Analytics

There were more than 170,000 people at Dreamforce a couple of weeks ago, and many more watching from afar. Also, there were well over 2,000 sessions. Numerous announcements sprang from the big Salesforce event. Some announcements and sessions, like the Tim Cook fireside chat, stand out. Of the top s...

Salesforce used its annual Dreamforce mega-show to make a host of announcements, ranging from contact center partnership with Amazon to a smart speaker tool for sales. For the most part, the keynote featured practical applications of Salesforce technology. Some Dreamforces focus on the highly aspira...

In today's highly competitive B2B software industry, it's not enough to staff a call center and sit back and wait for customers to reach out when they need you -- it's imperative that you take the initiative. When customers have so many solution vendors to choose from, service becomes a strategic di...

D2C commerce is on the rise. Increasingly, consumers are expecting to interact directly with the companies that market and manufacture products. "Direct-to-consumer commerce has been enhanced by the explosion of the Internet. E-commerce provides a more convenient and frictionless buying experience,"...

The amount of data we create each day is astronomical. The digital universe likely will reach 44 zettabytes in 2020, according to the World Economic Forum. That is 40 times more bytes than there are stars existing in the observable universe. To say that's a lot of data is a colossal understatement -...

Businesses have been using secret scores created by data brokers to determine how much to charge consumers, whether to allow purchase returns, and what level of service to offer, among other things. "Most consumers will never know when they are the victim of a secret surveillance score," noted Laura...

As technology advances and consumers' expectations and digital sophistication rise exponentially, marketers no longer can focus on delivering static messages, regardless of how "targeted" or "multichannel" they may be. It's no longer enough simply to greet a customer by name.

I have been writing about Salesforce for 20 years. That's incredible for me because aside from marriage, there's nothing in my life I've done so consistently for so long. Perhaps like a marriage, the thing that's been attractive about Salesforce is its constantly changing nature. The company went th...

Artificial intelligence is arguably the most disruptive technology to emerge over the last few decades. Consumers are producing data at record levels. It's estimated we'll produce 463 exabytes per day by 2025. Yet humans aren't equipped to process that complex information. We're starting to rely mor...

The software development lifecycle reminds me of the proverb of the three blind people confronting an elephant. One grabs the trunk and says it's a snake, another touches a tusk and says it's a spear, while the third feels its side and calls it a wall. The moral is that perception has a lot to do wi...

Too often, sales teams and successful reps are shrouded in an air of mystery. Many can't tell you exactly how they do what they do. Nowadays, they do it behind a screen, which limits the potential for apprenticeship, immersive learning and modeling. It offers little data beyond outcomes for managers...

Spotify has launched Spotify for Podcasters following a year-long beta involving more than 100,000 podcasts from 167 countries. Spotify for Podcasters is a discovery and analytics dashboard designed to let podcasters track performance through data such as episode retention charts, aggregate demograp...

Startups in the U.S. fail at a rate of 90 percent largely due to cash flow problems and the lack of a market need for a product or service. In fact, not even half of startups make it to their fourth year. It's also noteworthy that 65 percent of startup owners admitted to not being fully confident ab...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score, handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these m...