Customers

Seven months after Avaya closed its acquisition of Nortel and simultaneously released a road map for integrating the two product lines, Avaya has delivered on that plan. It is releasing a cornucopia of new and enhanced products that largely follow the promises Avaya made in January. "Most users on b...

Businesses will probably always have customers who want to place their orders by fax. When there are manual tasks involved in processing those orders, they can present a serious problem because companies may fall short in meeting expectations of the customers who place them. There is a fundamental c...

The facts about today's customers are well established: They know more about your business than ever before, they're talking to their peers and to the wider public about you, they want to be communicated with through the channels of their choosing, and they desire to have a more partner-like relatio...

CRM and marketing systems are all geared toward getting people to buy. After all, the whole point of investing in these tools is to increase top-line revenue. At least, that's the argument we make to our bosses when we seek to implement them. Those tools are getting better all the time, and one area...

In May and June of 2010, Aberdeen surveyed more than 260 executives regarding their plans for the second half of 2010 and the first half of calendar 2011. The results were clear and compelling -- marketing's ability to access and understand customer experience data means success or failure for compa...

Most technology buyers understand that system capabilities represent only one part of the buying decision. Service after the sale, ease of doing business, and a commitment to meeting customer needs are also critical in selecting the right technology partner. Most vendors talk a good game when it com...

As businesses worldwide increasingly focus on e-commerce as a vehicle for driving new revenue streams, most e-commerce sites still struggle to leverage the growing wealth of customer data to which they have access. This failure to integrate customer relationship management activities with online vis...

Do you want to close more sales? Do you want to sell more to existing customers? Do you want to get closer to your users online so you can know what they are thinking? A virtual agent could be an effective way for you to do all of the above. What is a virtual agent? Technically, a virtual agent ...

Building better relationships with customers is an ideal that's not limited to any one market, community, industry or even country. The basics are the same, for the most part; they involves collecting data and applying it where appropriate to drive sales and customer loyalty. Understanding this come...

The consequences of providing poor customer service are well known. What is less obvious perhaps is the importance of providing on-target customer experience as a means to boost profitability -- in other words, neither underdelivering nor overdelivering in order to secure optimal customer satisfacti...

Digital signage is a combination of electronic display devices and content that delivers information, advertising and other messages to a broad or narrow target audience. The benefits of digital signage over traditional static signs are centered on two basic concepts: For one, digital signage conten...

Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on within the business was usually shielded from the customer. That dichotomy ...

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

Marketing data does yet not evolve the way individuals evolve. The inability for marketers to quickly adapt to rapid changes in how their customers behave is undermining the effectiveness of their communications. How, then, can what is learned about an individual be leveraged into a better experienc...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...