By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group

NetSuite's graphic to describe its offering for SRP — services resource planning.

NetSuite’s idea is an integrated solution blending three elements:

• enterprise resource planning;
• services-oriented planning; and
• sales modules.

The combination, in NetSuite’s parlance, goes by the name of “SRP” — services resource planning — and the idea has legs.

[More on why that is, after the jump...]

Read on… »

“One reason Best Buy has been around for 43 years is that we have been able to evolve,” said Barry Judge, Best Buy’s Chief Marketing Officer at Wednesday’s Forrester Consumer Forum (#FCF09) in Chicago. It’s a tough landscape, especially with competitive retail giants Amazon.com and Wal-Mart delivering consistently low prices on electronics. So how does Best Buy differentiate? Our people and our culture, Judge said. The “Blue Shirts,” as the company calls its employees, seek to deliver upon the following promises to customers:

• Make sure you know all we know.
• Deliver an experience that inspires you.
• Blow you away with the latest and greatest.
• Never leave you hanging.
• Make a difference.

Judge said that he admires Zappos and its company culture centered on happiness. Happiness is a customer loyalty strategy that Best Buy is striving toward, because at the end of the day, Judge said, “We sell the same products [as our competitors], What’s different is how we sell it.” Judged pointed out that often times, for customers, it comes down to price, but in many cases, customers need hand-holding after the sale, to figure out “How do I turn this thing on?” That’s where the Blue Shirts come in.

In his keynote presentation, Judge touched upon the following points:

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Bob Kraut, vice president of marketing communications, took the stage yesterday at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in Chicago with his iPhone in hand. After introducing Pizza Hut’s native iPhone application, he did what most attendees were hoping he would do. “I’m going to order a pizza to the conference,” Kraut said.

Kraut, whose background is in advertising and emerging media, spoke about Pizza Hut’s strategies in marketing to its customers — and its goals in connecting to customers in a fragile economy. There’s a new mindset out there that’s going to stick around, Kraut said. Not only are consumers more strategic in searching for deals and the best value for their dollar, customer confidence is low. A company such as Pizza Hut is especially linked to consumer confidence, he said. “Whatever we can do to lessen anxiety, give more choices, and give more value, Pizza Hut is prepared to do,” he told attendees.

Kraut then shared Pizza Hut’s 4 Key Strategies in marketing to its customers:

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The sun hasn’t even risen yet here in Colorado Springs, Colo., but RightNow Technologies is already pulling back the shades on what many have been wondering about since its acquisition of HiveLive back in early September.

The cloud computing vendor officially unveiled its November ’09 release this morning, including its debut of RightNow CX, a multichannel customer experience solution spanning across Web, social, and contact center touch points.

Read on… »

Previous posts: here (Part I), here (Part II),  here (Part IIb), here (Part III), and here (Part IV)

Wherein Our Hero Fights for $100 at the Heart of the JetBlue Contact Center

I got an agent after a few minutes on hold — maybe five or six, but now that I was in full meltdown mode it seemed like a thousand, compared to the instantaneous service I had received before.

When an agent picked up, I hurriedly gave her all my information, asking her, desperately, if my flights were in order and if I would ever be able to leave Rochester (which more and more seemed like a prison of sprawling greens and rivers). The agent assured me that I did have a flight booked from Rochester back to Florida. She added, however, that I had missed a flight from Florida to Rochester a couple hours back and would now be levied with a $100 penalty fee.

Turns out, the agent who had booked me before had correctly added my new flights, but she forgot to cancel my old ones. Originally, I was supposed to go to Florida first and then Rochester, but due to a scheduling conflict had to switch the trips. Now, I found myself effectively double booked. I explained this to the agent and asked what could be done. Right away she canceled the remaining flight from Rochester to my next destination, Washington, D.C.. Still, however, the $100 fee remained. I pressed her on that and told her to go ahead and look at when I booked the flights. She could see for herself that I had called the second reservation in 20 minutes after the first. Clearly, my story checked out.

“Hold on,” she said. She had to check the terms. Read on… »