Customers

In the not-so-distant future, the mundane will become borderline miraculous. The home washing machine will order its own repairs and the sprinkler system will call you on your cell phone to say the lawn service has broken one of its water spouts and it is now wasting water. The car will tell you to ...

Autonomy has introduced a new contact center application, the Intelligent Contact Center, which provides a range of higher-end capabilities, including the ability to detect anger or emotion in a call, multichannel analysis at the point of interaction and real-time agent support. The rollout, Autonom...

Oracle on Tuesday released a new Critical Patch Update addressing 51 security flaws across a variety of its products. The release was Oracle's ninth such quarterly update, and was the first to be preannounced. The release was initially announced last Thursday. Included among the patches are securit...

Unlike in previous years, the big attraction for holiday shoppers in 2006 was neither advertising nor special offers, according to KPMG's newly released annual National Shopping Behavior survey. Rather, 81 percent of consumers surveyed said they shopped at stores that carried the items they were loo...

Whenever I think of New Year's resolutions, one of Mark Twain's best quotes comes to mind: "A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time." Resolving to change is really what customer relationships and serving customers is all about. How many times has ...

The coming year is going to reorder entire industries due to customer churn. With this reordering will be an entirely new set of selling dynamics, as existing ones prove marginally successful into 2007. The old "bundle three" rule for higher customer retention will prove no longer as effective as i...

As most people know now, the practice of pretexting was publicly highlighted earlier this year when it was revealed that HP had hired private detectives to spy on reporters whose reporting appeared to be based on leaks from members of its Board. The PIs has used pretexting ruses to gain access to th...

Selling products and services through multiple channels offers a number of "touch points" where information can be gathered from customers or potential customers. Most people in marketing clearly understand the importance of using this information to personalize communications with customers and per...

Service centers get a lot more calls with complaints and criticisms than they get showers of praise. All telecom companies experience churn rates way above those of many other industries -- it isn't unheard of for 30 percent of an average telecom company's customers to switch providers in the course...

CosmoCom has upgraded its IP-based contact center software platform to version 5. Called CosmoCall Universe, the system has been enhanced to address multiple contact center channels in a unified fashion, according to Steve Kowarsky, executive vice president of CosmoCom. It also improved functionalit...

There is no limit, it seems, to what financial institutions are willing to spend to ensure that their customers' money is safe. The latest twist? Biometric safeguards, such as voice imprints or iris scans. To be sure, this technology already exists and is used in all sorts of high-end applications.

It's about that time of year when we see all the predictions and forecasts of how much online sales will increase, by product, for this holiday season. From cautiously to wildly optimistic, these forecasts are things that e-commerce managers' dreams are made of. There's something missing in this y...

Demographic information is the most common type of information gathered from your customers, and today ranges from basic information such as name and address to age, education, profession, hobbies, pets, and virtually any type of factual attribute. The more you know about your customers' profiles, t...

A recent national survey found that an overwhelming 83 percent of consumers would purchase more online if retailers provided more interactive and interesting sites. Consumers surveyed expressed interest in a wide variety of features that would improve their shopping experience, but what does creatin...

Avaya on Thursday made two related announcements: the acquisition of enterprise mobility software maker Traverse Networks; and a new product strategy centered around unified communications. Avaya's unified communications solutions give corporate users easy access to all of their communications appli...