Do Business Well

If you want your customers to have a consistent experience and develop a loyal relationship with your brand, you must clearly define your organization’s communications and relationship management responsibilities. Normally, marketing is responsible for managing an email direct marketing program, but it is not the only part of your organization that will engage with customers. Customer service, support, sales, and perhaps even e-commerce groups may also communicate with your customers independently.

To avoid any confusion, I propose that if your company is communicating with thousands, perhaps even millions, of customers, you put your marketing department in charge of managing and coordinating all customer communication, regardless of where it originates, and that the “relationship czar” discussed earlier be responsible for this initiative. Marketing’s role in the engaged organization is to ensure that your company’s email communication have a consistent voice, that they are focused on servicing the customer and effectively coordinated across all points of contact. To do this requires the following: Continue Reading »

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If your company developed a new operating system and software platform that became the world’s de facto standard in the field, gaining you a market share three times larger than that of your nearest rival, you would probably be pleased. If your new product earned cult status, won award after award, sold 7 million units in the four years following its release, causing industry analysts to predict a 40 percent earning growth rate for the next several years, you would probably be elated. That is, unless you’re Palm, Inc., the world’s leading provider of personal handheld computing devices (also referred to as personal digital assistants or PDAs).

Palm’s sleek electronic organizers took off faster than color TVs, cell phones, and CD players, and now account for approximately 70 percent of the worldwide market, but nipping at the company’s heels is its key rival, Microsoft, whose PocketPC operating system (a modified version of Windows CE) was chosen by Hewlett-Packard to drive its Jornado, by Compaq for its iPAQ, and by Casio and Siemens for devices that will compete with Palm’s. Continue Reading »

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