Archive

Nearly everyone who has ever phoned a company's call center has encountered long hold times, multiple transfers and agents who seem too rushed to pay attention to customer queries. With the introduction of a new contact-center application, Siemens is hoping to file those common customer experiences ...

In late 2002, Microsoft rolled out the first version of its CRM software. In the intervening year, the company reports, more than 1,000 companies have purchased the product and praised its ease of use and painless integration. Not all companies are so enthusiastic, however. Some report software glit...

Bozeman, Montana-based RightNow Technologies is a major player in the on-demand CRM space. In an interview with CRM Buyer, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte explained that unlike hosted CRM leader salesforce.com, which has its roots in sales force automation, RightNow focuses primarily on customer service...

Hosted CRM software vendor salesforce.com released a spate of announcements Wednesday in advance of its impending IPO. The announcements included its largest implementation yet, a 2,000-seat deal with SunTrust Banks; the release of an sforce toolkit for IBM's WebSphere Web services platform; plans t...

As CRM evolves, with low-cost hosted CRM options surfacing to compete with the traditional in-house software model, companies are trying to determine how best to manage customer relationships on a reasonable budget. However, in-house CRM software providers are still going strong and adapting to the ...

A CIO or IT manager who is trying to decide which CRM path his or her company should take faces an extremely tough decision. In the first installment of this two-part article, analysts and CRM vendors weighed in on whether a company should purchase an in-house CRM system or outsource the project by ...

Jim Steele, president of worldwide operations at on-demand CRM provider salesforce.com, joined the company in October 2002 after a two-year stint as executive vice president of worldwide sales at Ariba. CRM Buyer caught up with Steele at salesforce.com's San Francisco headquarters earlier this month...

As interest in hosted CRM grows stronger, Siebel is moving to establish a foothold in this market. The company achieved a significant victory last fall when it acquired CRM vendor UpShot. The deal was sweet for both companies, executives and analysts noted, because it gave UpShot stability and visib...

It is not a given that people dislike automation. When ATMs began to proliferate during the early 1980s, people flocked to them. Ask the average person about interactive voice response (IVR) systems, however, and he or she likely will rattle off at least one Kafkaesque story that induced near-homici...

As businesses have focused more on efficiency and cost savings -- and less on big-budget purchases -- as cornerstones of IT strategy, they have begun considering on-demand CRM services far more seriously than ever before. Amid this shift, another trend is surfacing. While many companies seem all too...

Salesforce.com has announced that its CRM solution, Winter '04, now links seamlessly with Microsoft Office applications. The new service, called Salesforce.com Office Edition, will be available as of Thursday evening at no extra charge to current Salesforce.com users and will not cost extra for new ...

Salesforce.com's sforce 2.0 platform "could do for application development and the software business in general what salesforce.com's CRM product has done for CRM. If that is so, it will be sforce rather than hosted CRM that is the true disruptive innovation," Denis Pombriant, vice president and res...

In January 2003, 52 percent of respondents to an Aberdeen Group survey said they would consider using on-demand CRM services. By June 2003, the proportion of respondents who said they would consider such services had jumped to 85 percent. Why the sudden infatuation with hosted CRM? One reason, Aberd...