Heard and Overheard

"If people come to opt-out of your list they're probably doing you a favor. As marketers we need to respect that, and focus on the people who really want to engage with us, because in the end those are the people we're likely to be successful with." --Vince Vachio, director of e-business, Newell Rubbermaid "You can manage and design the customer experience--or the customer will do it for you." --Wendy Close, research director, Gartner "Data decays at a steady rate: After 18 months, everything's out of date. Unless you're taking action, your data's getting worse." --Kermit Yensen, CEO, the Massini Group "CRM 101--the part of the class that most people seem to have skipped--is about the 360-degree view of the customer. But, practically speaking, nobody has a 360-degree view. There are always holes or blind spots." --Eric Schmitt, senior analyst at Forrester Research "Collaboration is a people, process, and technology issue." --Ed Muth, senior director, Financial Services Group, Microsoft "Buying the CRM solution--that's the 1-percenter. Making it work is the 99-percenter." --Dr. Jon Anton, director of benchmark research, Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality "Trust is the engine of commerce." --Martha Rogers, Ph.D., partner, Peppers & Rogers Group "Companies get overwhelmed with the amount of data [they have available to them] and then they don't know which way is up. Often it's a matter of deciding what stats we should ignore." --Guy Creese, managing principal, Ballardvale Research "You can't seriously say you care about your customers if you only use CRM to acquire them and don't do anything to provide end-to-end service." --Denis Pombriant, managing principal, Beagle Research Group