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Retailers performed well this holiday season in terms of customer satisfaction across multiple channels, according to the ForeSee Experience Index: 2013 U.S. Retail Edition, which was released this week. The report focuses on customer satisfaction at the company level and queried consumers about eve...

CBS viewers who get their broadcast TV service via Time Warner may have felt a little bit like the characters in summertime drama Under the Dome in the last 24 hours or so. Specifically, as part of a battle over retransmission fees, the cable giant on Monday briefly pulled CBS from its lineup in sev...

Businesses depend on their customers, and it would make sense that good customer service would translate into loyalty and sales, but high-tech vendors don't seem to have gotten the message. The average customer experience rating for tech vendors fell from 58 percent to 52 percent since last year, in...

In an effort to build its cross-channel marketing capabilities, Adobe on Thursday announced that it will acquire Neolane, a provider of cross-channel campaign management technology, in a $600 million cash deal. Neolane integrates online and offline marketing data from across an enterprise, performin...

In a move to bolster its offerings for the real estate market, Trulia said this week that it would acquire Market Leader, a Software as a Service-based CRM company targeting agents and brokers. The acquisition, expected to close in the fall, will provide Trulia with tools to help real estate profess...

CRM applications tend to embody a range of features, depending on the maker and the audience. Some applications are stripped-down products sporting a handful of features -- and only those features -- deemed necessary to the user. Other products have become de facto mini-ERP systems with their integr...

SAP on Wednesday unveiled a rapid-deployment solution for marketers. It lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources. Users can combine the information with CRM text data and, if they so choose, business intelligence applications to ...

A woman in Florida was floored recently by a T-Mobile cellphone bill that reportedly totaled nearly a quarter of a million dollars. After intervention on the part of a local TV station's news department, though, the carrier slashed Celina Aarons' bill from $200,000 down to $2,500. The charges were i...

Last week, at the HP Summit 2011 in San Francisco, the tech industry waited with bated breath for HP CEO Leo Apotheker's first presentation as CEO. Surely, the theory went, he would make a startling pronouncement describing a twist in the company's strategy -- say, a greater focus on developing its ...

Oracle announced Tuesday that it will acquire ATG -- a provider of e-commerce applications and platforms -- for $6.00 per share, or approximately $1 billion in cash. Oracle and ATG both pointed to the complementary nature of their applications. ATG provides an e-commerce platform that includes a cro...

Oracle faced off with SAP in an Oakland, Calif., court on Monday in a hearing to determine the amount of damages the former is owed over its claim that SAP stole its software. Oracle reportedly wants $2.3 billion dollars, while SAP is seeking to pare down the sum to within the range of tens of milli...

Cloud computing and Fusion Apps were the major points of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 on Wednesday. Ellison also took several swipes at Salesforce.com and its CEO, Marc Benioff. His speech concluded with an extensive demonstration of Fusion Apps, assisted by sev...

Microsoft is set to release both the online and in-house versions of its new CRM package this fall. Along with the beta release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the company will be opening an app store for third-party developers called "Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace." That's according to a company a...

Are cable "bundle" customers changing channels to wireless telecom services? A recent study by the CFI Group, which focuses on measuring customer satisfaction and CRM issues, indicates they are. That is, if they can. Some can't, either because the choice is unavailable, or they have signed the optio...

The joke used to be on the U.S. Postal Service. Indeed, jabs about the government's mail system may have driven business to private-sector competitors like United Parcel Service, Federal Express and DHL. That was decades ago; now, it seems, some of the same companies designed to outperform the USPS...

Five years ago, Mark Goldstein and three partners recognized that loyalty programs were becoming a cottage industry. Coming up with the right way to manage those programs, he believed, would be a neat trick. So would finding an effective way to lure in customers. "The toughest part of the business i...

How can companies establish effective customer relationship management in the heat of battle? We're not talking about a military action; the conflict in this case exists between entertainment companies and their customers. "For the most part, the entertainment industry and its customers have been at...

Private equity heavyweight the Blackstone Group is taking another publicly traded software company private. It has announced it will purchase Alliance Data Systems for $7.8 billion, including the assumption of certain debt, or $81.75 per share in cash. That is a premium of 30 percent over the $62.96...

As Microsoft once again renews its efforts to target small to mid-sized companies, many in the software industry express skepticism, while others welcome the competition. Just how committed is Microsoft to the small to mid-market software segment? As many critics will point out, this is not the firs...

As Microsoft once again renews its efforts to target small to mid-sized companies, many in the software industry express skepticism, while others welcome the competition. Just how committed is Microsoft to the small to mid-market software segment? As many critics will point out, this is not the firs...