The mobile phone represents the most pervasive channel of communications and targeted engagement on the planet, with more than 5 billion users globally. As smart phones already account for more than 30 percent of the market, users are rapidly migrating to smarter devices and increasingly utilizing their phones for social media engagement. There will be some 800 million users of mobile social networking worldwide by 2012, according to eMarketer.
The mobile channel is an unprecedented opportunity to reach both developed consumer markets in new an intrusive way, and developing regions that cater to a previously untapped, unreachable, and unbanked mass of humanity. An estimated 2.5 billion adults (more than half of the world’s adult population) do not use any form of formal financial services, yet about 70 percent of all people on the planet use a cell phone.
Continue ReadingA surprisingly simple service-based approach makes implementing end-to-end encryption and tokenization in your payment environment simpler than you might think.
In recent years, most merchants have followed the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) guidelines to institute numerous security measures that have helped reduce the risk of loss or theft of sensitive cardholder data. Nevertheless, data vulnerabilities still remain and costly breaches still occur. This situation is leading many merchants to turn to solutions that exceed the current PCI DSS guidelines.
Continue ReadingWith today’s economic pressures it is more critical than ever to deepen existing customer relationships – it’s much more cost effective to keep your current customers than it is to gain new ones.
The recent global downturn has put a dramatic new focus on measuring the customer experience. In 2009, 63% of survey respondents in the Vovici/CGA Customer Experience IQ (CEIQ) study of over 200 companies around the globe said that customer experience management (CEM) was important to their business, up from 47% in 2008.
Continue ReadingThe trend is clear: Consumers are continuing to spend more money shopping online.
eCommerce sales climbed 11 percent in 2009,1 even as total retail sales fell 6 percent,2 and analysts are forecasting continued strong growth in eCommerce sales over the next five years. Today, 63 percent of U.S. adults shop online, and Javelin Strategy and Research expects this number to grow to 78 percent by 2014.3 Online transactions now account for about 6 percent of total retail sales in the United States, up from just 1 percent a decade ago.
Continue ReadingSince the beginning, most marketing business models have been built around organizational structures, management and incentive plans, financial systems and the four P’s of marketing: product, price, promotion and placement. The focus was completely on the product.
Many organizations have professed to shift their attitudes, claiming to be “customer-focused,” “customer-obsessed,” “customer-driven” or whatever. But even to this day, the heart of most business models remains product-centric.
Instead of having a primary focus only on the four P’s, organizations can enhance their marketing by evolving to a customer-centric business model that focuses on insight, interaction and improvement - the three I’s.
Continue ReadingCouponing, a strategy to build loyal customers?
