Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the commonplace rules of products, services and pricing that have made competition between technology providers so aggressive are giving way to the principles of pleasurable customer experience. You may have the right package and the cost may be in synch with the customer’s budget, but a shift is taking place wherein clients are recognizing that their relationships with manufacturers have a considerably higher value.
This change has helped to foster relationships where the customer views the application creator more as a valued business partner and less like a vendor.
The Long View
Too many times companies that employ Customer Relationship Management technologies find themselves using its capabilities only to focus on how to better cross-sell their various product offerings. While this can be temporarily profitable, it is incredibly short-sighted in that it fails to take into account the full-term and strategic goal of improving customer loyalty through a total customer experience (TCE) approach, which itself is a long-term commitment.
When effectively managed, however, the approach looks at how to improve and maintain the relationship with the customer in all aspects from beginning to end. This can be defined as the period from point of first contact with a potential client to the end of a business …
