November 2003

Magazine Features

One Company, Two CRM Strategies

Two divisions that serve The Schwan Food Company's markets, Schwan's Home Service and Schwan's Food Service Group, have revamped their CRM strategies as part of Schwan's ongoing effort to keep customers satisfied and loyal.

Setting and Managing Your Customers' Expectations

The notion that there is a fixed relationship between the quality of the product or service you offer and the enthusiasm those products or services generate in your customers persists. In reality, the relationship between those two values is far from fixed.

How Do You Measure Success?

CRM magazine, in partnership with strategic CRM measurement and improvement firm CRMetrix, invited readers to evaluate their organizations' CRM measurement systems against CRM measurement best practices. More than 260 executives responded to the survey. Fifty-four percent say their implementation is live, 15 percent of them are in the process of deploying CRM, and 31 percent of them are still in the planning stage.

BPO: What You Need to Know About Call Center Outsourcing

Despite the anxiety of handing over call center operations to a third-party outsourcer, organizations are still quietly off-loading their customer support efforts.

Front Office

Giving Customers What You Want Them to Want

Often customer expectations are misaligned with company offerings.

Reality Check

CRM Is Not a Game of Chance

Carefully consider and prioritize the business-functional, technical-features, and user-friendliness/support requirements for your CRM system--then move into the CRM-software selection process.

Insight

You Want Fries With That CRM?

A self-service pilot program using touch screen kiosks has allowed McDonald's to increase capacity, taking more customers' orders than before.

CRM Defined: Nearsourcing

Take My Advice--Please

The SuperPowers of CRM panelists at a recent Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing Strategies Executive Summit answer CRM magazine Editor-in-Chief Ginger Conlon's 30-second CRM-advice question.

Optimizing Service

News in Brief

U.S. call center spending in the financial services industry between 1998 and 2003 increased by 118 percent; Customers are looking for better integration between applications, information systems, and portals; and companies are getting into offshore BPO, but enterprises should also examine the benefits from offshore "insourcing."

Heard and Overheard

Vertical Focus: Consumer Packaged Goods

Insuring CRM Success

REAL ROI

Driving Marketing Results

The new marketing method has resulted in close rates at the call center that are several times higher than prior to the implementation.

Tackling Sudden Support Surges

Hundreds of thousands of customers visit the support portal, which has deflected a significant portion of calls from Charter's contact center.

HOT PROJECTS: Banking

The mortgage-refinancing boom taught wholesale lenders a real lesson about the loyalty and attention span of their broker-partners.

User Buy-In Makes All the Difference

Travelex's SFA and CRM pieces were not integrated with the processing system, so the sales group refused to use it; Travelex decided to trash its system in favor of another solution.

Secret of My Success

Mastering Multichannel CRM

Once we started the process of searching for a new commerce solution we began to realize that the solution would have to be CRM-driven.