All retailers know the industry stat — only 4 percent of disgruntled customers speak up, meaning 96 percent of your unhappy customers simply walk out the door, never to return.
What if at least some of these unhappy customers had an outlet? What if you made it easy for them to vent and call out what went wrong with their experience, giving you an opportunity to save that individual customer?
Given the right methods, you can get a much greater percentage of these slighted customers to speak up. With the cost of customer acquisition at an all-time high, you must use every tactic available to you to keep customers from defecting.
If you have not considered implementing a [...]

Jaduka Exchange has been a bit quiet lately as all hands have been busy launching new applications of our on-demand voice communications services for partners such as Strikeiron and Appian. We are now readying a pilot launch of our in store feedback service, CommentFunnel.
Jaduka’s CommentFunnel service is a consumer-facing voice application for businesses with physical brick-and-mortar store locations, such as grocery stores, department stores and big box specialty retailers.  Built around our core Jaduka Diary service, CommentFunnel lets organizations effortlessly enable real-time capture of consumer feedback—in the voice of the customer—at the point of sale.
The service works by allowing shoppers in retail store locations to dial a posted toll free number using their mobile phones [...]

With the minutiae of data available to the online marketer and click thru rates well below one tenth of one percent (Current click thru rates range from .06% to .17% according to stats Doubleclick provided Comscore in a June 2009 study), it’s no wonder that online display ads have come under fire.
With the rise of paid search driven by the game changing success of Google AdWords, display ads have been a remnant item on the media buy for some time now. Is there a way to make display units relevant again, beyond simply being a branding tool for brands that can afford to buy massive amounts of inventory?
Adgregate has a novel idea for display ad [...]

Gary Kim recently penned a post about eBay spinning off Skype as a cautionary tale for communications enabled business processes. I enjoy reading Gary’s posts and do so daily, but I have to respectfully disagree with Gary in this case. This divorce has much more to do with eBay’s internal teams simply not looking for communications solutions outside the current auction platform process more than not seeing value in CEBP.
In my view, the primary reason Skype was never a good fit for eBay is eBay’s direct communications resistant culture. In my experience, you can’t contact eBay via phone—they don’t support a call center or anything that resembles live customer service. Try to find a number [...]

If you work with brands that maintain digital properties, you have opportunities to recommend and integrate leading-edge technology into your digital programs. And with some luck, you’ll have successfully amplified that brand with the buzz generated, helped that brand gain market share and maybe even won an award or two! In this economic period of slashed budgets and diminished expectations, now is the time to really dig to uncover and leverage new, cost-effective ways to differentiate your brand while still positively and proactively engaging your customers.
One area where brands and their agencies are still focused (or need to be if they are late to the party!) is the social media space. And for good reason–social [...]

Tim Berners-Lee, the real inventor of the Web as we know it (Al Gore’s claim that he invented the Internet is laughable and insulting to the true pioneers like Tim), preaches the value of linked data in this video.
Tim discusses the Web as we know it today–a collection of documents formatted in a more or less standardized format using HTTP. Tim speaks of the need to take the next step in the evolution of the Web–putting data on the web in a format that is useable by anyone that wishes to access it.
Linked data, as he puts it, refers to sharing data online using the HTTP standard for naming the data, whether the data represents [...]

According to reputable sources, Facebook is soon to launch a new layout for its advertiser business profile pages. What does this mean for those supporting a business profile? It means get ready for some changes in the look, feel and functionality of your profile and how your message appears and reaches your fans.
Big changes announced are that the updated business profiles will now feature tabs, similar to current personal Facebook profiles and that messages will appear more often in fans newsfeeds. This last item is a positive development for any brand marketer. More impressions!
I wouldn’t jump to make a huge strategy change here, not just yet. Facebook has been known for announcing changes, then rescinding [...]

ToysRUs bought the domain name Toys.com at auction for $5.1 million after a heated bidding war with domain holding company National A-1, owner of a portfolio of names that includes free.com and divorce.com.
Was this a good purchase for ToyRUs? It is if they want to own the online space for toys. Wonder what their estimate is to recoup the investment for this domain? Is the long term goal branding, increased market share via more traffic to the site, taking advantage of type-in traffic or to save money on paid search?
Clearly ToysRUs has been eyeing this asset for years and finally had the chance to buy it and did so when they had the chance, despite [...]

Before widespread adoption of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter or even email, using your telephone was the only form of social networking that involved dedicated technology of any sort. The only way to reach out beyond your immediate physical location to contact someone was to pick up your phone handset, spin that rotary dial and ring someone up.
Even today, the immediacy and intimacy of voice still far outshines email, instant messaging and text messaging for true interpersonal communication. Knowing this, why is voice hardly considered for digital applications and not integrated into all web sites and other digital media as a standard practice?
In my opinion, too many of the tools we have today (such as voicemail) [...]