Heard and Overheard

"Customers are a defensible competitive asset...your competition needs your customers' participation to get the information about them that you already have." --Martha Rogers, Ph.D., partner, Peppers & Rogers Group "In concept, the whole goal with database marketing is to make the companies that you deal with smarter about not only what it is you want from them, but when you want to hear from them, and how." --Alton Adams, managing partner, customer insight domain, Accenture "We don't live in a conceptually perfect world [where] there's a master contact strategy for each customer. You compromise and step back and say, 'We may not have a perfect view of their history, but we know enough to make decisions about how to treat them right now.'" --Eric Schmitt, senior analyst at Forrester Research "Integrating CRM with the back office is the only way to get to the ideal of 'one and done.'" --Mark de la Vega, president, AmdocsCRM "Accuracy has been one of the Achilles heels of CRM. Unless I'm constantly going back and refreshing it, the maintenance of data is a huge issue." --Jim Dickie, partner, CSO Insights "Companies will go to great lengths and spending on sales, but all their efforts--and cost savings--can be wiped out by one bad customer experience." --Scot Struminger, vice president of IT, FedEx "I think we have a big job ahead of us to create awareness of CRM." --Bruce Cleveland, senior vice president and general manager, OnDemand/SMB, Siebel Systems