Archive

If you follow a market long enough and if it's a successful marketplace, you notice that some of the companies in it go through a succession of moves; first in new products and then in finance. The confusion comes when a company like Oracle lives through multiple up and down cycles. When you look at...

A pair of recent studies highlight changing shopper attitudes as the pandemic continues its stranglehold on the supply chain for most industries. Two clear-cut consumer trends have surfaced: online shoppers want more self-service options and an overall more-efficient shopping experience.

Leaf Home built its call center operation to drive potential customers to a cheerful encounter with all the departments to which they connect. That pleasant working relationship starts with Leaf's call center staff. We spoke with the company's chief human resources officer, Sean Loboda, to discuss ...

A sales process is a set of protocols that an organization uses to conduct selling. One's process needs not be complex, many organizations settle on processes that have around seven steps. But a sales process that everyone in the organization adheres to is fundamental to that organization's success....

Cultivating repeat customers is a critical necessity in the continuing customer shift to mobile-first interactions for a potential product or service purchase. Digital CX tools help level the playing field by providing SMBs the same advantages put to use by their larger counterparts to solidify the ...

It isn't just the pandemic that's shifting society; other macro events add an important dimension and all of it influences the direction of CRM for the foreseeable future. But a key question looms: Are we still too close to these events to be able to make sensible predictions about how and where we...

With the recent completion of the Slack acquisition, Salesforce can look forward to improving the quality of the customer-facing business processes that it supports with more and better collaboration. However, the presence of Slack may now highlight the reality that while vendors operate at the spee...

Tapping into natural language understanding technology as part of an overall approach to managing customer relations improves the experience that businesses provide to their customers. Brands already implement a variety of solutions to gain data and insights from customer interactions. Still, many c...

The need for better customer journeys is a challenging goal. Overcoming operational challenges to become more agile in meeting customer needs -- and raising the maturity of the customer experience team -- will be critical to staying competitive in this ever-changing business environment, advised Blo...

The magnitude to which retail stores recover when consumers fully adjust to post-pandemic routines may well hinge on the shopping experiences they offer. A new study of consumers in the U.S. and UK shows that the majority of shoppers today view customer experience as one of the most important factor...

The build-versus-buy decision is an important one. Companies have been making similar choices about their technology stacks for decades. When it comes to customer data platforms, however, some organizations are rushing to make a determination. There are some important questions to ask before making ...

First, cloud-based CRM democratized business information, then it erased the distance between customers and vendors. Now it is poised to expand into other areas with similar democratizing opportunities. I am speaking about how we work -- at least those of us in the knowledge economy -- but there's a...

There may be two Salesforce seasons in a year -- the one we're finishing and one that happens just before Dreamforce. Roughly speaking, these seasons happen when the company disgorges a raft of new technologies both to update existing products and to bring forth new ones. This season covers a lot of...

The post-pandemic era is bringing many changes to how the marketing industry interacts with messaging strategies and how marketers work. Chief among these changes is the technology they use and the frequency with which they visit company offices. But one essential industry staple is not changing. Th...

It seems the digital disruption is being disrupted. If the original disruption was about leveraging company data to better understand customers and to meet them where they are, the new disruption depends on all that plus supporting worker efforts wherever their lifestyles take them.