Search results

Relationship marketing is the process of using information about customers and their preferences to build targeted promotional programmes and establish longer‐term relationships with key groups of customers. Explains the use of such devices as loyalty schemes and identifies the key components of a relationship‐marketing programme, including the importance of technology to collect and analyse customer‐related data.

The book can be regarded as one of man′s greatest developments. It gives us an easy means of maintaining knowledge over time and of transferring that knowledge from one person to many. Before the book, nearly all knowledge was transferred from the teacher to his/her pupils directly by word of mouth.

We all know about the great revolution in customer care and customer service. Organizations nowadays have to use their service to compete – customers themselves are more sophisticated than they once were and are unlikely to buy on brand name alone; they expect reliability, competitive pricing, availability, long‐life, etc. – and they expect good service. One of the reasons for this is the increase in globalization. Organizations are no longer just competing with others in the same town, the same region or even the same country; their competitors can reach their markets from anywhere in the world. This means that we are always competing against the best. It is no longer enough to get our product to market – we have to know that a customer is waiting for what we are supplying, and wants it in the form that we are supplying. No longer can we rely on engineers to make the products and salesmen to sell them. They now have to work together to understand customer needs and set about meeting them. Customers need to be won with our first meeting, our first order, our first service. If not won then, we may never get another chance.

In this age of massive competition, customer service is too important to leave to chance. It must be driven into all parts of the organisation by the chief executive personally. Outlines some of the most important aspects of improving customer service and ways in which chief executives can make a real difference to practices within their organisations.

Computer supported collaborative working (CSCW) is an extension to groupware computing which recognizes that there is a need to go further than supporting existing ways of working by using technology to underpin innovative forms of work organization and practice. Outlines the government‐backed initiative to raise the awareness of CSCW and briefly describes the exemplar projects being funded under the initiative.

The computer has become ubiquitous. Almost every office has at least one indeed, in many industries, almost every member of staff has one. This situation has come about in only 50 years – and, in effect, in only about a dozen years since the development of the first microcomputers. This article is about the history and development of the computer, but also about the relationship of the machine with time.