CRM

According to a study by Accenture, 55 percent of companies lack a single view of their customers. CRM may be able to solve that problem, but the study found an even bigger problem that traditional CRM doesn't touch: 68 percent of companies can't measure the return on investment of marketing campaign...

What makes channel, sales and service partnerships messy? Contracts, lots of them, for office leases, for equipment, even to prove the partnerships' existence to local, state and national governments. Problems coordinating all these commitments -- buried in contracts that are stuffed into filing cab...

Social networking software and Web-based tools have proliferated in the past few years. These networks operate by creating a tree of contacts beginning with the user, followed by the friends and associates she or he extends an invitation to, the friends they extend an invitation to, and so on. The c...

Too often channel strategies ranging from the most tactical and short-term to the most strategic and multiyear fail. Success or failure of a channel management strategy has nothing to do with the time horizon and everything to do with perspective, timing and getting away from a "one-and-done" menta...

Having gobbled up JD Edwards and PeopleSoft, Oracle yesterday held a coming out party for "Project Fusion," its plan to meld the products of the three companies and hold onto the customer base for which it paid $10.5 billion. "The big news is that Oracle is not forcing customers to migrate," Evan Qu...

Hoping to gain traction with PeopleSoft customers unnerved by Oracle's recent takeover, SAP has acquired TomorrowNow, a leading PeopleSoft support and maintenance vendor. With the acquisition of Bryant, Texas-based TomorrowNow, SAP is working to insinuate itself into the enterprise software upgrade ...

As database services become increasingly commoditized, the value of databases depends more and more upon advanced consumer analytics. The technology exists both for aggregating data to input into analyses and for acting on results of such analyses in a multitude of ways and through a variety of chan...

While January 1 is a great mile-marker in any business timeline, the urgency for change needs to be dictated by honest assessments rather than by the flip of calendar pages. We all have enough to do already, and no one wants another action item list. That's why resolutions can turn out to be counte...

Just as many companies that adopted CRM applications years ago often failed to use the data they collected, call centers that tape inbound calls for regulatory compliance and quality assurance often lack the time and the staff to listen to the calls and learn from them. Enter speech analytics softwa...

Traditionally, e-mail program measurement focuses on overt consumer responses: We know that a customer has opened, clicked, perhaps even transacted -- but unless a coupon redemption is involved, our knowledge of why a response has occurred is often limited. With the focus in measuring e-mail progra...

Hoping to expand its customer base while also enhancing the so-called front office services it already provides, Siebel Systems said it will buy e-billing service provider eDocs in a deal worth US$115 million. Siebel will take control of Natick, Massachusetts-based eDoc's 180 employees and gain acce...

Now that e-commerce is no longer a novelty, most corporations recognize some basic realities about online sales: Building and maintaining a Web site is no walk in the park; not all browsers are equally interested in buying; and when it comes to sales, slick Web copy can't replace the human touch. T...

We live in a data-rich world. Data is everywhere you look, and used in so many ways -- to build e-mails, generate lists, create target groups, form reports, even to construct the foundation of a valid strategy. Yet data remains an elusive and stubborn beast, and it can become a point of contention b...

Loyalty card programs operated by grocery and drug retailers have been focused on rewarding shoppers for isolated activities. Typically, retailers dole out extra points for buying Brand A today or discount the price of Brand B during a given week and not much more. But now these loyalty programs are...

In the last U.S. presidential election the candidates clashed on the issue of privatizing the Social Security system. I'll leave the political debate to the professional politicians, but I would like to address this matter from the standpoint of millions of U.S. workers. Many of them are already b...