Managing the New Customer Relationship: Strategies to Engage the Social Customer and Build Lasting Value

Praise for MANAGING THE NEW CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP “Gordon delivers an impressive synthesis of the newest methods for engaging customers in relationships that last. No organization today can succeed without the mastery of customer relationship management strategy fundamentals. But to win in the decades ahead, you must also understand and capitalize on the rapidly evolving social computing, mobility and customer analytics technologies described in this book. Checklists, self-assessments and graphical frameworks deliver pragmatic value for the practicing manager.” — William Band, Vice-President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, MA   “A very comprehensive and practical book on managing relationships with existing customers in the age of social media! I particularly enjoyed reading chapters on teaching customers new behaviors, which were illustrated by excellent case studies.” — Jagdish N. Sheth, Ph.D. , Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Emory University, Atlanta, GA   “The strategic breadth and depth of this book is impressive as Gordon explores the new customer and how to plan and manage the new customer relationship. I found his review of strategies, techniques and technologies for social, mobile, mass customization and customer analytics to be particularly insightful. Gordon urges marketers to live and breathe one-through-one marketing and to master social engagement techniques. The checklists, cases and examples make the content grounded and actionable. This is an important, current and detailed book to which every organization should pay close attention to improve customer relationships and create shareholder value.” — Marcus Ruebsam, Vice-President, Line-of-Business Marketing Solutions, SAP AG, Walldorf, Germany   “There are many books on CRM, but I recommend this one because Gordon’s book does what others do not. He considers CRM strategy and evolves it to recognize a new customer, one who is always connected, socially available and influential. The book doesn’t just discuss many point solutions for specific marketing challenges; it integrates technology with strategy, people, process and customer analytics to develop relationships continuously. This book is a broad and deep exploration of CRM, providing practical, fact-based perspectives that every company can use to validate and rethink their customer and stakeholder relationships.” — Helmuth Cepeda, Small, Medium and Distribution Director, Microsoft Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico     Marketing has changed fundamentally in the last few years and has become an entirely new discipline, one that focuses on a new customer and a new relationship, framed by new principles, strategies, processes, roles and tactics. Individual customers are economically targeted and served, and treated as segments of one rather than members of a target market. Word of mouth and recommendations are vital as customers influence one another more than a company can do within its own advertising or customer dialogs. Today’s customer is always online, accessible and connected. Now marketing is not only direct and customer-specific but a continuous process by which companies seek to engage customers and be progressively more relevant, attractive and valuable. This is the era of a new customer relationship—an individual relationship that is social, mobile and local, influenced by peers and shaped by cognitive, behavioural and social psychological principles. New techniques, processes and technologies transform what it means to implement marketing strategy and achieve improved business results. The new customer relationship requires that even those companies that have embraced customer relationship management ought to reassess their customer management. Now every marketing decision, whether online or in the physical world, whether of a technological nature, whether it affects customer experience, communications, dialogs, teaching or organizational memory, every decision should be seen through a single lens focused on the individual customers who matter most. Managing the New Customer Relationship provides a strategic and practical guide to help companies attract, develop, sustain and build more valuable relationships by: Expanding upon existing customer relationship management theories, concepts and methods to make these considerations more useful, strategic and contemporary Recognizing the profound importance of social media and how to plan customer engagement in the social context of each customer Exploring new technologies that offer new opportunities for engaging customers, including mobile, local, the cloud and customer analytics Demonstrating how to develop customer-specific understanding, predict what customers will want next, and how to manage each individual customer, and Offering perspectives to help the organization endure by focusing a chain of relationships on the end customer and creating meaning for stakeholders that can make relationships more intense and robust. Managing the New Customer Relationship is for organizations of all sizes in all industries, for private- and public-sector organizations and not-for-profits. In short, every organization can apply the new principles, strategies, techniques and technologies discussed here to recognize important marketplace changes, plan to improve relationship and financial results and capture new shareholder value from new customer relationships.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv Chapter One: Managing the New Customer—and the New Customer Relationship 1 Relationships Matter 1 The Old Rules of Marketing Don’t Work 3 Technology Has Changed Everything 6 The Truth Is Visible 6 Marketplaces Are Social 8 Marketing Is Sociology 9 One-Through-One Is More Important Than One-To-One 11 Defining the New Customer Relationship 12 Implications for Managing the New Customer Relationship 13 Chapter Two: Strategies for Better Customer Relationships 23 A Strategic Context for Relationship Management 23 Relationship Management Capabilities 25 The Cultural Imperative 44 Beyond Culture: The Strategic Enablers 46 Chapter Three: Planning Relationships with Existing Customers 57 What’s In a Relationship Management Plan? 57 Customer Selection 58 Relationship Objectives 76 Engagement 86 Value 92 Innovation 99 Teaching 102 Sharing 102 Chapter Four: One-Through-One: Engaging Social Customers 107 The “Peoplescape” of Social Media 108 The Company is No Longer Center Stage 109 The Customer is Speaking 110 Listen 111 Social Media Taxonomy 113 Social Media Objectives 115 Social Media Planning 118 Individual Customer Engagement 131 Chapter Five: B2B Relationships 141 Consumer and Business-to-Business Relationships 142 Buyer–Seller Relationship 150 Managing the B2B Relationship 152 B2B, Social Media and Product Lifecycles 153 Social, Internal to the Enterprise 158 Chapter Six: Relationships with Mobile Customers 163 Defining Mobile Relationships 164 Mobile Relationship Objectives and Strategies 166 Selected Application Categories for Mobile Devices 171 Emerging Technologies 181 Chapter Seven: Mass Customization 183 Mass Customization Defi ned 183 An Expensive Option? 184 Technology for Mass Customization 185 Enabling Relationships through Mass Customization 186 Approaches to Mass Customization 189 Customization versus Standardization 190 A Mass Customization Plan 191 Chapter Eight: Customer Analytics 199 The Meta is the Message 202 The Upside of Customer Analytics 205 Putting Customer Analytics to Work 208 Online Customer Analytics 216 Customer Analytics Soft ware 218 Customer Analytics and the Cloud 220 Net Promoter Score 221 Chapter Nine: Teaching Customers New Behaviors 223 What’s Wrong with Existing Customer Behaviors? 224 Pedagogy and Teaching Customers 226 Emotional/Affective Pedagogy 229 Cognitive Pedagogy 230 Behavioral Pedagogy 231 Individual/Social Pedagogy 232 Developing Pedagogy for Teaching Customers 236 Learning Relationships 238 Best Pedagogy Practices 239 From Teaching to Addicting 241 The Consumer as a Functional Addict 241 Chapter Ten: Case Studies: Making it Happen 255 Dell 256 Leicester City 259 New York City, Health and Human Services 261 TransGaming 265 TransLink 270 Chapter Eleven: Strategy, Stakeholders and Semantics 275 Planning a Strategic Relationship 276 Customer Management 277 Direct and Indirect Stakeholders 279 Direct Stakeholder Management 280 Indirect Stakeholder Engagement 290 Strategic Response-ability 291 Society and Response-ability 292 Appendix A: Selected Customer Analytics/Data Mining Soft ware Solutions 297 Notes 303 About the Author 317 Index 319