Customers

By now, most people understand the power and the value of adding a social component to your CRM strategy. Perhaps you're not yet ready to go to full social CRM, but you no doubt recognize that there is a lot of value in engaging with customers in the ways they want to engage. As social media become ...

On Sunday, July 10, Time Magazine posted a book review of sorts by Rana Foroohar. "Driven Off the Road by M.B.A.s" is really a riff on Bob Lutz's new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business. Lutz should know something about his topic since he spent a 47-year c...

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Avaya is delivering multimedia capabilities to the front line with its announcement of two new contact center products designed to bring agent-assisted and automated customer service up to speed with the social networking world: Avaya Aura Contact Center 6.2 and the Avaya Experience Portal. Avaya Au...

Although businesses no longer control the conversation with their customers, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way. It's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer expe...

If you are a regular reader, you know that from time to time I write about things that appear to be tangentially related to CRM -- at best. My favorite alternative to straight ahead research and reporting on CRM is a strange sounding thing called "peak oil." For those of you not familiar with the i...

CDC Software's Pivotal CRM Customer Service and Support has launched, with major changes to the application's integration with social media and email, and more configuration options. This module was developed for the Pivotal 6 platform, which was built on the .Net Framework. The biggest jump in func...

Imagine a customer service agent who can do virtually no wrong. She typically answers questions in about three seconds, with an astonishing 94 percent accuracy rate. She puts callers at ease, offering them information about related issues without making them listen politely through an entire spiel o...

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communi...

Two events in the CRM industry this week are shining a spotlight on a broad and sometimes nebulously defined space. First, Oracle announced its agreement to acquire FatWire, a provider of Web experience management software. Second, Adobe rolled out its Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experi...

Last week Marc Benioff was in Boston with another regional Cloudforce tour event, and Stephen Denning has written a good book. There is a connection between them. The day after the Boston Bruins clinched the Stanley Cup, Benioff was in Boston, and thank goodness the company decided on a noon start ...

Customer experience can make or break a company. The pressure to manage costs has never been greater, but it's a fatal mistake to view customer service channels as a cost center. The solution? An at-home workforce that delivers excellent results: 10 percent higher customer satisfaction; 30 percent m...

If you like speaking with live customer service reps about service issues without having to first endure a long and frustrating wait on the phone, then shop at Sierra Trading Post. That is one conclusion that can be drawn from a study of online retailers released by StellaService, which found that...

For more than a decade, B2B firms have used the Internet to publicize their product catalogs. As a result of the rise in consumer sales on the Web and the rapid maturation and adoption of Internet technologies like RIAs and Web 2.0, B2B firms are now rethinking their e-business strategies. At the sa...

It has been a wild ride for retailers these past few years. But when we look back, we won't be talking about the economy, the drive for lean inventory, or deep discounting. Rather, we will recognize the fundamental change that occurred was in the shopping process itself. Shoppers are often interac...