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According to a study by Accenture, 55 percent of companies lack a single view of their customers. CRM may be able to solve that problem, but the study found an even bigger problem that traditional CRM doesn't touch: 68 percent of companies can't measure the return on investment of marketing campaign...

Identity theft is one of the fastest growing types of consumer fraud, and banks in particular fear that such crimes will hinder consumer online banking activity. A recent study on bank account phishing and hacking from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reveals that single-factor authenticati...

Call center operator InfoCision Management Corp. is adding teleservices representatives. Over the coming months several hundred people will join the company's call centers in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This growth seems to fly in the face of expectations following the implementation of th...

Twelve months ago, CRM faced some resentment in many organizations, but as the year progressed it began proving its value. "2004 was mainly a year of validating that CRM works, rather than [focusing] on major new functionality. A lot of companies focused on governance and integration, making what th...

Just as many companies that adopted CRM applications years ago often failed to use the data they collected, call centers that tape inbound calls for regulatory compliance and quality assurance often lack the time and the staff to listen to the calls and learn from them. Enter speech analytics softwa...

Canadian outsourcing vendors tend to attract sophisticated work and projects closely tied to American culture and the English language. As such, despite the stronger numbers of outsourcing firms and employees in offshore locations such as India and the Far East, Canada is holding its own against ove...

Many retailers already use automation in their supply chain and inventory management. Vendor-managed inventory (VMI), for example, has made its way into many retailers. It optimizes supply-chain performance by keeping the responsibility for restocking with the manufacturer, not the distributor. The ...

Oracle's OpenWorld conference last week in San Francisco combined the company's traditional shows Oracle AppsWorld and OracleWorld in the company's largest conference ever. More than 25,000 customers, vendor partners, Oracle employees and analysts took part. Even Microsoft made its first appearance....

Loyalty card programs operated by grocery and drug retailers have been focused on rewarding shoppers for isolated activities. Typically, retailers dole out extra points for buying Brand A today or discount the price of Brand B during a given week and not much more. But now these loyalty programs are...

Siebel Branch Teller, a new retail bank solution that invigorates cross sales and customer care at branches, finally brings CRM to the channel that originates most financial services relationships with consumers. The product, which uses IBM middleware specifically designed for the retail banking ver...

The time has come for not only a new faith in CRM but a new following -- by small and midsize companies. Since Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft introduced a CRM product to its Business Solutions line in January 2003, it has captured more than 2,500 small and midsize organizations representing mor...

Pressed to establish best practices and comply with global quality audits, Indian business-process outsourcers (BPOs) have taken an interest in outsourcing firms in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom and employed the help of outsiders to guarantee their future success. Approximately 8...

East Coast grocer Stop & Shop has introduced shopping carts that give consumers Internet accessibility at their fingertips. The smart carts, from IBM and Cuesol of Quincy, Massachusetts, feature on-board IBM touchscreen computers that double as personal assistants when the laser scanner on the c...

With recent regulatory developments in the industry and routine call center functions moving to offshore teleservices vendors, there is no time like the present for the Call Center Research Laboratory established at the University of Southern Mississippi a few weeks ago. The CCRL, led by USM profess...

Long known as a technology and hardware provider, Unisys has pushed to diversify, joining the ranks of large systems integrators just when many companies are drawn to the simple, low-risk offerings of hosted solutions providers. Unisys, however, sees that trend as temporary, and its CRM leaders feel...

Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia and semiconductor maker Royal Philips Electronics plan to test a contactless transportation payment system in Germany next year. The pair are working with Rhein-Main Verkehrsverbund (RMV) public transportation authority on a pilot program that will allow consumers to ...

Each season, Legoland Denmark welcomes 1.6 million guests, and about 1,600 of them end up getting lost. This spring, the theme park adopted an AeroScout RFID location solution, offering parents use of an RFID bracelet for their children at a nominal fee. If their children wander away from them in th...

The European Commission, the regulatory body of the European Union, today removed the final anti-trust barrier to Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft. Not only did the European Commission meeting in Brussels, Belgium, end its yearlong consideration of the merger in Oracle's favor, it did so without stip...

In some ways the buzz about business intelligence analytics, an increasingly common add-on to a smart and established CRM system, resembles the buzz five years or so ago about CRM. Maybe the two don't match up just so, but organizations do have to exercise caution in choosing BI analytics solutions,...

The Food and Drug Administration recently green-lighted a product called VeriChip, a coded radio chip that, when picked up by a radio-frequency reader in an ambulance or hospital emergency room, yields a code that unlocks a patient's medical stats from a central database. Unsurprisingly, the chips, ...