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Results 201-220 of 266 for Christopher J. Bucholtz.
OPINION

When It Comes to CRM, What’s Your Motivation?

"What's my motivation?" Sounds like a corny question an overwrought actor might pose to a director on the boards or in front of a camera. But we all have motivations -- and it's smart to understand your own and those of your vendor when it comes to CRM. No one wakes up one morning and decides, "What...

OPINION

Customer-Centric Thinking Is Good for the Back Office Too

My wife is a recruiter working in high technology. Recruiters are like every other profession: There are some bad ones, a bunch in the middle who are competent, and some who are truly excellent. I may be biased, but I think she falls into the latter category. Here's why I think she's so good: She t...

OPINION

A Peek Behind the Curtain of My CRM Laboratory

I'll admit it -- I have a secret life. In addition to being a CRM reporter, I'm also a small businessman. A tiny businessman, in fact; my goofy, niche company grosses about $5,000 a year. We make detail parts for scale model airplanes -- and while you can't get much more niche than that, you also ca...

OPINION

Why Does CRM Training Get Short Shrift?

Applications delivered as Software as a Service are great. They allow businesses to scale their operations, reduce up-front costs, relieve themselves of tasks like backups and software updates, and speed up deployment of applications. They're simple to implement (in most cases). But, oddly, I think ...

OPINION

Doing More With Less: The Social CRM Challenge for the Mid-Sized Biz

One of the great promises of the social CRM revolution was -- at least in my mind -- the opportunity for quick, creative, smaller companies to develop the same sort of customer relationships that larger companies could afford to create. There's a gulf between small businesses, which may speak or eve...

OPINION

Reaching the Untapped CRM Market: Talk About Problems, Not Apps

As hard as it may be for CRM veterans to accept, there are still a great many businesses out there who don't have an application to track the customer and to feed data to sales, marketing and service. These businesses -- mostly small -- are not in the position to afford an employee designated as the...

OPINION

Lessons Social CRM Can Learn From Telecom’s Mistakes

Around the time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and signed into law, I was a reporter covering that area of technology. Specifically, I was writing about service, measurement, data management and the software that made all that possible for telecommunications companies. Little did I re...

OPINION

Missed Customer Loyalty Opportunities

One of the goals often cited for implementing CRM is an improvement in customer loyalty. That sounds like a logical objective, and knowing more about your customers and the history of your interactions with them certainly helps you understand how to keep them coming back. Still, there's a long way f...

OPINION

3 Smart Social CRM Things You Already Do

As I've written before, social CRM best practices don't exist -- but only because in order to be most effective, each business needs to tailor its social CRM approach to its specific customers. However, that doesn't mean you're doomed to a long evaluation process and a tough spell of trial-and-error...

OPINION

3 Human Obstacles to CRM Success

One of the misconceptions that has bedeviled CRM has been the idea that it is simply a technology you buy and implement, thus solving your problems. Technology is a part of scaling your processes for managing customer relationships, to be sure, but in reality it's a link in a chain of decisions and ...

OPINION

Building Trust Before Social Skepticism Sets In

The emergence of the social customer is forcing businesses to think differently about how they reach the people to whom they sell, and much has been written about ways for businesses to cope with this. However, as is all too common in CRM discussions, the customer is often forgotten as we default to...

BEST OF ECT NEWS

Battling CRM’s No. 1 Killer

When it comes to the broad topic of "CRM failure," you often hear the same tales: a too-complicated integration, an incompetent integrator or inflexible technology. The reality is that technology is usually not the problem, nor is it integration or integrators. If you push, you'll find that the most...

OPINION

Become a Social Service Revolutionary Today

Wouldn't it be great if customers who had questions about your products could get the answer from other customers? Wouldn't it be wonderful if customers brainstormed on ways you could improve your service processes? Wouldn't it be tremendous if you could see trends in service needs and adjust your p...

OPINION

When Self-Service Goes Horribly Wrong

McDonald's used to have a hamburger called the "McDLT." The peculiar selling point of this burger was that it was served in a two-compartment Styrofoam container that "kept the warm side warm and the cool side cool." The diner would then put the two halves together. I was blissfully unaware that war...

OPINION

Doing CRM Right Means Staying in Discovery Mode

This week, I interviewed a small business owner who told me a very interesting story. He'd done some planning before implementing his CRM solution, and his new technology took rapid care of the problems he anticipated. After that, however, he started finding new problems -- which he then found solut...

OPINION

What Holds Back CRM Success: Executive Fear

The past year seemed like one of marking time in CRM. The trends are all well spelled out: Social CRM will become a critical tool, service has grown in importance as customer acquisition has become more difficult, and the value of mobile CRM is becoming painfully apparent. So why aren't we acting on...

OPINION

A CRM Lesson From Sesame Street

This Christmas, I was sitting around with the in-laws after the presents were opened, when my father-in-law asked me a question that has probably been nagging him for a long time. "What is it that you do?" he said. Well, I'm a writer, first off, but what is it that I write about? CRM. Explaining wha...

OPINION

5 Great Gifts Your CRM Users Will Love

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

INSIGHTS

The Lessons Antique Computers Can Teach About CRM

A few weeks ago, Computer History Museum's upcoming exhibit "Revolution: the First 2000 years of Computing." I was there to see a model of the SAGE computing facility, but I also reveled in seeing pieces of ENIAC, JOHNNIAC and a host of other early computers. As I toured the still-under-construction...

OPINION

Breaking the Tech Terminology Barrier

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

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