Customers

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate. A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-bus...

May I take your order please?" These sometimes-garbled words uttered through a speaker at your local drive-through restaurant may soon originate from a different city or even another state thanks to new customer-relationship-management technology. Hardee's -- part of CKE Restaurants Inc. in Carpint...

In the economic clouds of recent years, marketers discovered a silver lining in multichannel marketing. Numerous reports and case studies showed that online marketing of big-ticket items such as automobiles improved offline purchases. In recent research, MSN and research partners the Advertising Res...

Phishing is one of the most significant threats to online consumers, and as the incidence of this type of fraud increases, so does the perpetrators' average take. Phishers who lucked out and lured several customers of a British bank into false communications recently made off with an average of 5,00...

Phishing as a way of pilfering private consumer information has become a major security concern. What started as fraudulent e-mail requesting personal information has morphed into sophisticated phony eBay transactions and fake online bill-pay opportunities. Consumer fears, combined with the someti...

Blogging is quickly becoming part of the online lexicon of marketing, sales and support organizations as companies look for better ways to connect with customers. The Pew Internet and American Life Project published a report in January based on two blog surveys. The report is free and can be downl...

Vendors of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services have made big promises to corporate America and consumers about the cost savings to come from VoIP. The possibilities of VoIP savings have stirred excitement even among jaded CFOs. But the adoption of a technology that accommodates data and t...

Interactive marketing has come a long way. In 2005 it will appear more often not only on the big screen -- the computer screen, that is -- but on the little screen of the mobile phone as well. With a cell phone the constant companion to more than 170 million Americans, there's a lot of potential. A ...

Since the end of the U.S. presidential campaign, the issue of outsourcing has ceased to be daily fodder for television news outlets. But it remains an issue that many American corporations struggle with on a daily basis. Aside from controversy surrounding the loss of American jobs, companies must d...

Online ad spending is poised to grow by as much as 30 percent in 2005, according to recent surveys conducted by Deutsche Bank in conjunction with MediaPost. Online advertising is beginning once again to garner large venture capital dollars. The growing Internet ad market promises to be a US$10 billi...

According to a study by Accenture, 55 percent of companies lack a single view of their customers. CRM may be able to solve that problem, but the study found an even bigger problem that traditional CRM doesn't touch: 68 percent of companies can't measure the return on investment of marketing campaign...

Call centers that rely on VoIP without proper security measures could find themselves facing degraded quality of service, slowdowns, or no service at all. In addition, insecure lines could lead to information theft, leaving a call center liable.

You can possess a business card that says you're the boss, or be promoted to a position that gives you control and authority over other people, but that doesn't necessarily make you a leader. The definition of a true leader is someone who gets the job done, along with the efforts of other people who...

Call center operator InfoCision Management Corp. is adding teleservices representatives. Over the coming months several hundred people will join the company's call centers in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. This growth seems to fly in the face of expectations following the implementation of th...

Just as many companies that adopted CRM applications years ago often failed to use the data they collected, call centers that tape inbound calls for regulatory compliance and quality assurance often lack the time and the staff to listen to the calls and learn from them. Enter speech analytics softwa...