason for the change. Organizations are beginning to understand that mass marketing alienates customers. Spray and pray doesn't work - so organizations aren't spending their
