Enterprise Apps

"Your call is important to us. Please hold." "We've automated our phone system for your convenience." "Our agents are busy helping other customers." As consumers, we are all too familiar with these rote statements that are somehow supposed to make us feel all warm and fuzzy while we cool our hee...

Sprint has entered the hosted contact center space, a submarket that is rapidly expanding, with the introduction of an IP-based offering that is powered by Avaya technology. It is Sprint's first toll-free VoIP product, Barry Tishgart, director of product marketing, told CRM Buyer. "We have always su...

With tight budgets and plenty of alternative ways to invest their money, small and medium-sized businesses must always balance value with overall affordability as they pursue software solutions. Some solutions may seem like must-haves -- but if it is not affordable, then the "must-have" quickly beco...

Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the...

First it was support for e-mail marketing, then it was a user interface that displayed real time system data -- also known as the "Dashboard." Now the latest must-have feature in on-demand CRM, at least as evidenced by two separate offerings, is paid search. Both NetSuite and Salesforce.com have in...

Several years ago, a large manufacturing company lost a key distribution center to a fire. The fire destroyed not only the building, but also thousands of shipments destined for a global customer base. Naturally, the CEO of this company wanted to send a letter to customers to explain the situation ...

SplendidCRM has created what it says is the ideal "compile once, run everywhere" cross-platform application with its release of SplendidCRM 1.2 for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and SplendidCRM 1.1 for Novell Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10. The company used Novell's Mono open source toolset to lev...

Oracle has released the next version of PeopleSoft's CRM application, version 9, fulfilling a promise made to PeopleSoft customers concerned over Oracle's acquisition of the vendor. Included in the new release, according to Doris Wong, vice president and general manager for PeopleSoft Enterprise pro...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...

Loyalty Lab, an on-demand CRM application for consumer brands, has introduced Loyalty 2.0, an upgraded product to help retailers and grocery stores incorporate e-commerce channels into their first-generation loyalty programs, and to better segment their customers. It is part of the summer 2006 relea...

FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then. This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interfa...

A wireless expert I met on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago told me that more than 58 percent of people don't even know the brand of cell phone they use, and it made me wonder what else we don't know about wireless. More important, is that a good or a bad thing? I usually loath splitting ...

Asked to define CRM, most enterprise executives will tell you it's the process of moving a company from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one. Since customers ultimately write your paycheck, it's not hard to see why enterprises have embraced this concept and the technology to enable it.

Trying to get your hands around organizational change is a difficult challenge for most companies, but it is even more daunting when you are trying to identify the needs of employees that support multiple product lines and span numerous geographic locations. Today, Web-based surveys continue to tak...

With the CRM vendor landscape going through so many changes today, it's an excellent time to check up and see what your vendor's viability is, what their future prospects look like, and especially for the best-of-breed vendors, what their exit strategy is, if they have one. I have compiled some quic...