Successful Workplace

Getting the right information on demand is an eternal problem of today’s knowledge workers, and will only grow. Lack of knowledge causes a delay in decision-making, and ultimately leads to bad decisions. This is the essence of the Two-Second Advantage, where a little knowledge in the correct context at the correct time is much more […]

I used a long drive to Northern California this week to catch up with my insurance company, USAA. I had a laundry list of things to cover from a birth to a death and from selling a motorcycle to buying a new car. These administrative changes can take a long time and involve being passed […]

Predictive analytics is big business now. Hand in hand with Big Data they represent one of the only ways to get to know your consumer market and understand how they’ll behave under conditions, respond to marketing and react to incentives. But the problem with all of this is that it’s a constant cat and mouse chase, consumers are […]

Most organizations continuously strive to achieve operational excellence, but they spend less effort understanding customer needs — and few marry these two sources of customer value effectively. While a focus on lowering costs, improving quality, and providing consistent, reliable service will continue to be important, I see a shift in the coming decade to combining […]

The following is a guest post by Sean O’Shaughnessey. Recently, my daughter was in the market for a dress and her experience with the retail store was so positive, she became a fan. Her particular experience was due to a one-in-a-million, perfect store clerk with a photographic memory. Yet now, technology is capable of consistently reproducing […]

One of the foundational keys to consistently achieve business  benefits – whether they are related to inward looking drivers (such as efficiency, costs,  etc.) or outward looking (such as customer orientation,  customer service quality,  customer satisfaction, etc.) is the process. So as evangelists of ‘process thinking’, we all believe strongly that getting the process right […]

This guest post was contributed by Clare Jeeves. Airlines are usually at the mercy of our acid tongues when it all goes wrong and the flight is delayed. However it is a rare thing to read about when they get it right, and in United Airlines case when they go more than the extra mile […]

We live in an increasingly competitive world, but more importantly, we live in a world where quality information doesn’t demand a premium. Anyone with a browser can know the most competitive details about pricing. Imagine the surprise when the United rep asked for a credit card before she could apply upgrade coupons to a flight […]

Journey won 8 awards including Game Of The Year at the DICE conference this week, an accolade which was well deserved for a number of reasons. You control a solitary figure and guide it through a personal story, along the way meeting the occasional lone figure who is controlled by another over the net. But […]

Customer experience management is a very hot topic because so much is in flux at the same moment. Before recent times, we managed customers as demographic segments and used focus groups and segmented lists to design and deliver the best message at the best time based on a great deal of pre-planning. And we were […]

Just today it was announced that Salesforce.com acquired the French content integration solution EntropySoft. First reported on VentureBeat, this story shows how CRM continues to be an expand from its initial boundaries as a way to manage one enterprise’s sales funnel and forecast. EntropySoft brings Salesforce.com an ability to normalize access to content repositories with […]

Barcodes have been around for years, but something has changed. No longer are they lots of stripes but they are square and dotty and are called 2 Dimensional. There have been multiple competing formats and there are large companies trying to make their format the standard, with the inevitable lock-in. But there is a winner. The […]

Many made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the […]

So we’ve survived the Mayan Apocalypse and a passion-filled election here in the U.S. only to face the “Fiscal Cliff”…will our troubles never end? New years are a chance for new starts so it would be great to start the year looking forward to something other than disaster. For us, there are many reasons to […]

Gartner this week revealed its predictions for 2013 (and beyond). From their role at the intersection of technology and technology consumers, they have a relatively unique perspective on what’s coming next. Not too surprisingly, Gartner predicts that social, mobile, cloud and information are the Nexus of Forces that will drive change in the enterprise. You […]

A recent blog talked about Generation C, also known as our time’s Digital Natives. These are the folks who wouldn’t think twice about trying out a new social platform or using a mobile device as their first choice when deciding where to go, what to buy, and what’s happening in their world. They are the leading […]