As many channels start to converge, the chatter among customers about products, benefits, uses, problems, referrals is increasingly gaining a lot of attention. It's so easy today to get on to the web and know what customers think about your products. The ability to fuse this data along with your transactional & attitudinal data that lies within your organization and doing analytics on this information is going to be the next inflection point for marketers.
Here's a presentation by Paul Isackson that brings out the power of this chatter and influence on customer behaviour.
www.customerworld.typepad.com