Last year the bank increased fees for customers with small balances, but said it would consider each customer's entire relationship and not merely the balance in a particular account.

ECONOMIST: The trials of megabanks

The specific discounts and special offers will vary by your type of business, but each must be meaningfully valuable for the customer.

FORBES: Make the Holidays a Launching Pad for Repeat Business

But in each of these cases we are really dealing with customer feedback rather than core innovation.

FORBES: Should Your Focus be a Collaboration or Innovation Platform?

The disc can be played for free for 48 hours, but after that the customer must pay an additional fee each time the disc is played.

FORBES: Stillborn

Machine learning distills the raw information about the behavior of each individual customer and creates associations that are accurate, but general enough that a campaign based on those associations has a good chance of success with a substantial group of people.

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Under the new structure, InPhonic gets a smaller upfront fee for each handset activated, but it also gets residual payments for as long as the customer stays with the carrier.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Each time she complained to Delta customer service she was told the airline was sorry, but rules had changed.

WSJ: Saving Frequent-Flier Miles From the Ax

But it is notoriously ill-suited to high-tech industries that have to tailor each item to a customer's specific needs (as in a data-switching centre or air-traffic-control system) or in which it is crucial that thousands of interrelated components all work correctly together (as in a rocket vehicle).

ECONOMIST: The land of disappointments