Customers

The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld's third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I'd been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle's C...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

Oracle has upgraded its Customer Experience cloud-based application with enhancements throughout the platform, including the sales, marketing and service modules, the company announced on Wednesday at its Oracle OpenWorld event. "Organizations need to be able to easily establish the operational syst...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

There were a few representative tweets in the article I read on the accounts of Twitter's S-1 announcement last week. My favorite was, "This is Peak Twitter," implying it was time to sell -- but that overlooks the inconvenient idea that except for the secondary markets, there isn't anything to sell ...

Why buy when you can lease? That's a question businesses are asking both externally, as they offer products ranging from software to food, and internally, as they look at billing, ERP and other operations. The upshot is that corporations are moving toward a subscription-based business model both ins...

It is an old truism of economics that supply drives its own demand. While this is true, it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, a boatload of hula hoops could conceivably inspire a new generation of kids to pick up the toy, and nostalgic adults of a certain age might be compelled to see if they could s...

It's a fact of life in market research that the success of any survey will depend at least in part on its accessibility to the intended respondents. Toward that end, Qualtrics has released Qualtrics Mobile, a new app designed to help reach respondents on the go. Qualtrics Mobile works alongside the ...

It's no longer uncommon for marketers to customize the messages they send via email, but such personalization capabilities haven't typically been extended to Web content. Enter Silverpop, which last week released a beta version of Smart Content, a new product designed to enable just that. Smart Cont...

There is something odd happening between Americans and their usually intense love relationships with their cars. One survey points to a slight, but still worrisome, drop in customer satisfaction with vehicles and light trucks this past year; another shows that Americans are driving less. Is there an...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence...

Delta Air Lines has outfitted its more than 19,000 flight attendants with Windows Phone 8 mobile devices that it expects will further customer service and facilitate on-board transactions. Specifically, the flight attendants are now using Nokia Lumia 820 devices equipped with a Delta-specific applic...

Echopass recently unveiled a new enterprise edition of its software for corporations that use the cloud to manage their contact center operations. The offering consists of more than 40 applications and services aimed at centers that support between 500 to 20,000 agents. One early adopter typifies th...

Top brands continue to push the envelope in customer service generally, but that's particularly true in the online sphere. So reports StellaService, which just this week published new data that ranks the top retailers in terms of customer service performance over the last month. "Some of these guys ...

Am I making up a term? Maybe. This column is inspired by the continuing dreadful news out of PC land. Last week Dell announced its profits for the just finished quarter dropped 72 percent year over year and Lenovo took over the No. 1 one spot in PC manufacturing from HP, though both companies saw ...