Enterprise Apps

In recent years, First Call Resolution has emerged as a critical element for contact centers looking to become more customer centric. The FCR metric focuses on how well a contact center handles customer requests the first time, and most organizations agree that it is the only true metric that delive...

HP has released a number of new offerings targeting the mid-market, including new Linux management tools, remote security access products and -- for companies embarking on a customer relationship management implementation -- two new additions to the HP ProLiant server line that include configuration...

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...

Candidates, political parties and money might seem to dominate the upcoming 2008 U.S. presidential election, but when it comes to voter relationship management, software rules campaigns and politicking. When qualified U.S. citizens cast a legal ballot to express a preference for a candidate or for a...

Companies now have many options when it comes to packaged applications for CRM, and these applications are helping companies reduce development time, in some cases by as much as 65 percent, which in turn helps save money. These resources are now freed up to explore greater CRM customization that ult...

As an executive at Callidus Software, Chris Cabrera was frustrated at the mid-market deals he often had to leave at the wayside. There were firms that basically could not afford Callidus' on-premise incentive compensation software, nor the integration and implementation costs that would accompany su...

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...

Microsoft's annual lollapalooza of a conference, Convergence, has come and gone, but the blogs it triggered live on. The team behind Microsoft CRM Live -- the on-demand application scheduled to be released later this summer -- has been particularly prolific, with "how-to" posts on the company's late...

The front office meets the back office at the Web 2.0 enterprise portal. The enterprise 2.0 portal is a single accessible location intended to consolidate resources and serve up data from systems throughout an organization so that each "touch" a company has with its customers, prospects, partners an...

Microsoft is on schedule to release Dynamics CRM Live this summer, CEO Steve Ballmer assured the crowd at the Convergence 2008 keynote address. The application's features and functions are, for the most part, familiar to users and partners. They are largely the same as the Dynamics CRM 4.0 applicati...

There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the C...

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.

RFID has gained ascendancy in the corporate world more by fiat than through efforts to persuade suppliers that the technology could deliver internal returns -- at least, in the beginning. With the requirement to deploy it or lose contracts handed down by such entities as Wal-Mart and the Department ...