Customers

If you are in London on April 24th, you might want to check out the next monthly VRM Hub meeting. What is VRM, you wonder? For starters, VRM, or vendor relationship management, is the brainchild of Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Project VRM is a ...

The contact center has become the focal point of the customer interaction. Customers spend more time researching products, managing account and order information, resolving issues, and utilizing self-service than they do within the traditional brick-and-mortar storefront. This requires contact cente...

Much ink has been spilled about what, exactly, has been the secret of Barack Obama's overwhelming success. There is no denying his charisma or the appeal of his message, but a behind-the-scenes look at how his political machine operates -- namely, how it empowers its people on the ground to operate ...

Active is much better than passive in most things, not just CRM. In writing, I am constantly reminded to write in the active voice because active voice is terse, to the point and more intelligible. Passive voice takes perfectly good sentences and turns them into gobbledygook. For example, the active...

A network intrusion at Advance Auto Parts has put the credit card, debit card and checking account information of up to 56,000 customers in jeopardy. Data security at 14 stores in Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Virginia and New York, has been compromised, according to the...

You would think, based on blogosphere chatter, that Starbucks invented Web 2.0. The company's introduction of My Starbucks Idea last month has inspired numerous bloggers -- some who make it their business to follow Web 2.0, some who could care less about the space -- to post about the new site. Basi...

SynerG, formed in 2005 to develop interactive business mashups, has released its first product -- a contact center application -- from beta. SynerG Contact Center targets a familiar pain point -- one that all agent desktop apps have tried in various ways to address: the difficulty of accessing and i...

Having your customers comment on your policies, products or employment practices is one thing. Having them suggest ideas for improving said policies and products -- in a public forum where participants can vote on these ideas, no less -- is an entirely different matter. How well a company can handl...

Companies have long recognized the importance of customer data in the context of revenue growth and cost reduction. Today, more companies are also waking up to the value of customer data in the context of direct mail waste reduction, which is fast becoming not only an environmental imperative but al...

Retailers in Japan and South Korea have been using image capture technology for several years now, and with the growing base of smartphones, companies in the U.S. are rolling out a wide range of new mobile applications, including some that use interactive digital symbols captured in photos to provid...

Avaya has introduced Intelligence Presence, a new software application that gives users -- both in corporate environments and call centers -- the ability to view so-called presence information across multiple sources. For example, it would allow a contact center rep engaged with a caller to see if a...

To say the Federal Communications Commission isn't responsive enough to citizen complaints about telemarketers or TV programs likely would be an understatement of monumental proportions, if a new study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office is accurate. On Thursday, the GAO issued a report t...

Contact consolidation is not for the lighthearted. For years, contact center management has been attempting to control costs by reducing the number of agents, physical sites and consolidating software and hardware solutions. Often these attempts are in conflict with customer and corporate demands.

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has change...

Call center reps get a bad rap. They're expected to be constantly nice in the face of increasingly not-nice customer interactions, field the blunt of management's never-ending drive for increased performance, and solve every problem that randomly hits their line. It's no wonder the industry faces a ...