Year: 2005

When clients ask us to help them plan CRM projects, there’s a general anticipation that our biggest contribution will be helping them cut through the fog of competing vendor claims to identify technologies that will best suit their needs and budgets. While this is an important part of our planning Continue Reading

Customer Relationship Management is a term that means very different things to different people, and these perspectives were powerfully contrasted at a Netsuite briefing I attended this week. On the one hand Jennifer Kirkby, independent analyst and editor of the Customer Management Community, was a powerful advocate of organisations shifting Continue Reading

There’s an awful lot of hype in the world of CRM, and it can be a pretty insightful, and potentially humbling, exercise to re-visit a project to see whether you’ve genuinely added value to a client’s business. I spent a morning last week reviewing how a client had fared since Continue Reading

Michael Bosworth/John Holland make the following observation in their book ‘Customer Centric Selling’ – ‘Because of the predominant perception that selling is more art than science, few companies have sales processes that traditional sellers can execute. We believe that this deficiency is the single most significant factor contributing to the Continue Reading

The recent bankruptcies of Rover, Red Letter Days, and EU Jet, are a painful reminder that when companies go into administration the customer can get hurt, whether that’s the sudden depreciation of a recently purchased car, the un-experienced experience of a life time, or being marooned in a distant international Continue Reading

An entry in Joel Spolsky’s ‘Joel on Software’ blog caught my eye the other day. In ‘Hitting the High Notes’ he sets out some of the research he has undertaken, which seeks to establish the magnitude of differences in development productivity. His conclusions, which were well in line with other Continue Reading

I’ve spent the last few days putting together case studies based on some of our assignments from the last several months. One thing that struck me hard, was how much of our work has been around helping our clients budget for projects and work out what internal resources will be Continue Reading

This week’s edition of the Economist (July 23rd 2005) carries an article entitled ‘Terminal Care’. The article notes the technical success of the world’s biggest government IT project – Connecting for Health, or CFI – which, with its £6.2 billion price-tag, will link 31,500 family doctors with 300 hospitals, and Continue Reading

As a potentially insightful exercise I spent some time and listed what I felt were the top five hallmarks of a successful CRM project. The results of those deliberations were as follows: One – A clearly defined set of business objectives for the projectTwo – Active and effective executive sponsorshipThree Continue Reading

This morning’s news stopped me in my tracks somewhat. The Chiltern railway line, one of the mail commuter routes into and out of London, had been blocked by a collapsed tunnel in the town of Gerrards Cross. The tunnel in question had been recently built as part of the ongoing Continue Reading