Ernan Roman

The Challenge: Just as businesses must provide customers with a wide variety of marketing channels to choose from, they must allow a choice of multiple service channels.

As we've discussed previously, multichannel marketing enables delivery of messages per an individual's media preferences. Some customers want to engage businesses on social...

The Challenge: Social media platforms are crucial to building customer engagement, but the vast majority of marketers haven't incorporated that reality into their daily workflow -- with outsize consequences to their bottom lines.

A recent study by IBM found that while more than 80...

The Challenge: Businesses that do not recognize the power of high quality customer service, increase the risk of revenue loss and decreases in market valuation.
Businesses that treat customer service as a cost center, relegate it to an operations function and focus on manufacturing metrics such as reducing the...

The Challenge: All businesses want to engage in sophisticated multichannel marketing, but many are forgetting about the power of direct mail as a vital element of their media mix.

Multichannel Integration: Online and Off
As we reported earlier this year, a recent Direct Marketing Association study...

The Challenge: Instagram's billion-dollar exit was not an anomaly. It was a lesson about the value of "engagement" that every marketer must heed.

Since the advent of social media advertising on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, "engagement" has become a mantra for marketers. But despite the media buzz, many businesses...

The Challenge: Domino's Pizza. GoDaddy. Chrysler. Mattel. The Gap. Nestle. And the list goes on. Some of the biggest brands have suddenly found themselves entangled in social media crises that no one could have predicted... but that we all must now plan for.

Social Media Crises on the...

The Challenge: Customer-driven personalization is a powerful competitive differentiator, and marketers should take note of how Pinterest provides this.

True personalization is complex to achieve and requires a deep database of individual's opt-in preferences. However, the results are powerful.

THE CHALLENGE: Consumer frustration with opt-out marketing policies is growing. Marketers need to convince them to share information regarding their preferences in exchange for a valuable, personalized relationship.

Unfortunately, Opt-Out Is the New Norm

THE OPPORTUNITY: Creating customer-focused websites that are more engaging, yield more inquires, and generate more revenue than traditional "corporate" sites, using these four Best Practices.

To get customers to interact with your enterprise, websites today must provide a multi-dimensional experience. This means abandoning the old and familiar one-dimensional, "corporate brochure"...

Twitter can help your business get closer to its customers... create better word of mouth and greater brand advocacy... and generate great ideas from engaged fans. How? Start by learning from the best practices used by companies that have been successful with Twitter.

Start by learning from Starbucks. When a...

THE SITUATION: Social media can impact the national and global agenda with astonishing speed ... and it can also put people and institutions on the spot, instantly.

Two Hurricanes: Recently, marketers learned two powerful lessons regarding how empowered, engaged social media communities can form suddenly around an issue and exert...

The Challenge: How do you build a business case for potentially costly changes to improve the overall customer experience?

The Reality: Marketers can expect reluctance to support new customer experience initiatives without proof that the investments will actually pay off. Sentiments like "If it ain't broke, don't spend money...

For nearly two decades, my family and I have been repeat guests at a beautiful inn on the Chesapeake Bay. We were very loyal fans, until our recent stay during the holidays.

I can no longer recommend this inn to others, which is something I've been doing enthusiastically since 1996......

Three Voice of Customer (VoC) innovators -- Pitney Bowes, JetBlue, and Intel -- implemented important best practices in 2011. Watch them closely in 2012.

What is VoC?

Voice of Customer (VoC) is a marketing process that values, and is guided by, the insights of customers and prospects. The VoC process...

Were you missing something you ordered this Christmas?

My daughter was. She complained about a number of late-arriving packages ... packages that were supposed to have arrived before the 25th, but didn't. Curious, I did some research on the web to see just how widespread the late-delivery problem was ......

PREDICTION: Marketers who deploy their multichannel marketing mix at key points in customer's lifecycles with the company and per customer's individual preferences will win. Those who don't will just be creating multichannel irritation.

Brand Paths in 2012

For some brands, this will be the year of multichannel breakthroughs. For other...

THE CHALLENGE: We invite retention problems, loss of market share, and loss of good will when we consistently ignore big problems that gall our consumers... and assume that they must be wrong when they complain.

Although this challenge affects all marketers in all industries, I want to illustrate how important...

THE CHALLENGE: As the holiday season kicked off, online and offline marketers wasted millions of precious opportunities to engage with customers, capture preferences, and build the foundation for a year-long relationship. And most marketers relied too heavily on discounts.

Using discounting alone to drive customer purchases is not a strategy....

Empowered, activist customers are getting better and better at making their displeasure known... and, as they proved this year, they are also getting better at winning battles against big companies.

Occasional problems with customers are inevitable. The question is, how do you reduce the odds of those problems turning into...

Unfortunately, opt-out marketing policies are the norm. They allow marketers to send you information and offers they want to send and to use online and other information about you to target their marketing.

You can opt-out if you don't want this to occur. But the message is this: if you...