CRM

Intelliverse has rolled out a new cloud-based tool that monitors social media for brand mentions and responds when appropriate. IntelliBuzz is simple enough that a company with minimal IT resources in-house -- that is, a computer and an Internet connection -- can manage this outreach just using the ...

OPINION

3 Bad Habits to Unlearn for SCRM Success

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said ...

LiveOps this week debuted LiveOps Engage, a browser-based desktop agent app that centralizes myriad channels -- phone, email, live chat, SMS, Twitter and Facebook -- on one screen. The screen also displays the history of past interactions with the customer. "This release is bringing together all of ...

OPINION

Context: Customer Data's Secret Sauce

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales orga...

CRMCulture is preparing to release its latest iteration of Productivity Pack for Pivotal CRM. On one hand, it might seem counterintuitive that Pivotal would need a productivity pack. "Pivotal is a great platform," said Steve Roch, CRMCulture's founder and president. "It is pure .Net on the front and...

"People buy your story." Hearing that said from the stage at DemandCon 2011 by Forrester's Jeff Ernst made my withered writer's heart grow two sizes (to paraphrase Dr. Seuss). Covering the technology industry has made me an unwilling witness to a range of crimes against language, ranging from tortur...

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball spring training, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oa...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Zoho Update Gooses Sales Productivity

Although Zoho routinely updates its CRM application every few months or so, its latest release is far from routine, according to Zoho Evangelist Raju Vegesna, who described it as a step forward in collaborative productivity. "Essentially we added three new features, all of which focused on improving...

INSIGHTS

Moving to the Front Office

For a long time, many people have been predicting the demise of ERP, and while I share those sentiments, a demise can take many forms. The one we all understand well is the crash-and-burn variety, but that's not the only and perhaps not even the predominant approach. The crash is at best the final s...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Zurmo: Playing Games Is Serious Business

Last summer, open source CRM provider Zurmo threw its hat into the CRM ring with a beta version of its particular take on the hot new gamification software category. The theory is simple: CRM, especially sales force automation, has notoriously poor user adoption figures. Why not use some of the fu...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Salesforce.com Pilots Tech for Team-Building

Salesforce.com rolled out an integration between Sales Cloud and Work.com this week. The integration is currently available in pilot and will be made generally available to all Salesforce.com customers in the first half of 2013. To understand the value-add the integration offers, one first has to b...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Coremotives Connects the Marketing Dots

CoreMotives, a Silverpop company, has launched a new integration that ties revenue-tracking capabilities embedded in its CRM system to the Ticketmaster sales application. The upshot is that teams that use Ticketmaster to market tickets can also easily track which campaigns actually led to a sale. In...

OPINION

Loyal Customers Are Not to Be Trifled With

As I've said in the past, CRM's biggest benefit is in extending your customers' relationship with you for as long as you can. New customers are great, but returning customers are profitable -- and profit is what you're really after, right? Thus, it makes sense to foster loyalty in these customers....

It is a truism that consumers' smartphones, armed with a slew of sophisticated apps, function as mini computers. That being the case, smartphones programmed with sales force marketing and productivity applications have almost become sophisticated enough to be compared to mainframe computing. They're...

Microsoft next month will roll out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that will have a new user interface, integration with Yammer, Skype and Office 2013, and cross-browser support. In general, the theme of tight integration with other Microsoft technologies runs through the release, said S...

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