Sure, the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal is all about the financial crisis that hit our floundering economy last week, but it’s not all bad news on the doorstep…Flip to the last section and you’ll find some CRM tips from professors and industry pundits that could give you a much needed boost. Ah, there’s always a (semi) bright side…

The authors of the article Making the Most of Customer Complaints highlights an interesting customer sentiment they called the “recovery paradox” — Customers are actually more satisfied when they know that a complaint was resolved and that steps are being enacted to make sure it doesn’t happen again, than when they have a problem-free experience. The caveat here is that if companies don’t manage to resolve the situation on the second try, it’s bye-bye customer.

Similarly, Staring You in the Face further adds to the importance of using a company’s existing abundance, loads, mountains, overflow of customer data to gain insight into your corporation. The key, however, is bringing all that data together, which can be a whole other issue — one that may be even more overwhelming — in and of itself (look to my interview with author David Aaker about his book Spanning Silos in the October issue).

I wrote a piece back in June about loyalty programs and my editor attempted to coin the phrase “lollipop loyalty.” The idea being that loyalty programs may look and taste good but at the core of many, they’re just the same old stick. So, how are you going to make your program different? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s your customers that should be defining your program (After all, we are talking about customer relationship management…) The WSJ article  Rewards that Reward speaks precisely to this point about personalization, whether it’s based on their purchase motivations or the type of product or service.