CRM

If you are in London on April 24th, you might want to check out the next monthly VRM Hub meeting. What is VRM, you wonder? For starters, VRM, or vendor relationship management, is the brainchild of Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Project VRM is a ...

Salesforce.com and Google have announced the rollout of Salesforce for Google Apps, a product that combines Google's budding suite of productivity applications with the ubiquitous on-demand customer relationship management application. The two are already collaborators on Salesforce Group Edition fe...

In recent years, First Call Resolution has emerged as a critical element for contact centers looking to become more customer centric. The FCR metric focuses on how well a contact center handles customer requests the first time, and most organizations agree that it is the only true metric that delive...

SAP has signaled its intention to hand the leadership reins to board member and deputy chief executive Leo Apotheker, naming him as co-CEO to serve alongside current chief Henning Kagermann, whose contract expires in 13 months. SAP has traditionally groomed its chief executives in this manner. Kager...

HP has released a number of new offerings targeting the mid-market, including new Linux management tools, remote security access products and -- for companies embarking on a customer relationship management implementation -- two new additions to the HP ProLiant server line that include configuration...

Active is much better than passive in most things, not just CRM. In writing, I am constantly reminded to write in the active voice because active voice is terse, to the point and more intelligible. Passive voice takes perfectly good sentences and turns them into gobbledygook. For example, the active...

SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and i...

Companies now have many options when it comes to packaged applications for CRM, and these applications are helping companies reduce development time, in some cases by as much as 65 percent, which in turn helps save money. These resources are now freed up to explore greater CRM customization that ult...

Every year, Beagle Research Group scours the tech landscape in search of a few good companies that are developing technologies not only novel to the customer relationship management industry, but also likely to reinvent business processes in their particular niches. Denis Pombriant, principal at the...

Having your customers comment on your policies, products or employment practices is one thing. Having them suggest ideas for improving said policies and products -- in a public forum where participants can vote on these ideas, no less -- is an entirely different matter. How well a company can handl...

Retailers in Japan and South Korea have been using image capture technology for several years now, and with the growing base of smartphones, companies in the U.S. are rolling out a wide range of new mobile applications, including some that use interactive digital symbols captured in photos to provid...

Avaya has introduced Intelligence Presence, a new software application that gives users -- both in corporate environments and call centers -- the ability to view so-called presence information across multiple sources. For example, it would allow a contact center rep engaged with a caller to see if a...

Microsoft's annual lollapalooza of a conference, Convergence, has come and gone, but the blogs it triggered live on. The team behind Microsoft CRM Live -- the on-demand application scheduled to be released later this summer -- has been particularly prolific, with "how-to" posts on the company's late...

The front office meets the back office at the Web 2.0 enterprise portal. The enterprise 2.0 portal is a single accessible location intended to consolidate resources and serve up data from systems throughout an organization so that each "touch" a company has with its customers, prospects, partners an...

Microsoft is on schedule to release Dynamics CRM Live this summer, CEO Steve Ballmer assured the crowd at the Convergence 2008 keynote address. The application's features and functions are, for the most part, familiar to users and partners. They are largely the same as the Dynamics CRM 4.0 applicati...