CRM

The past year seemed like one of marking time in CRM. The trends are all well spelled out: Social CRM will become a critical tool, service has grown in importance as customer acquisition has become more difficult, and the value of mobile CRM is becoming painfully apparent. So why aren't we acting on...

Self-service is a concept that has been evolving. In decades past, self-service meant providing a detailed manual. The downside, of course, was that a printed manual could not be updated dynamically and was costly to distribute. In the late 1990s, with the advent of the Web and content management, s...

LiveOps, a contact center software and call center outsourcing provider, recently announced six new features designed to enhance its contact center cloud solution. The enhancements include Call Flow Authoring Studio, configurable recording, real-time configurable dashboards, call visualization repor...

This Christmas, I was sitting around with the in-laws after the presents were opened, when my father-in-law asked me a question that has probably been nagging him for a long time. "What is it that you do?" he said. Well, I'm a writer, first off, but what is it that I write about? CRM. Explaining wha...

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure, and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception. On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well. After bottoming in the middle of the summer, the software companie...

With helpdesk, knowledge management, customer portal, email auto response, project management, and mobile access capabilities, Soffront prides itself on being a one-stop shop for customer service solutions. "The customer service solution we offer is pretty comprehensive," said Manu Das, CEO of Soffr...

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

FuzeDigital characterizes its customer service solution as social business software that uniquely blends comprehensive multichannel support and online community technologies. "The Fuze Suite is a blending of SCRM and E2.0 technologies," said Chuck Van Court, president of FuzeDigital. The community k...

Zoho has enhanced its CRM app with new accounting and telephony functionality via integration with QuickBooks and several telephony systems. Zoho CRM for QuickBooks and Zoho PhoneBridge -- which hooks into PBX systems from Asterisk, Avaya, Elastix, and Trixbox -- each take about 20 to 30 minutes to ...

A few weeks ago, Computer History Museum's upcoming exhibit "Revolution: the First 2000 years of Computing." I was there to see a model of the SAGE computing facility, but I also reveled in seeing pieces of ENIAC, JOHNNIAC and a host of other early computers. As I toured the still-under-construction...

It's amazing to me how we overuse words. Bothering to notice is an occupational hazard of the writing life, I suppose. For instance, consider the word "unique," which means one of a kind. If you add "very" or any other modifier to it, you get mush. Today's word might be "amazing." There is entir...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides customers with a complete customer service solution, including marketing, service automation and sales capabilities. Microsoft currently offers Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as either an on-premise option or a partner-hosted version; Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a ve...

Email marketing has been a mainstay marketing tool for 10 years or more. When social media's clout with consumers became apparent -- Facebook now has 500 million users and counting -- there was much talk about whether email marketing was even still relevant. Email marketing providers responded quick...

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me...

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff devoted much of his keynote speech at Dreamforce on Wednesday on lashing out at Microsoft. "There are forces out there that want to stop us," Benioff told his audience at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco. "We're trying to transform our industry, and when you ...