Customers

What's the ultimate goal of CRM? As much as I and others of my ilk might talk about the positive interactions, good feelings and peer-to-peer relationships that result when CRM is done well, they're just happy means to an end. The end is, and always will be, inflating the bottom line. While a lot of...

Thousands of people may visit your website every day, but only a fraction of them make it into your CRM system. What about those visitors who don't get captured by CRM? How do you count and relate to the vast universe of prospects you know nothing about, but who obviously have some reason to be in...

Bank of America may have hoped it could quietly slip a $5 fee past its customers. If so, it was woefully wrong. This week, the bank announced it would charge debit card customers a $5 monthly fee when they use their cards to purchase goods. The bank pointed to new financial regulations as a reason.

Customer interaction analytics specialist Nexidia has announced a new integration partnership with Teleopti, a provider of strategic workforce management solutions. The aim of the partnership is to enhance agent performance management by linking Nexidia's performance measuring applications with Tele...

Shades of George W. Bush and Victoria's Secret all in one. We got fooled again last week by our own ineptitude and inability to learn from history when retailer Target's website crashed under the weight of a highly successful marketing campaign. The last time anything remotely similar happened was...

The Durbin Amendment is well-known throughout the financial services community thanks to extensive media analysis over the past year. Originally scheduled to take effect last month, the Durbin Amendment, an addition to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, will now take effe...

Of the nearly 6 million people who consider home their primary place of work, 2.8 million -- slightly more than 2 percent of the population -- are employed by someone else, not "self-employed," according to the U.S. Census Bureau. When accounting for those working at least one day from home, the Te...

Salesforce.com kicked off its 9th Dreamforce conference with a slew of new features, services and products, as well as an offering that represents a surprising shift for the cloud-evangelizing company: the ability to store data on premises for security-conscious companies. Although lost somewhat ami...

NanoRep, the developer of a help-desk application that employs a self-learning knowledge base, has just taken its fledging product global. An automatic language conversion feature now translates information into 34 languages, explained nanoRep CEO Doron Herzich. "The system can learn which language ...

Recent announcements in the CRM space have been all about crossing bridges to streamline customer contact functions and making customer service representatives' lives easier and more productive. And all it's taking is a click of the mouse. LiveChat, a developer of real-time software and Web analytic...

Assistly, a SaaS customer service company, started out with the goal of helping its user base incorporate communications from all channels into the customer service hub. That means messages sent via social media, including tweets and Facebook posts, and even replies to routine transactional emails s...

At CRM Evolution, Brian Vellmure, founder of Initium Technology, gave a talk on the future of customer relationships. He peered well into the future, envisioning an era when the Internet anticipates customer needs and delivers advice automatically. That can only happen when companies develop suffici...

For more than 15 years -- since the dawn of the Internet, really -- display advertising has held promise, but it has often underperformed with boring, static banner ads whose value diminished greatly as consumers became trained to ignore them. Today, innovative technologies are pumping new life into...

By this point in the evolution of e-commerce, most e-tailers know the benefits of live engagement. Website visitors are three times more likely to make a purchase when they have the support of a sales representative. Just as in brick-and-mortar stores, interacting with a knowledgeable person in real...

As companies head out into the brave new post-recession world, the top two goals for marketers are organic revenue growth and margin growth. To help achieve these objectives, marketing budgets grew by an average of 4 percent for 2011. The crucial question, then, is this: How do CMOs invest that mar...