Monday Notes

Note #1: If you're willing to do this, send me an e-mail outlining how much you're paying, per name, to each of your co-ops to pull a name out of their database (for housefile modeling and for customer acquisition). I'm working on a pricing elasticity and long-term customer value spreadsheet, showing how customer acquisition performance improves as prices come down. Unfortunately, you already know what happens when pricing increases via the USPS.

Note #2: If you're considering call center reductions, give this idea a chance. I've talked about this numerous times before, but it might be time to let your call center staff loose "creating demand". Have then all open Twitter accounts, and in their down time, ask them to find every possible customer service issue on the internet that involves your business, and see if they can solve the problem for the customer. I'm increasingly becoming convinced that the future of customer service is the outbound use of a call center --- using tools like Twitter, rather than taking inbound sales calls. These are talented people --- put them to work in a constructive way, rather than employing folks via the robotic process of fielding calls.

Note #3: If you are a cataloger (and about 1/3 of this audience represent the catalog industry), can you explain why nobody will publicly talk about about the fact that catalog customer acquisition is dying? Is there a good reason why nobody wants to talk about solutions?