The best thing that anyone in Demand Generation can do, to set up for long term success, is to build a "Contact Washing Machine" that standardizes and normalizes this data as it comes in. For Eloqua users, I'll talk about some of the pieces of a good Contact Washing Machine on this blog's sister blog - Eloqua Artisan ( http://eloqua.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name-job-titles-and.html ). I think we can all agree that B2B marketing has shifted from a purely creative discipline to a much more operational, process-oriented, data-centric, analytical discipline. It's a long road

Some of these issues first showed up on Twitter way before they ever hit the Contact Center. Perhaps days before anyone called into the Contact Center to inquire. Firey laptop batteries, defective chips, tainted foods, toothpaste that stains teeth – these are just some real examples of issues that struck companies recently that might have been headed off at the pass by Social Media. When you have an issue these days – what’s the first place you go for more information?

And little did he know 9 years later he would have set the stage for how many Contact Centers handle Social Media? Let me explain … Many of the most Socially advanced Contact Centers today are using tools to listen in on Conversations. So many Contact Center managers find themselves using their listening tools to find Support opportunities and then manually “cutting and pasting” them into email to send to the agent that can best handle the inquiry. Back in the year 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published his landmark book called The Tipping Point . Conversations that are happening

However, online tools such as Zoomerang , Constant Contact or Survey Monkey make it easy to devise a reliable questionnaire. Tags: Content Marketing Knowledge Center Marketing Basics News Online Tech Tools Tips & Mini-Guides Trends constant contact market research survey monkey zoomeran How to Get Started on Cheap and Powerful Customer Studies Unless you understand your customers, you risk painful marketing missteps. Because we know that effective content marketing depends on a thorough understanding of your customers, regular research should be a core component

But that begs the question - what impact will Twitter have on today’s customer contact centers? So does that mean for every new channel that gets launched we need a separate grouping of customer service reps to handle it in our Contact Centers? Maybe not – but a certainly a portion of Contact Center experts can and should be trained in responding real time with Twitter. If you have never seen this web page http://twitter.zappos.com/ - you should! With legions of Twitter-ers on staff - 432 to be exact - Zappos make customer service look: easy, decentralized, and inexpensive.

Media Group was conceived by Wayne Bishop founder of Arbutus Software which produces Joint Contact project management software . had recently signed up for BaseCamp to manage client projects and wanted to know how Joint Contact was different than BaseCamp. In minutes I got a reply from Wayne with a list of about a dozen ways Joint Contact is better than BaseCamp. Where web 1.0 was a monologue, web 2.0

And little did he know 9 years later he would have set the stage for how many Contact Centers handle Social Media? Many of the most Socially advanced Contact Centers today are using tools to listen in on Conversations. So many Contact Center managers find themselves using their listening tools to find Support opportunities and then manually “cutting and pasting” them into email to send to the agent that can best handle the inquiry. Back in the year 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published his landmark book called The Tipping Point . Let me explain …

I had the pleasure of speaking with the folks at Constant Contact last week about their new Event Marketing tool. They then went on to share with me just how well they know who they are and who they serve. "Constant Contact helps small businesses and organizations grow customer relationships and succeed by delivering professional, easy-to-use online services and coaching at a reasonable cost." So that's exactly what Constant Contact gave them It sounded pretty cool. So I tried to push them about how it could be useful to mid-size and larger companies whose

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Another great article on how to make it easier for people to get in touch with you via your Contact Us page. Ever see a website that has a million numbers that you should contact? Clicking on "Contact" brought up an easy to use form that only asked for the basic amount of information. Wow, ClickZ keeps up the great articles. You think that this would be a simple concept but it isn't.