Many shoppers would be just fine if they could never set foot in a retail store again. After all, everything is available online: books, groceries, pizza, household necessities, even big ticket items like mattresses and cars. However, 15 percent of people worldwide have a disability that affects their daily life, and many retailers are unaware that their websites are not always accessible to them.

7-Eleven has begun accepting Apple Pay, and Google Pay at participating U.S. stores. The stores will add support for the services throughout this month. The convenience store chain has more than 66,000 stores in 17 countries worldwide; 11,800 are in the United States. "A 7-Eleven is a 'hit-and-get' kind of experience," noted Michael Jude, program manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan.

Well, here's one Dreamforce idea I never heard of. A group of groups opposed to the Trump administration's immigrant detention and separation policies has announced that it will picket Dreamforce. It already has called on speakers attending the event to pull out. A long time ago, a very underfunded Salesforce marketing team tried a similar stunt, disrupting Siebel user group meetings.

Square on Monday announced that Cash App users could buy and sell bitcoin in all 50 U.S. states. Square began testing Cash App's bitcoin purchasing option last fall and officially launched the option early this year. However, it was not available in four states -- New York, Georgia, Hawaii and Wyoming -- because of their more restrictive regulation of bitcoin transactions.

CVS Health'a retail MinuteClinic on Wednesday announced MinuteClinic Video Visits, a new virtual healthcare offering designed to assist people with minor illnesses and injuries, skin conditions, and other wellness needs. The telehealth offering will provide 24/7 access to healthcare services via mobile devices. It is available for both Android and iOS in nine states and Washington, D.C.

Freshworks has secured $100 million in funding from Accel and Sequoia Capital India with the participation of CapitalG. That brings the total amount of capital raised since the firm's 2010 launch to $250 million. "The new funding will be used to invest in our platform and to continue scaling internationally," said Arvind Parthiban, Freshworks' director of marketing.

Photo-hosting service Photobucket in May quietly restored third-party hosting of photos, reversing its unpopular year-old policy that required users to pay nearly $400 for hosting privileges. Many irate users claimed their photos were "taken hostage." Hosted photos on blogs, forums and other sites were replaced by an image of a dial indicating the hosted data quota had been surpassed.

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader. As individuals, teens had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of helpful information, the teens tended to look down on it, or even become hostile toward the messenger.

B2B customer support firm TeamSupport has added sentiment analysis technology, powered by IBM's Watson, to its customer relationship platform. The new tech provides automatic text analysis of email or chat responses to assess how a customer feels, so customer support teams can prioritize and personalize their outreach efforts. It includes predefined categories such as "satisfied" and "frustrated."

If you operate an e-commerce company, the world is at your fingertips, and global markets offer the enticing promise of increased visibility and sales. "International expansion is a great way to mitigate risk and reliance on a single market for all your sales," noted Chris Vincent, global CEO of Practicology. How to get started may seem murky, though.

Amazon has opened Prime Wardrobe to all Prime members, after beta-testing the service on an invitation-only basis for a year. Prime Wardrobe is included in Amazon Prime memberships at no additional charge. "This is going to be an immensely valuable service for Amazon which will increase consumers' confidence in buying apparel from the company," said Nikki Baird, VP for retail innovation at Aptos.

A number of trends have taken hold in the CRM space, according toHubSpot Sales Exec Brian Signorelli. "One of the first things that stands out to me is that, ironically, despite all the money that is spent on CRM overall, sales reps aren't spending that much time there," he said. "Instead, reps are using all these tools that are connected in some way to CRM, like email or sales acceleration."

Worldwide CRM software revenues totaled $39.5 billion in 2017, eclipsing DBMS, the former market leader. DBMS had worldwide revenues of $36.8 billion last year, and it "has been the biggest software segment for years, noted Julian Poulter, research director at Gartner. CRM software will be the fastest-growing software market in 2018, with a growth rate of 16 percent, Gartner predicted.

Inbenta has released new APIs and SDKs that let enterprises customize chatbots. The company offers an artificial intelligence-powered natural language search and conversational platform. The new APIs and SDKs facilitate a number of chatbot capabilities: intent detection, decision trees, transactional intelligence, Content Digest and seamless escalation.

Starting a new online service "was a great business opportunity to combine nutrition with technology," said Jackie Elnahar, CEO of TelaDIetitian. "I'm also very passionate about making nutrition information mainstream. I don't think seeing a registered dietitian should be a luxury. Anyone who needs to see a dietitian should see one, and it should be easy to."

