Trends

Amazon, Google and Apple have suspended contractor review of consumer recordings following disclosures that the devices are nearly always listening and have captured personal, business and other delicate human interactions. Consumers using smart speakers and digital assistant apps from Amazon and Go...

Video traffic is expected to make up 82 percent of all Internet traffic by 2022. This spike coincides with the increased production and distribution of videos throughout every industry. With this in mind, it is important to remember that the value of video marketing for brands is as old as video its...

The road to e-commerce business success is hardly a straight and narrow one. Every step in a business lifecycle -- from launch and growth to scale and maturity -- is fraught with peaks, valleys, bumps, hazards and roadblocks. Your plan and reality are usually very different! When reflecting on how c...

E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass $735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactio...

I have been warning about online companies invading our privacy for years. Some very large companies now are under scrutiny by the U.S. government. As the pressure increases, Amazon seems to have come up with a creative solution. It has been offering to pay users $10 for permission to track them. In...

Oracle just published some commissioned research that gives us insights into both CRM generally and the times we live in. A study of more than 1,100 people across several generations found the following: Almost half of consumers have blacklisted a brand as the result of a bad experience; more than o...

Congratulations! You've succeeded in driving online traffic to your product page. So why aren't customers actually clicking 'Add to Cart'? Making successful e-commerce conversions, or transforming your website's visitors into actual paying customers, isn't an easy feat. Expertise on doing it well an...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score, handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these m...

Finance and accounting technology became the No. 1 software budgeting priority for small and mid-sized businesses, according to a survey conducted last year. Almost 54 percent of respondents were budgeting to invest in accounting tools in the next 12 to 24 months, with those in the retail industry s...

The DoJ is opening antitrust investigations into some of the biggest tech companies around, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and others. This is nothing that either the public or the companies involved should fret about. It is part of the evolution of the tech sector. We've been through this kind ...

It was bound to happen. Salesforce was going to China at some point, and it announced that action this week saying it was partnering with Alibaba. There are so many ways to read this, but I don't have the filters to resist comparing the announcement to what Robin Williams once said about cocaine: "C...

Amazon is keenly interested in protecting the intellectual property rights of its third-party sellers because the company depends upon them for their long-term success. In a recent newsletter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained that third-party sellers currently make up a majority of th...

CRM systems are the lifeblood of many businesses, and the volume of customer data within them keeps growing as companies digitize more processes. That data often is not being used to its full potential, beyond basic reporting on sales metrics and marketing campaigns. With the advent of mainstream ML...

Technology has enabled and empowered today's customers and as a result, they are totally in control of the sales process. This means that the quality of the customer experience is a determining factor in whether a sales organization succeeds or fails. Consider, for instance, that more than half of c...