Archive

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's C...

On Monday, Oracle announced its US$5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems, its largest competitor and tag-team vendor to many of its customers. The acquisition came as no surprise to industry experts, although the timing of it preceded some experts' expectations. "We were actually a bit surpris...

Oracle has agreed to buy Siebel Systems in a deal worth US$5.8 billion, continuing an acquisition spree that began with the controversial takeover of PeopleSoft and has included a number of smaller companies since. Oracle said the deal would make it the world's top vendor of CRM software, surpassing...

Consumer satisfaction with wireless phone service providers has slipped significantly over the last year, according to an annual study released by J.D. Power and Associates yesterday. Overall, satisfaction fell 10 percent compared to 2004. That's the largest year-over-year change in satisfaction sin...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

Today's organizations increasingly experience the creep from the general tracking of customer contacts and responses by CRM to the general tracking of marketing activities and their returns by the CFO. Marketers have to look at the bigger picture, at their contribution to the entire enterprise, rat...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they d...

When Rust-Oleum Consumer Brands Canada decided to deploy a business intelligence package, the company was only looking to get its monthly paper sales data in a weekly electronic format. A little more than a year later, they're using BI to gain a competitive advantage in such tangibles as shelf place...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

According to a study published by CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking sales and marketing excellence, companies that excelled at sales knowledge management saw the number of sales reps meeting or exceeding their quotas increase by 25 percent. Based on this statistic, one ...

Microsoft announced in July it was stepping full force into the small- to mid-size business (SMB) market with a customer relationship management (CRM) product designed to fit into its Office software suite. At the time, analysts said Microsoft was wise to take a bottom-up approach to the CRM office ...

The lack of trust in the accuracy, frequency and depth of financial reporting processes in companies has spawned a sizeable industry that has trust at its cornerstone. Sarbanes-Oxley's pain is the outsourcer's gain, and in this strengthening reciprocal relationship between the need for U.S. publicly...

Today, the CDI market has attracted several technology vendors from areas like ERP, CRM, data quality, and master data management. Unfortunately, while there is consensus that a CDI hub is critical for tying distributed customer data into unified views, there is rampant confusion on how best to imp...

According to the American Bankers Association, the average consumer has two accounts with any one bank. One is typically a checking account, and with the plethora of free checking options available today, that one hardly counts. It's not profitable. Relationship banking is the carrot, not the stick,...

Today, the first place your customers look for help is online. Gartner Group has estimated that capturing a new customer is 4 to 10 times more expensive than providing good service to an existing one. They additionally said over 68 percent of customers defect due to poor service. In a more recent st...