Customers

In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later -- eight years, actually -- the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green movement, among other things, would have pushed this concept al...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I ...

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, and Sonoma Partners' Mike Snyder summed up the event's highlights. "Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention," he wrote. "During the opening k...

Verizon Wireless has agreed to a $21 million payout to settle lawsuits alleging that the wireless carrier's early termination fees were too high and unfair to consumers. While Verizon has not admitted any wrongdoing in the case, the multi-million dollar settlement covers not only a California-based ...

Earlier this year, a careless employee at an investment firm learned a painful lesson: Sharing files through peer-to-peer Web sites like LimeWire can easily expose internal data in a corporate network. In this case, the employee worked for Washington-based Wagner Resource Group, which counts several...

The two largest electronic prescription networks have decided to merge. By joining together their two platforms, RxHub and SureScripts maintain that both doctors and patients will benefit. Having one integrated system gives doctors more information about patients' health insurance plans as well as r...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

Google and Microsoft have teamed with Intuit, WebMD and a consortium of more than 100 healthcare providers, insurers and consumer and privacy groups to develop a framework of practices governing online personal health record services. Under the leadership of the Markle Foundation, the Connecting for...

Contact center managers for years have been using tried-and-true efficiency-oriented key performance indicators to measure contact center success, such as average call handling time and cost-per-call. Aberdeen completed a benchmark survey in May that examines the trend of Fortune 100 Best-in-Class c...

Casinos have been on a roll when it comes to customer relationships. The house has learned it always wins when it places its bets on the fact that humans are creatures of habit. Unlike other industries, however, the gambling lot does not leave the odds to a stack of faceless data mirroring only tran...

The Google-Salesforce.com partnership grows ever more intertwined. The latest development occurred Monday when Salesforce.com released a Google Data client library for the Force.com platform that provides access to the full suite of Google Data APIs using Apex code, allowing developers to integrate ...

The Internet has seen massive adoption. Online retailing has continued to dramatically build its customer base and more and more companies are sending their offline customers to the Internet for service and support. To service both these old and new customers, the Internet has already had an abundan...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission reportedly is expected to rule against Verizon in a complaint filed by three cable companies against the telco. The FCC plans to tell Verizon it cannot try to talk phone service customers into staying instead of switching to a cable competitor, according to...

The vast majority of doctors aren't taking advantage of electronic medical records, with many citing the cost of adoption as a significant impediment, according to a new study that also suggests the tipping point toward broader adoption may be on the horizon. Just 17 percent of U.S. doctors have acc...

The audience for video games is zealous but fickle, and because of that, game studios have a unique challenge in attracting and retaining customers. While the tools they use are similar to those of other industries, studios have learned to be creative in the marketing tactics that support the effort...