CRM

Salesforce.com has announced it is making its social tool Chatter available for mobile devices within the next several months. Chatter is a real-time social collaboration application and platform for the enterprise, allowing employees to create profiles, and send feeds and status updates about proje...

I spent an interesting day at Harvard Law School last week at the invitation of Doc Searls for a conference on the intersection of CRM and VRM, or vendor relationship management. Doc's involved with the Berkman Center at Harvard, which sponsors research into issues of law and the Internet, among ot...

Salesforce.com is a top provider of CRM software in large part because its application is intuitive and easy to use and deploy. It is interesting, therefore, that many Salesforce.com users are opting for Salesforce.com Mobile because it is even easier and more intuitive to use than the desktop versi...

Social CRM has earned widespread appreciation as a real business tool. It's no longer an idea or a theory or a hunch. However, it's still a new idea, and many are approaching it with trepidation because its impact on the bottom line is not yet well understood. I don't believe there's a single set of...

A funny thing happened to open source CRM over the last few years: It stopped being all about open source and started being about delivering CRM -- at least, for some vendors. That shift makes sense. Customers of CRM products want applications that meet their business needs, not their desire to have...

Sybase has only recently formally entered the SAP corporate family. However, the two companies have collaborated on software integration projects for years: hence, the introduction of Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM, a native iPhone app. When designing the app, Sybase took the iPhone user needs into...

Zoho is poised, possibly this week, to take its BlackBerry CRM app out of private beta and make it generally available. It will be followed in the coming weeks by an iPhone app, which is in development now, said Raju Vegesna, evangelist for Zoho. The interfaces of the iPhone and BlackBerry apps are ...

This year, the CRM Evolution event was true to its name. The organization of the show reflected the way thinking about CRM has changed over the years, with a breakdown into three tracks: CRM, Social CRM and Deployment Strategies. Really, the tracks parallel the state of CRM for its users -- or rathe...

Cloud computing is breaking through to the general public. Unfortunately, it's only the most watered down version that the public is hearing about. Last week I listened to a program on NPR that briefly discussed the cloud and some "expert" who worked for a general circulation magazine was happily t...

There's a slew of CRM applications heading to mobile app format, available at online venues such as Apple's App Store and the Google Apps Marketplace. Social CRM, in particular, is on the vanguard as vendors optimize their applications for mobile use. One example is BatchBlue Software, a company tar...

As companies continue their search for the elusive "360-degree view" of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networks and other content providers about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales an...

CRM is a complex thing. It involves understanding your customers and your own business -- two difficult things to fully grasp under any circumstances -- and then using technology to convert that understanding into a positive impact on your business. Customers, and to a lesser extent your business, a...

The new age of sustainability is like a three-legged stool, and over the last couple of weeks I've discussed my ideas for the first two legs, including customers and energy or transportation. The third leg involves products, and this idea takes some thinking to fully comprehend. Most of us don't th...

The use of analytics in contact centers enables management to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, ...

Every business needs to understand its audience in order to put together a social strategy that makes sense. A one-size-fits-all template fits no one in the social era. Still, there are some things that you don't do. You don't use social data to creep out your customers, for instance, by revealing t...