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.

Ian Gordon is a management consultant with over thirty years of marketing and strategy experience. He is president of Convergence Management Consultants in Toronto, Canada, where he heads the Relationship Marketing-CRM practice, assisting clients to develop customer acquisition and relationship management strategies. He has worked with companies such as Alcan, Amadeus, Apple, Bell Canada, Canada Post, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak, Ethyl, Experian, Ford Electronics, General Electric, Goodyear, HP/Compaq, IBM, Kodak Canada, MasterCard, Microsoft, Mitel, NCR, Nortel Networks, Ontario Power Generation, Parker Hannifin, RBC, Thomson Reuters, Toshiba, Westinghouse and Xerox.

Ian is author of three previous books including the best-selling Relationship Marketing: New Strategies, Techniques and Technologies to Win the Customers You Want and Keep Them Forever (John Wiley & Sons Canada, 1998). He was the founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Relationship Marketing, and a past president of the Industrial Marketing and Research Association of Canada. He has lectured in relationship marketing, CRM and other marketing courses to undergraduate and MBA university students for over 20 years.