Customer Service

It always happens this way. A market erupts or transitions to something new or it goes the way of the dodo and you miss the key turning point. Looking back, though, you can spot the telltale signs of disruption. People like me, who try to forecast these great events, have the reliability of a dartbo...

Zendesk has rolled out a new analytics and data visualization tool that sits on top of its flagship customer service platform. Called "Zendesk Insights," it is available to the company's Plus and Enterprise users. "One thing we have been hearing from our customers is that they want more access to th...

Virgin Atlantic recently announced the expansion of a pilot project in which flight attendants use Google Glass to meet and greet customers. For the initial project, the airline equipped the concierge staff in its Upper Class Wing at London's Heathrow airport with Google Glass so they would have eas...

Amazon unveiled its Fire Phone this week, sparking wide interest, if not acclaim. The Fire Phone comes with some innovative features: a dynamic perspective display made possible by six cameras that track the user's head and eye movements; and Firefly, an intelligent assistant that can give Apple's S...

Target's customers jumped en masse onto social media Sunday night after technical malfunctions at its stores around the country resulted in long checkout lines and, in some cases, inability to make purchases with store-branded credit cards. The episode struck a nerve with customers, not only because...

Most companies of any size have a CRM application. Every company says it wants to build great relationships with its customers. Almost as many say they want to be "customer-centric." However, as any customer can tell you, the companies that attain these goals are few and far between. What is it that...

The idea of the subscription economy is not new -- at least not to anyone who's familiar with the idea of software as a service -- but it's an idea that can sneak up on businesses. Many in the SaaS space started as more traditional vendors that saw subscriptions as simply a different delivery mechan...

SAP has updated its cloud-based CRM portfolio with the rollout last week of three industry-specific applications. These applications, designed for the insurance, utilities and retail sectors, are the first cloud-based verticals for CRM, aside from a broader-based application with functionality tailo...

Amazon's Mayday button has intrigued CRM industry users as well as consumers. Introduced about a year ago, Mayday is a button customers can press on their mobile devices to get service or tech help. Salesforce.com last month debuted its version of Mayday. Now other tech providers are introducing var...

Traditional knowledge management programs focus on distilling knowledge into systems of record, which end up being underutilized for a number of reasons, chief among them because they cannot contain the long tail of knowledge. Conversely, nowhere are successful KM programs as impactful as where they...

Salesforce.com last week launched Salesforce1 Service Cloud SOS, a tool that allows companies to offer service via a mobile app. It consists of a button embedded in an app's interface, and as the name "SOS" suggests, it is meant for customers to press when they need help or assistance. Then, dependi...

If you aren't sold on marketing automation yet, there's another reason to consider it before you end up down two touchdowns with three minutes to play. We usually think of marketing in its traditional role of new customer outreach, which is good but no longer enough. As much as 80 percent of revenue...

inContact has released its first cloud contact center software update for the year. Version 14.1 contains a new two-way SMS channel, more refined automated call-routing, deeper integration with Salesforce.com and Oracle, and new APIs that give enterprise users the ability to customize their own appl...

The rise of Internet commerce sounded a death knell for small businesses. Large e-tailers could wield massive buying power, had less overhead than brick-and-mortar stores, and could appeal to customers in new ways. They could collect customer data in the course of doing business, and turn around and...

After racking up a number of successes, T-Mobile clearly made a misstep earlier this year, when it promoted Apple's iPhone 5 to its BlackBerry customers. BlackBerry this week announced it would not renew T-Mobile's license to sell its products, which expires at the end of April. Now T-Mobile is now ...