Friday - November 6, 2009
The chastening effect of the recession has many financial services firms taking a cautious view of future CRM investments. One reason is that these firms are husbanding their resources. Another is a growing awareness that investments in CRM by the financial sector have not been all that successful. The first wave of CRM programs had the positive effect of providing more efficient ways of implementing marketing programs through automation, indicates a study by the Aite Group. However, the report questions the true effectiveness of CRM programs.
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Friday - November 6, 2009
This week, I headed southwest as I continued making the rounds of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times. My first impression of Southwest Airlines' Web site was that its online presence faithfully reflected its corporate persona: It looked to be a roll-up-your sleeves, no nonsense outfit.
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Thursday - November 5, 2009
Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employee treat a customer unfairly? What are the specific factors that caused a customer to leave?
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Wednesday - November 4, 2009
I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages. The Black Swan is about uncertainty in the real world, and the subtitle explains it all: "The Impact of the Highly Improbable."
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Tuesday - November 3, 2009
There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.
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Monday - November 2, 2009
In both the best and worst of economic times, worker productivity is a major management goal. Making sure that employees efficiently carry out their tasks is critical to the success of both government and business enterprises. First, of course, the workers have to show up.
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Friday - October 30, 2009
Small businesses frequently rely on a haphazard assortment of tools to manage their CRM processes, such as email, contact managers and spreadsheets. However, such methods are usually not sustainable or scalable. "Their customer data ends up fragmented across 10 different applications and physical locations," said Dmitri Eroshenko, CEO of Relenta.
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Friday - October 30, 2009
My tour of travel-planning Web sites for the E-Commerce Times has included stops at some of the aggregator sites, some discount companies and some alternative services. I'm now entering new territory with explorations of the Web sites of the operators themselves. First stop: JetBlue, a discount airline that has carefully cultivated a customer-friendly reputation.
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Thursday - October 29, 2009
In research conducted among over 200 companies in 2008 for a reported titled "B2B TeleServices and Appointment-Setting: Less Risk, Less Reward?," Aberdeen Group found that end-user sales organizations relying primarily on external appointment-setting vendors for lead generation realized dramatically lower business results if the vendor deliverable was limited to simple appointments.
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Wednesday - October 28, 2009
Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park. The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good idea; it's a nice place.
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Wednesday - October 28, 2009
Consumers across the country soon will be able to find impartial information about out-of-network healthcare costs on a new Web site, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday. The information will be collected by a new not-for-profit company, FAIR Health, in partnership with a research consortium based at Syracuse University, Cuomo said.
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