Customers

As more consumers and businesses turn to the Internet not just for information, but as a way to run their daily errands, the need for more sophisticated customer service grows unabated. The old one-two punch of call-center representatives and an online Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page does not ...

Your broadband connection is down, and you can't get online to download the patches to fix it. Frustrated, you turn to the telephone. Once you find someone who can help, you have to relate the litany about your computer and all of the software you are running. Then, maybe, if you are lucky, you can ...

It's an age-old slogan for companies: "We value your business." Thanks to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, many enterprises now can place a highly specific value on the worth of each customer's business. Like it or not, CRM systems allow companies to identify customer segments, or "ti...

CRM software revenues are expected to reach $30 billion in the next several years, according to research firm Cahners In-Stat. Even so, CRM implementation projects are often cited for high failure rates. To avoid losing customers, these projects need to succeed in more dimensions than just company m...

Customer-service managers are always looking for ways to boost agent productivity by shaving seconds off calls and increasing upsell rates. Indeed, if there were a customer-service crystal ball that could search through all customer interactions and spot future trends, visualizing patterns and notin...

Shoshana Zuboff is a genius, but don't just take my word for it. Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor who recently wrote a book called The Support Economy with her husband and collaborator, James Maxmin. What makes Zuboff a genius is that although I think the book is about CRM, there is onl...

Onyx, a mid-market provider of CRM software, has unveiled upgrades to its Contact Center product that are designed to help it branch deeper into the contact-center and vertical markets. The improvements include call-center scripting and enhanced Web self-service capabilities. As a result of Onyx' mo...