By Wendy Eichenbaum
According to Gartner, 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from 20% of its existing customers. Who in your customer base is part of that 20%?
The answer in part comes from asking your customers one key question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are they to recommend your product?
Your future customers will answer with a 9 or 10. These are your Promoters. They repeatedly use your product, and enthusiastically recommend your product to others. Their word of mouth fuels your growth.
Passive customers are the people who answer 7-8. They are satisfied, but have little loyalty, and won’t take the time to recommend you. They’ll be swayed toward your competitors by a new feature or price.
There is a chasm between Passive and Promoter customers. Both groups are likely to answer that they’d use your product again. But when you ask them, “Would you recommend us?,” you’re changing the stakes. Now you’re asking your customers to put their own reputations on the line with their friends and colleagues. You’ll see a big gap between 8 & 9.
Ford's new small economy SUV, the EcoSport will soon be available in the US, and is equipped with the latest version of its in-car infotainment system SYNC 3.
Two big names, Amazon Alexa and Google's WAZE have been added to its SYNC in-car infotainment system for iPhone users.
"You can now get in a car with SYNC 3, plug in your iPhone, and navigate with: Ford’s navigation, Waze’s navigation, or Apple Maps. But if you fire up CarPlay, you won’t be able to use Alexa anymore until you back out to the SYNC menus. You also can’t, say, ask Alexa to get directions in Waze instead of with Ford’s navigation system."
Read the article at The Verge.
A study conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety compared drivers' odds of crash involvement when using a cell phone relative to driving without performing any observable secondary tasks, both overall and stratified by selected environmental and crash-related factors.
The study found that "visual-manual interaction with cell phones while driving, particularly but not exclusively relative to text messaging, was associated with approximately double the incidence of crash involvement relative to driving without performing any observable secondary tasks."
Read the article at Property Casualty 360.
Ford has filed for a patent for an autonomous police car that would be capable of detecting traffic violations such as speeding and then wirelessly communicate with the vehicle and its human driver to verify identity and issue a citation.
The autonomous police car would be able to tap into surveillance cameras to spot the infractions. Or the car might just see the violation, like a human driver rolling through a stop sign, on its own.
The patent application also describes other scenarios in which police officers are in the autonomous vehicle, they’re just not driving. In these cases, the vehicle might respond and pull over a vehicle driving erratically and the human officers might need to intercede if the human driver is suspected of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Read the article at Fortune.
If you want to figure out whether leasing or buying is best for your fleet, you should look at a variety of factors - including cash flow and ROI.