FORWARD MARCH

| MCM staff

The end of the year is often a time for reflection. But rather than rehash the past, we decided to reflect on the future. Executives from a quartet of

Applying New Marketing Fundamentals in the Internet Era

| Guy Maser

Achieving results is the core mandate of any business-to-business marketing strategy. Your goals are nothing less than gaining maximum, efficient exposure among your target audience, generating as many qualified leads as possible, and turning those leads into customers.

Show Me The Data: When Did You Last Talk To Your Customers?

| Bill Singleton

Some customer data systems have wonderful table structures listing accounts and the contacts that make them up: items, orders taken, and orders shipped. The wonderful table missing from some elaborate, enterprise resource planning systems is the one that will tell the company how many times they have contacted their customers since those customers

Turning the Traditional Contact Center into a Customer-Centric Profit Center

| Sam Bloomfield

The conventional, transaction-based contact center is going the way of the pay phone: fast disappearing. Whereas the recent wireless boom has made coin-operated telecommunications virtually non-existent, evolving business needs have enabled the contact center to shed its black-and-white, service-based platform. Companies in every market of the retail industry are wise to embrace the changing face of the contact center and the opportunities this presents for the organization as well as the consumer.