CRM

Companies allocate significant resources to customer satisfaction measurement and improvement. Wayne Hoyer, chairman of the marketing department at University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, says satisfaction with product or service quality has a strong and positive impact on customers...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

We've been having a debate in the graduate-level International Marketing course I am teaching regarding whether or not you can buy your way into entirely new markets through high levels of R & D spending. The knee-jerk reaction is to say the bigger the spending in R & D, the higher the inno...

OK, so here we are a week later and what do we know for sure? Well, lots of things. First, Oracle now has seven assorted CRM packages from its acquisitions and those of its acquired companies -- if you count Siebel. The issue with counting Siebel is that the deal is not done yet. Don't look for ...

Often overlooked and considered inferior in the past, so close to greatness yet so robbed of it, called focused to the point of being boring, at times rocked with controversy, and when considered seriously, always in a discounted way due to some statistical controversy, the parallels between SAP's C...

On Monday, Oracle announced its US$5.85 billion acquisition of Siebel Systems, its largest competitor and tag-team vendor to many of its customers. The acquisition came as no surprise to industry experts, although the timing of it preceded some experts' expectations. "We were actually a bit surpris...

Oracle has agreed to buy Siebel Systems in a deal worth US$5.8 billion, continuing an acquisition spree that began with the controversial takeover of PeopleSoft and has included a number of smaller companies since. Oracle said the deal would make it the world's top vendor of CRM software, surpassing...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

Today's organizations increasingly experience the creep from the general tracking of customer contacts and responses by CRM to the general tracking of marketing activities and their returns by the CFO. Marketers have to look at the bigger picture, at their contribution to the entire enterprise, rat...

When Rust-Oleum Consumer Brands Canada decided to deploy a business intelligence package, the company was only looking to get its monthly paper sales data in a weekly electronic format. A little more than a year later, they're using BI to gain a competitive advantage in such tangibles as shelf place...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

According to a study published by CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking sales and marketing excellence, companies that excelled at sales knowledge management saw the number of sales reps meeting or exceeding their quotas increase by 25 percent. Based on this statistic, one ...

As one of the primary functional prongs in CRM, the marketing department should use coordinated customer data to advance the sophistication, even the science, of its practices. Eastman Kodak, Rochester, N.Y., drew customer awareness, perception, satisfaction and purchase information from decades of...

If bad data is put into a data warehouse, companies risk what Tony Fisher, president and general manager at DataFlux, described as "code, load and explode." "If the data from a source system doesn't meet the expected qualities for that data, the loading process may fail, causing the company to stop ...

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been around since World War II, when the British Royal Air Force affixed tags to planes as a way to distinguish friend from foe, but it wasn't until 2003, when giant discount retailer Wal-Mart announced that it would require the tags on all shipments f...