Friday - February 3, 2012
Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO and now vice president and general manager of Desk.com. "Desk.com has been built from the ground up to work with Salesforce.com, although it can also be a standalone product. We've been working on it around the clock since the acquisition."
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Thursday - February 2, 2012
Every tool has a purpose. That's never more clear than when you see a neophyte do-it-yourselfer trying to use a tool for a purpose other than what it was designed for. For instance, anyone wielding a hammer while trying to fix a car's engine is probably not going to succeed.
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Wednesday - February 1, 2012
I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually reticent to write about most of them simply because it's not my job to provide free advertising.
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Tuesday - January 31, 2012
The sharp growth in the use of smartphones and tablets has spurred the U.S. government to keep pace with the private sector in the use of mobile devices. While federal agencies have been incorporating mobile technology for several years, the rate of adoption could be -- and should be -- far greater, contends Steven VanRoekel, the federal government's chief information officer.
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Monday - January 30, 2012
Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.
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Friday - January 27, 2012
At the National Retail Federation's annual convention,Retail's BIG Show 2012, Epicor debuted its latest mobile offering: the Epicor Retail Clienteling application. It is an add-on for Epicor's existing CRM app, said Dave Burton, product director of CRM services -- meaning a retailer has to be an Epicor customer to use it. However, the app comes with a few additional features designed for the tablet form factor.
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Thursday - January 26, 2012
The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is true. But what's in it for the sales staff?
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Wednesday - January 25, 2012
My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part compliment and part benediction: "Good on you." They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like "goo-don you." At any rate, good on you.
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Tuesday - January 24, 2012
It's one thing to have a computer system at a major bank, retailer or government agency invaded by cybercriminals. At best, such hacking incidents cause minor annoyances, and at worst, they result in high-cost privacy invasions. But what if the hackers get into the power systems that make the entire Internet possible?
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Tuesday - January 24, 2012
The Borders near me closed the other month. Wasn't surprising. Ditto for Circuit City. Gone. A few years prior to that it was Hollywood Video that rolled its end credits. The problem is, none of them had to go. They each died of self-inflicted wounds. Sure, a lot of their CEOs came out and blamed Iraq, the economy, e-commerce, etc., for their failures.
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