Customer Loyalty Programs: Stats, Facts and Opinions

For this last week in April, the final week of International Customer Loyalty Month, I want to share several more interesting statistics about customer loyalty. These statistics focus mostly on Business to Consumer types of businesses, and while the numbers may not apply to Business to Business, the concepts do. Read them with the idea of how the concepts apply to your industry and company.

Marketing tech needs Don Draper to be more Cool, not just Critical

At Forrester's Customer Intelligence Forum in LA, they opened the conference with an interesting exercise -- Asking the audience to vote whether a well-known brand was "cool" or "critical." The results:  IBM – critical, Facebook – cool, Pandora and Spotify – critical, Adobe – critical, Salesforce – critical, Pinterest – cool, Apple – cool AND critical

At the conference there were a amazing number of vendors exhibiting. Here is a tiny sampling of companies I managed to spend some time with, along with my quick assessment about whether they are cool or critical.

ClickFox -- AFAIK, ClickFox is still the only company that offers true cross-channel analytics, versus multi-channel. Hugely important in complex contact centers that want to optimize the customer experience. CRITICAL

ClickFox: Apple reigns in customer loyalty

ClickFox, a firm that analyzes behavior for more than 400 million consumer accounts, has announced the company's findings from its brand loyalty survey. April is customer loyalty month, and ClickFox's survey results shed light on what companies and industries consumers are most loyal to, as well as key drivers of brand loyalty.

Survey: Brands consumers love (Apple, Coca-Cola, Amazon and Google) and what drives loyalty

ClickFox, a firm that analyzes behavior for more than 400 million consumer accounts, has announced the company's findings from its brand loyalty survey. April is customer loyalty month, and ClickFox's survey results shed light on what companies and industries consumers are ClickFox just released results from a brand loyalty survey. It won't shock anyone that Apple was the top pick, followed by Coca Cola in the second spot. Amazon and Google tied for third. Other top brands included Starbucks, Target and Microsoft.

Apple Tops Brand Loyalty Survey

What consumers value most in a product are quality and customer service. Companies that succeed in creating a brand based on excellent quality and outstanding customer service can charge more for their products, get away with occasional goofs, and depend on their customers to promote the company with the zeal of a convert.

The biggest obstacle to embracing big data? You.

The technological hurdles to embracing big data are well known at this point — McKinsey & Co. predicted a shortage of nearly 200,000 skilled data analysts by 2018 — but an even bigger obstacle to achieving analytics nirvana might be overcoming a strong anti-data corporate culture. It’s easy to grasp the value of adopting big data techniques, but the changes required to listen to the data and, possibly, to transform a company’s business model take a little more work.

Sprint Uses ClickFox Analytics for Customer Satisfaction Assurance

Research firm Gartner released an interesting case study that covers Sprint’s use of analytics to keep its customers happy. What the carrier calls the ‘holistic voice of the customer program,’ or VoC for short, is running on ClickFox‘s famed BI software. The big data solutions maker’s portfolio focuses on measuring customer behavior, and providing insight from that via a more comprehensive view of things. That encompasses aspects from social media reactions to the reasons behind calls made to a customer support department.

How Big Data Will Roil the Business World

Most businesses are little more than collections of fiefdoms presided over by one C-level executive or another. The fiefdoms these executives preside over are usually tied to some central function, such as marketing, finance or manufacturing. But within each fiefdom are any number of principalities presided over by someone who is in charge of a specific function. The one thing that all these fiefdoms and principalities have in common is that they tend to husband data, because, after all, information is power.

Big Data: the Perils, the Promises and a Couple Use Cases

There are many use cases for Big Data that have nothing to do with getting people to click on ads. Clickfox, for example, has used Big Data and analytics to provide a major telecommunications company with the insight necessary to effectively assist its customers over the web Vs. needing to dial a toll free number because their internet-based “help yourself” service was so ineffective.

6 Questions on Customer Centricity with ClickFox

Joe Galvin, CMO, is interviewed about Customer Centricity as a part of a series with B/OSS Publisher Danica Cullins around pertinent industry matters, called "6 Questions." Invited responses to six uniform questions will be published regularly on the B/OSS website.

Contact center analytics looks a lot like Big Data

As enterprises seek to make more sense of complex customer interactions they come to recognize the limits of their siloed legacy data capture systems, and many are turning to new analytics systems that have similarities to IT-based Big Data tools. Some of the concepts behind Big Data have started to leak into the product marketing and messaging of contact center analytics vendors, and some of those contact center analytics vendors have in turn been acquired by traditional telephony vendors looking to solve the siloed data problem. Contact centers are ripe for this kind of effort: they sit at the nexus of multiple data streams but have been slow to make effective use of most of them. Decision-makers who want to position their contact centers as strategic and profit-centric (rather than merely operational and cost-centric) should pay close attention to the changes in how their own IT departments are managing other large corporate data sets.