How CX Drives Sales

In this day and age of Amazons and Flipkarts, it shouldn’t take much for a business to appreciate the importance of customer experience. Nevertheless, when we recommend certain features to improve the UX / CX of our customers’ products or platforms, we often receive pushback ranging from “when a customer takes a little more trouble … Read more

Retail Is Barking Up The Wrong Tree Against Ecommerce

Although I had my first taste of ecommerce as far back as 1998, over the years I’ve preferred to shop at brick-and-mortar stores – at least in India – because the offline channel shields me from the intrinsic delivery risk of the marketplace model and saves me the friction of transacting online with credit cards. … Read more

Big Pharma Turns To CEM For Cure

Medical representatives sell prescription drugs by detailing doctors and canvassing drugstores. They do not contact patients who actually consume the medicines. This makes sense because, in the pharma industry, patients don’t play an active role in deciding what to buy. As we know, the way it works in this business, the physician writes the prescription … Read more

When Should Mobile Apps Ask Their Users To Register?

Just like some people will never pay for a mobile app – or any digital content for that matter – I’ll never use a mobile app that forces me to register before I’ve had a chance to try it out. Of course, this rule doesn’t apply to mobile banking, Twitter, HootSuite, and other mobile apps … Read more

Thank God Google Acquired FeedBurner Along With Its CAPTCHA

When we separated our company blog from my personal blog Talk of Many Things, I had to migrate our business email subscribers from the latter to the former. Since I couldn’t find a way to automate this, I resigned myself to doing it manually. Because I’d chosen Feedburner to manage the feed and subscriptions of … Read more

How To Make Co-Creation Work?

It’s over a decade since the late C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their seminal book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers. During this period, users have written millions of articles on Wikipedia and posted zillions of updates and photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Judging by the explosive … Read more

Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies

All business development teams understand the importance of case studies in B2B technology sales. But, when it comes to producing and using them, we’ve come across two diametrically opposite approaches followed in many IT companies: Kool-Aid: Use case studies for everything Phobia: Shun case studies altogether  Case Study Kool-Aid Vendors in the first category launch into … Read more

How The Obama Credit Card Decline Shapes The Future Of Analytics

President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. Because, to quote Obama himself, “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be … Read more

Five Ways To Win Lost SaaS Customers Back

Many of us have signed up for free software trials and not upgraded to the paid version when the trial period ended. Some of us might have bought a subscription for the paid version, used it for a few months, and then bailed out. In all these cases, we become the SaaS vendor’s “lost customers”. … Read more