Customers

For public utilities, the world seems to be taking on a green hue. Their customers are the beneficiaries of an effort to preserve resources -- and save a bit of cash in the process -- as they move toward electronic bill payment, have their lights dimmed automatically, and place orders online. For ex...

Last year's online shopping season surpassed $29 billion in sales, up a full 20 percent from the previous holiday. More consumers did their shopping online than any holiday season before, due to the convenience and increasing popularity of the Internet as a way to get too many things done in too lit...

Cyber Monday, once considered the No. 1 shopping day for e-commerce and retail Web sites, has become the official kickoff to the holiday season and a key marketing event for the online community. As with any economic marker, it is vulnerable to credit crunches and significant financial tide changes....

Recovering from an identity theft case can be more than a burden on your time and pocketbook. It can also be emotionally draining. Victims frequently feel the same anger and vulnerability suffered by victims of violent crime. Yet diligently working through the steps recommended by identity theft pre...

So it's happened. Someone's stolen your identity and now you've got a collection agency on your case, demanding payment for a car you didn't buy or a credit card you didn't take out. What to do? The first thing is not to panic, said Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center...

With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there's a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I've seen a few financial services and insurance companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and rea...

Imagine getting a $45 billion bill without knowing exactly how you ended up with such a big tab. That's exactly the situation facing Americans struck by identity fraud. In 2007, the misuse of lost and stolen identity information cost $45 billion, an average of $5,574 per incident, according to Javel...

When it comes to security software, who really knows what lurks in the minds of today's users? It appears that most people seem to choose their security products based on a lot of other factors beyond their ability to protect their computers from the malicious forces at work. Whatever the label on t...

As Wall Street unwound last week, RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte watched from a vantage point an ocean away. He was in London, making a stop on his self-assigned global tour to visit the company's top 50 users. Like many people, Gianforte is viewing the events with a combination of uncertainty and cau...

Oracle OpenWorld wasn't a day old before Twitter-like blog posts began peppering the Internet. Mike Gotta from the Burton Group posted notes encapsulating his essential gleanings from Charles Phillip's keynote. Paul Greenberg was equally terse in his posts, which numbered at least five by the middle...

There is a near-universal desire among firms to link all aspects of their supply chain -- including the customer front end -- on one platform. However, there are relatively few applications on the market today that address that demand. ModusLink hopes to fill that void with its newly launched e-busi...

Microsoft announced an important update to Dynamics CRM this week in which it spiffed up its marketing capabilities. You can find the news details pretty easily out on the Web, but the details are less important to this piece. The fact that Microsoft delivered an update is the really interesting par...

Sprint Nextel is making a big push to help customers understand their phones, creating a formal program to make store employees available to explain their products and set them up for buyers. The campaign to be announced Tuesday is the first official program for in-person help by a cell carrier, but...

Many contact centers continue to operate at suboptimal levels. Case in point: One financial services company has managed to turn "press zero to talk to a human" into not just a selling point but a major advertising campaign. While some great leaps in efficiency and quality have been made over the pa...

Last week, SugarCRM made version 5.1 generally available. With its beta release earlier this year, the open source CRM provider broke new ground, providing innovations in business intelligence and an intriguing mobile app for the BlackBerry and the iPhone. Developers are particularly excited about t...