MarketLive, the leader in enterprise-class eCommerce software and solutions, today announced the launch of MarketLive Content Experience Manager, the first of its kind, fully integrated product that uniquely enables and optimizes content to deliver a differentiated shopping experience. The MarketLive Content Experience Manager empowers merchants by improving customer engagement, lowering barriers to purchase, boosting repeat site visits, building customer loyalty, and lowering customer service costs. Merchants gain new efficiencies and raise their brand's search engine relevance, while earning trust and ultimately driving long term growth.

It is no longer enough for retailers online to be strictly merchants. Even integrating product specific content such as product details and ratings and reviews simply falls short. To effectively connect with a brand's core market and stay relevant, merchants must inform and inspire shoppers with the same insight that informs and inspires them. Today, the most sophisticated merchants are weaving in buyer's guides, how-to instructions, use ideas, care information, lifestyle information and more throughout customer experience. However, integrating this syndicated information maintained in traditional open source content management systems is a serious and rising challenge.

Etihad Airways and airberlin have integrated their small and medium-sized enterprise loyalty programmes – Business Connect and business points.

From today, companies which participate in either airline’s business travel loyalty programme will be rewarded for flying on codeshare flights operated by Etihad Airways, airberlin and NIKI.

Etihad Airways’ chief commercial officer, Peter Baumgartner, said:  “We are delighted to be able to introduce the smartest and most rewarding loyalty scheme to the market, targeted at SME businesses who are looking for ways to optimise their business travel spend while adding convenience and value to their travel experience.

The Kroger Co. is forecasting a rosier year after its customer-loyalty programs helped boost net income in the first quarter.

The nation's largest traditional grocery store chain said Thursday that its targeted discounts and coupon mailings, which are based on purchase histories, are enticing more customers to return to its stores.

The aggressive courtship comes at a time when Kroger and other supermarkets and big-box retailers are struggling to manage their costs for products, which have ballooned as a result of higher fuel and commodity prices. Rather than taking the risk of scaring off customers by passing on those costs entirely, Kroger is focusing on cutting expenses and boosting traffic in its stores

Satmetrix, the company behind customer loyalty metric Net Promoter Score, today launched SparkScore, a benchmark for brands to measure and incorporate social media sentiment into overall customer experience strategy.

As of today, Spark-score.com provides customer loyalty insights on airline, hotel and motel, and computer and laptop industry domains, with more industries to follow. Brands can now access weekly data that comprises their social NPS, or SparkScore, which compares the brand to best, worst, and average scores in their select industry sector.

Richard Owen, president and CEO of Satmetrix, told CRM magazine that the ultimate goal is to provide a comprehensive "cloud-based experience product line" that integrates social NPS with the traditional NPS loyalty metric. The intention is not to tread on the likes of a social customer service platform provider like a Social Dynamx, or a cross-platform social media management solution like HootSuite, Owen says, but rather to "get our metric into lots of different apps."

Although self-directed investors' overall satisfaction with their investment firm has improved from 2011, satisfaction with trading charges and fees has decreased for a second consecutive year, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Self-Directed Investor Satisfaction Study(SM) released today.

The study, now in its 11th year, measures customer satisfaction with investment firms based on performance in six factors: account information; account offerings; information resources; interaction; problem resolution; and trading charges and fees.

Non-trading fees continue to be the primary contributor to dissatisfaction. The study finds that satisfaction averages 723 (on a 1,000-point scale) when investors do not pay a non-trading charge, compared with 613 when they are aware of maintenance fees and 628 when they are aware of inactivity fees. Overall, satisfaction with trading charges and fees is 697, down from 703 in 2011.

U.S. consumers have high expectations for both increased speed and attentiveness for customer service over social media channels. Among the key findings from a cross-industry survey released today, commissioned by social customer service leader Conversocial, and conducted in May 2012 by Assistant Professor of Communications at New York University, Liel Leibovitz, include:

More than half of consumers (55%) surveyed called their experience of communicating with brands via social media "disappointing" or "mediocre."

Approximately 30% of respondents said they expected companies to reply within hours when contacted via social media; 16.6% expect a response in less than 10 minutes; 13.1% less than an hour; 29.2% said within the same business day.

Supermarket, retail banking, and telecommunications sectors were found to be the least effective at communicating with customers via social media, while department store and dining sectors were the most effective.