CRM

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. Aberdeen completed a benchmark survey in May that examines the trend of Fortune 100 Best-in-Class c...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

LucidEra, a provider of on-demand analytics for sales professionals and managers, is bringing marketing into its fold with the addition of LucidEra Lead Insight. This is an analytics application with more than 65 prebuilt metrics focused on marketing performance -- specifically, how effective the ma...

Last week, and for many other weeks, I discussed CRM 2.0, but today I am thinking more about the world beyond 2.0. Maybe it will be CRM 3.0, or maybe some wise guy like Paul Greenberg will change the numbering and call it "CRM 20xx," who knows? My reading and research tells me that there will be a n...

Google and Salesforce.com have rolled out a Force.com toolkit for Google Data application programming interfaces that's designed to help developers integrate Google Apps data and content with Force.com's database, logic and workflow capabilities. These open source tools and services, which are model...

The Google-Salesforce.com partnership grows ever more intertwined. The latest development occurred Monday when Salesforce.com released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform that provides access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code, allowing developers to integrate ...

Amdocs and IBM have entered into an original equipment manufacturer agreement in which Amdocs will embed the IBM DB2 Data Server and the IBM Optim Data Growth application in its CRM product line. It is the first OEM agreement IBM has inked involving Optim, Steve Tallant, senior manager of product li...

The audience for video games is zealous but fickle, and because of that, game studios have a unique challenge in attracting and retaining customers. While the tools they use are similar to those of other industries, studios have learned to be creative in the marketing tactics that support the effort...

I was at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week. Good show, nice people, well run, and it was held at a swanky new Westin on the waterfront. It got me thinking, though, about the "two-dot-oh" phenomenon and how badly it needs a rethink. See, the problem -- whether we're dealing with Enter...

So you've decided to buy your solution instead of build one. This doesn't mean that it's easy to choose which product, or even what kind of solution to purchase. Take the choice between installing software on your own equipment -- the "on-premise" solution vs. leasing a solution that runs on the ven...

Despite repeated pleas of "Do you hear me now?" from customers the world over, few companies have done much more than turn a deaf ear. As a result, consumer frustration is at an all-time high while brand loyalty has hit an all-time low. The technologies that were supposed to open lines of communicat...

Oracle has released the third in a series of small, plug-and-play Web 2.0 tools designed to enhance specific features of its customer relationship management platform. Oracle Sales Prospector, previewed Monday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, recommends prospective leads, rating the likel...

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfie...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the r...

As a company grows in size, various information sharing challenges appear that can stifle that growth. One such speed bump sets in a few years into the growth cycle, when the company expands and each department develops its own information needs. That problem is called "Islanditis." The system that ...