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By now, common sense, the business media and practical experience have taught the lessons of multi-channel engagement for service. Businesses have come to realize that they need to provide service in whatever way their customers wish to receive it, whether it's through the phone, via chat or text, o...

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM strategy is that it requires left-brain and right-brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined proces...

The social media era doesn't mean that more people can communicate than in the past. It means that more customers can communicate faster than ever before -- and customers always communicate more and faster when they're angry. You'd think that this message would have been internalized by the nice peo...

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers' relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returning customers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? Thus, it makes sense to foster loyalty in these customers....

They don't call it the Christmas rush for nothing. December weekends see masses of customers crowding stores to buy gifts, and at peak times the salespeople can appear overwhelmed. Their objective is to check out as many customers as quickly as possible -- ring 'em up, bag their stuff and move to th...

As a callow youth, I enlisted in the Navy and found myself at sea aboard the USS Gray as a bosun's mate. That meant standing a lot of watch on the bridge, and being on the bridge meant knowing how to report positions of other things based on a 360-degree arc. The idea was to have a 360-degree view o...

I love CRM as a discipline, but I have no illusions about its ability to survive in the cruel world. The reality is that customer relationships are fragile things; they need the right environment to flourish and be profitable. There are a host of things that can scuttle these relationships, and most...

Disasters -- be they man-made or natural, like Hurricane Sandy -- showcase the best in people. Neighbor helps neighbor like never before, people share what they have, and assistance comes from unexpected places. They also showcase people at their worst -- looters, scammers and other lowlifes emerge ...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...

I'm a gigantic San Francisco Giants fan -- so, two World Series Championships in three years has been something of a dream come true. But when I was a kid, my family was devoted to the Oakland A's -- as they won three consecutive championships from 1972-1974. As a much younger adult, I worked for th...

"It is a good thing to follow the first rule of holes: If you are in one, stop digging." It was only 1988 when this nugget of wisdom was first recorded, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. It's one of my favorites, because it has so many applications in the business world. Unfortunately,...

It used to be that your business could provide a basic level of service and your customers would be perfectly happy. Some form of help, delivered at the speed of the business and within the parameters of your company's policies, was usually OK -- and if it wasn't, you could probably get away with...

As a technology journalist, I interact with public relations professionals regularly, to the point where some firms have asked me to speak internally about what journalists are looking for from the companies they cover. Usually, these are straightforward discussions -- journalists want access and th...

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM strategy is that it requires left-brain and right-brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined proces...

About five years ago, CRM analyst and author Paul Greenberg set out to develop a definition for social CRM, or CRM 2.0, as some called it at the time. It was this: "Social CRM is a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, ...

The CRM industry is used to getting a jolt every year from Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual mega-event. Each year, the number of attendees swells -- this year, it's more than 70,000 -- and that makes CEO Marc Benioff's bacchanal the epicenter of the CRM industry for a week. That give Salesfor...

Back in my college days, I worked part-time for an insurance agent. It was an eye-opening job, and not just because it pointed out how many strange and silly ways people could get into car accidents (loose birthday balloons obstructing the driver's vision, concrete poured off an overpass into a bran...

CRM is not itself a technology -- it's a discipline enabled by a technology. But the ideas are so completely enmeshed with technology today that it's almost impossible to talk CRM without lapsing into jargon. That's led to the abduction, abuse and expropriation of technical terms, which often resul...

There's a lot of opportunity for CRM vendors seeking to reach small businesses. While there are 15 million seats of CRM in action today, there are a lot more than 15 million customer-facing workers out there, and the vast majority of them are in small businesses. That's a big opportunity for CRM ...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies ar...