Statistically Speaking

65 percent of respondents in a survey conducted by BenchmarkPortal on behalf of Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality and staffing firm Kelly Services admitted that they would probably lessen or completely terminate their dealings with a company that outsourced its customer call center overseas. The findings coincide with an SSPA study in which 11 percent of respondents said that domestic representatives had poor customer service skills, but 45 percent claimed they were unhappy with the same skills possessed by offshore representatives.

84 percent of the more than 13,000 evaluations from IT decision-makers, influencers, and staff suggested that these IT respondents are satisfied with IT companies, but only 44 percent define themselves as being truly loyal customers, according to a Walker Information report. In fact, 30 percent confessed to feeling trapped and 23 percent fall into the high-risk category, with both low commitment to and low intention of furthering the relationship.

Not all companies are living up to their customer-centric claims. "Fifty percent or so say they're customer-centric, but that same fifty percent aren't doing all of the things in [our] success factor [category]," says Gene Brown, CEO of Market Intellect and Valentine Radford Professor of Marketing at the University of Missouri--Kansas City. For example, a Market Intellect study that surveyed 1,200 chief marketing officers at businesses of all sizes, found that only 35 percent said they understand customer lifetime value, and only 20 percent measure it on a consistent basis.

Marketers are throwing their mojo behind retention, according to a Grizzard Performance Group survey. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they are dedicating the majority of their marketing funds to customer retention, compared to only 30 percent who say they are mostly devoted to new customer acquisition. However, only 38 percent were confident in their ability to accurately identify each individual customer's profitability year-over-year.

Siebel garnered the top slot as the CRM Leader in the META Group's latest "METAspectrum" ranking of CRM vendors. The report, which scores nine on-premise CRM solutions developers--Amdocs, E.piphany, KANA, Onyx, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Pivotal, SAP, and Siebel--is based on the performance of their solutions and their position and strength in the market. Excluding Siebel, the other eight companies comprise the Challenger tier.

Open rates, which reflect the share of emails that have been read by recipients, dropped by more than 7 percent, compared to the year-ago second quarter, according to a DoubleClick report. Moreover, there was a 33 percent decline in revenue per email delivered in the second of quarter 2004, with only 20 cents generated per email delivered--a 10 cent drop from a year ago. Average order size also slid from $98 to $93.

According to a recent study conducted by Lucid Marketing and BSM Research, marketers have not recognized that there is huge potential in using email marketing campaigns targeting mothers. Seventy-one percent of moms surveyed said that email messages influence their buying decisions. Additionally, 80 percent of mothers tell friends about commercial email messages that they find to be valuable.

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