Customers

When Oracle agreed early in September to buy former rival Siebel Systems for US$5.85 billion, some questioned how long Siebel would continue its CRM OnDemand service. That question came to light because Oracle rival IBM plays a big role in the on-demand service. Yesterday, Siebel responded with the ...

Companies allocate significant resources to customer satisfaction measurement and improvement. Wayne Hoyer, chairman of the marketing department at University of Texas-Austin's McCombs School of Business, says satisfaction with product or service quality has a strong and positive impact on customers...

At the heart of any customer relationship is trust. Knowing how healthy that trust is in your company and its execution starts with knowing the expectations your prospects and customers have.

As goods and services increasingly become commoditized on a global scale, companies are looking for new ways to reduce costs, customer churn, and make the most of their existing customer base. In order to whittle down their overhead, many companies are looking at outsourcing their service delivery g...

Consumer satisfaction with wireless phone service providers has slipped significantly over the last year, according to an annual study released by J.D. Power and Associates yesterday. Overall, satisfaction fell 10 percent compared to 2004. That's the largest year-over-year change in satisfaction sin...

Breaking the rut of complacency when it comes to new product development and getting the true voice of their customers reverberating through their future channels, sales, service, pricing, and product strategies does take hard work, and it's much more than just calling up your favorite customers and...

There's an undercurrent running through many conversations these days with professional colleagues: To blog or not to blog? That is the question. Even deeper than that quandary is the fact that many business professionals, convinced they have valuable things to say, routinely get blog envy if they d...

Extroverted, loud and direct, your sales force is a living case study about whether CRM drives sales excellence or not. The highest achieving sales people -- I like to think of them as sales warriors because the really do fight to win business every day -- are the lifeblood of any company. Convers...

Today, the first place your customers look for help is online. Gartner Group has estimated that capturing a new customer is 4 to 10 times more expensive than providing good service to an existing one. They additionally said over 68 percent of customers defect due to poor service. In a more recent st...

Despite 2004 marketing budgets estimated at US$9.45 billion by the American Bankers Association, 93 percent of banks do not treat inbound consumer inquiries as sales opportunities. They spend money on marketing, but for what? Marketing's purpose is to sell more, to more people, more often, at highe...

Service has been restored on a damaged telecommunications cable that links India and Pakistan to the West, but not before the international service outage caused widespread financial damage, most especially to the cell center industry. Service on the cable was restored on Friday. The cable was damag...

Damage to the undersea telecommunications cable SEA-ME-WE3 (SMW3) Monday initially disrupted most of Pakistan's international telephone and Internet connections, but the outage spread to India, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Djibouti as repairs were started yesterday. Call centers in India using...

In a move designed to quickly expand its call center capacity and productivity, Vonage today announced its sales and service subsidiary, Vonage America, has chosen Avaya's SIP-based telephony and contact center solutions. Vonage, a provider of broadband telephony in North America, hopes the move wil...

In the recent cases of customer data sales by bank employees, employers came face to face with their biggest security challenge -- trusting their employees. "It's pretty much the toughest security problem to deal with," says Rich Mogull, research vice president at Gartner, Phoenix. At the end of May...

During the last downturn nearly every enterprise software vendor stayed alive for a quarter or more due to their support and maintenance revenue streams. Today, support and maintenance comprises the majority of revenue for many CRM vendors, both public and private. Existing customers are carrying t...