Ronni Marshak

For over 20 years, Patty Seybold and I have been helping organizations co-design their future with their customers. And the insights, priorities, and recommendations that surface are always impressive and often eye-opening. When you work side by side with customers, the things you discover can confirm your assumptions and validate the path you are on—or they can blow the path out of the water! Usually, companies are at least somewhere on target, even if they don’t hit the bull's eye all the time; but every now and then, they aren’t anywhere near the target area based on assumptions that miss the mark.

I remember a client, trying to launch a new business line, who “knew” that their potential customers would rebel against doing what had traditionally been one-on-one negotiations with a dedicated sales person (with competitors) in an automated, albeit, quicker and less expensive, online manner. They insisted that these old-fashioned...

For a number of years now, companies have been adding execs with Customer Experience in their titles. But only the most savvy, customer-centric organizations actually empower these CX execs with any clout. Most CX activities start and end with surveying and measuring customer satisfaction. Even those initiatives that do dive deeply into understanding customer needs and expectations often leave those learnings just languishing on the floor—without any official or sanctioned input into product or process development/improvement, these insights have no place to go.

Adobe’s many tools are well understood and valued by both graphic designers and software developers. Now, Adobe is making a major move “up market” to appeal to the marketers who plan and implement product marketing strategies, who oversee customer experience, and who control agency budgets. Adobe’s acquisition in 2009 of Omniture—a major web analytics platform and closed loop marketing environment—has provided the company with the opportunity to both move “up market” and to flesh out an end-to-end platform and ecosystem.

One of our Senior B2B marketing consultants, Sue McKittrick, attended Adobe’s Omniture Summit this month to rub shoulders with many of Adobe’s customers. Her takeaway: Adobe is successfully repositioning itself as an end-to-end platform for marketers. At the summit, Aseem Chandra, Omniture’s VP of Marketing, referred to marketing as “the new finance” because it can now measure the pulse of the business in a way that...

I have been on the CSR empowerment bandwagon for years now. In most of my writing on customer support and customer experience, I strongly encourage organizations to empower their contact center personnel to make creative decisions that can rectify a bad customer experience. So imagine how pleased I was when a CSR was empowered to turn around a bad situation for me.

I received an email offer to shop at OneStopPlus.com, a clothing retail aggregator.

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