Jacada has released V. 10.0 of its Jacada Interact platform, which supports its new Autonomous Customer Experience Suite. The CX Suite lets enterprises design and automate assisted-service or self-service business flows, and then use them in multiple channels to standardize and optimize customer service interactions. The Autonomous CX Suite supports five Jacada solutions.

Customers often make investments in their relationships with the businesses they choose to patronize. There is plenty of competition, so companies must pay attention. It's only when a company respects and wants a customer as much as the customer wants the company that things will go well, and a long-term brand relationship will be created. However, too many companies focus only on themselves.

Salesforce has launched Salesforce Essentials, a collection of intelligent apps targeting SMBs. Built on the Salesforce Lightning framework, Essentials offers a consumer-like experience optimized for any device. Relevant information is displayed on one unified console, with drag-and-drop customization. "Essentials is easy to try, set up, use and maintain," said Salesforce SVP Marie Rosecrans.

Automation. Robots. Technology taking our jobs. I defy you to pick up a business magazine and avoid this topic -- it will be in there somewhere. Here's another theme you won't be able to avoid: the need to focus on the customer experience. These two trends are in tension much of the time. They don't have to be, but most businesses seem determined to focus on themselves instead of the customer.

Companies are run by people. Some do a great job of putting the customer first and growing, which ultimately rewards investors. Others don't. Some first focus on investors and numbers, simply not caring about or taking care of the customer. That approach can have a serious and long-term negative impact on the company. Following are several examples of what some companies are doing right and wrong.

"We're seeing a digital transformation take place, where companies are moving their contact centers to the cloud," noted Dan Burkland, president of Five9. "There are two key criteria for a contact center -- there's the CRM and the contact center infrastructure, and those two really go hand-in-hand. You bring a call, chat, text or email into the center, and you have to look for an agent who's available and properly skilled to handle such an interaction."

This is a call for resistance that has nothing to do with politics. It's coming from someone who unwittingly walked into a virtual jail cell that was disguised as a DirecTV contract. I'll be behind bars for another 23 months, and I'm counting the days. Please don't take this as a rant or as an attempt to pressure AT&T, DirecTV's parent company, into appeasing me. That ship has sailed.

The new battleground in enterprise software is likely to be the software platform. This is not to say that analytics and security are not important, but they are being handled in different ways. Security is being handled in ways that address both hardware and software vulnerabilities, but these things aren't what customers or consumers spend their days thinking about.

SMBs should "be proactive and ready to help [customers] right at the moment they need it," said Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift. Companies must streamline support systems to resolve issues faster and more efficiently, she said. An up-to-date knowledge base enables instant self-service, "but SMBs must also offer channels for customers to communicate directly with support agents."

Cali Group has announced a pilot program using kiosks equipped with facial recognition software and AI to ease the ordering process for regular customers at the Pasadena, California, location of its international CaliBurger restaurant chain. The kiosks use NEC's NeoFace facial recognition software to identify registered customers and pull up their order preferences and loyalty accounts.

Uber works great -- until it stops working, leaving your kid walking home alone on a cold winter night. Wireless technology opens up new avenues for innovation and excitement, with companies like Uber and Lyft. Most of the time, their technologies work just fine, but don't let your guard down. Prepare for the moment when something goes wrong, because eventually something always goes wrong.

Given how many big names have fallen over the last few weeks due to sexual misconduct, abuse and harassment, you'd think I'd name 2017 as the year of power abuse. However, while I know a lot of folks think the issue is dying down, I don't see that at all. There are entire industries that have yet to be hit by this, and Congress hasn't even finished cleaning house or putting in place rules to prevent this activity.

Genesys on Monday unveiled a new integration between its customer management solution, Genesys PureCloud, and Amazon Lex at the annual AWS re:Invent conference. The integration will help businesses build and maintain conversational IVR flows that route callers more efficiently, by using artificial intelligence to recognize not only what consumers are saying, but also their intent.

Customers prefer human interactions to IVR systems or other automated customer service offerings, according to a new report from B2B ratings firm Clutch. Businesses need to move carefully when outsourcing customer service operations, the research also suggested, because there are big differences depending on a number of factors, including how familiar reps are with the local language.

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it was preparing a plugin to its popular Messenger platform that will allow a website's visitors to chat with a human or bot without leaving the location. Customer Chat is one of a number of changes in the version 2.2 update of Messenger platform revealed at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. The chat plugin will be available on desktop and mobile devices.