MIT Sloan Management Review

How many privacy policy updates does your credit card company send you each year? Companies often “manage privacy” and “keep consumers informed” by drafting their privacy policies as broadly as possible and consider their job done if they change the policy 10 times a year to fit with changing practices. However, managing privacy should not be seen by businesses as a burden. Instead, it can be a valuable way to generate and maintain a good relationship with your customers.

Customer relationship marketing was supposed to be a “new paradigm,” yielding more loyal customers and much more profit for companies. It hasn’t. What should managers do?

Many think that the way to capture value through relationship marketing is to focus on the “good” customers and get rid of the “bad” ones. But there is more to best practice relationship management than maximizing revenues on individual customers and minimizing costs to serve. This article provides guidelines for companies that want to improve the value of customer relationships. For most companies, the transition to a relationship-based approach will require a significant shift in practice.

Are you dropping the ball when it comes to conveying your ideas – about data, about creativity, about direction, about design – in ways that your audience really understands?

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, blogged yesterday about the moment when he realized he

This article examines how three factors—emotions, trust and control—shape customer assessments of service experiences and their overall view of service providers. Drawing on research conducted at companies including Dell, the Seattle Supersonics and McKinsey & Company, the article posits that organizations seeking to excel in customer service need to attack the “soft side” of customer management with the same type of intensity they have previously used to reengineer workflow and supply chains.

Customer-centricity may sound like a good idea. But a new breed of companies focuses instead on getting the customer to comply with a company’s systems.

To become a customer-focused organization requires senior executives to open up communication with people throughout the organization so they can hear what is actually going on — as opposed to a sanitized version. Few companies make this leap, even though not doing it can hurt long-term performance. However, managers can come to terms with their company’s weaknesses in the realm of customer focus by posing a set of five questions specifically designed to uncover their vulnerabilities.

Times are tough. There’s too much work to go around and some days it seems like you’re spending all your time trying to please customers who never seem happy.

Companies that provide professional services have not always been eager to invest in customer education initiatives. For such companies, it has remained unclear what economic benefit they would gain by providing customers with the skills and abilities needed to become more knowledgeable customers.

With a clear definition of what a customer need is, companies are able to get the inputs that are required to succeed at innovation.

Word of mouth is a great way to reach new customers, but it’s an even better way to lose them. At least, that’s what three researchers found when they looked at how the usage patterns of a home video service changed with quality levels.&

Customers frequently play key roles in the delivery of services. But if customers fail in those roles, their experiences may be unsatisfactory for them — and for the companies with which they do business.

Customer service is not found on a T-shirt or a bumper sticker or in a mission statement.

Too much familiarity with customers can backfire, but engaging them in multisided conversations, or “polylogues,” can manage the risks and get better results.

The textbook approach to satisfying customers is simply to give the people what they want — and a little bit more. The trick, then, is to know what it is that customers want.

Unlike static demographic and psychographic techniques, identity marketing taps into the multilayered and fluid nature of who customers are and who they want to be.

A restaurant patron berates a waiter for delivering the wrong entrée. A traveler cuts in line at an airline ticket counter and demands immediate service. A manager refuses to gather the documentation an outside consultant needs to provide services. As these examples suggest, the obnoxious customer has many faces.

As customer power grows, innovative companies are moving beyond traditional push marketing and customer relationship management to become full proponents of the customer agenda.

Businesses are increasingly trying to enhance customers’ experiences, but that’s not easy when dealing with scenarios that are inherently routine. The authors relate how three companies — Jordan’s Furniture, Commerce Bank and Stew Leonard’s — have been successful at injecting fun into seemingly neutral environments.

Companies must move beyond merely fixing what has “gone wrong” to developing what will “go right” by refocusing on the actual customer experience.