Enterprise Apps

As a result of having little to no visibility into business processes, many companies have turned to the integration capabilities of Business Process Management tools. In the Aberdeen Group benchmark report "BPM and Beyond: The Human Factor of Process Management," Best-in-Class companies are working...

Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...

A trigger is a device that automatically executes a response to a certain event. In marketing, triggers are used to automatically deliver targeted messages, offers, recommendations or other treatments to customers on an individual basis at the most optimal point in time, based on any number of facto...

Happy New Year! Let's be counterintuitive for a moment, shall we? We're in a recession and we all know it. Traditionally (and sadly) in an economic downturn, when companies seek to lower their expenses, they cut their marketing budgets -- and why not? Marketing costs money, and if you believe your ...

The global financial marketplace has recently become quite volatile, as fears of an American recession affect economies all over the world. Such fears can be especially dangerous for businesses. In times like these, many top managers panic and make unwise decisions such as firing quality employees a...

For many e-tailers, online chat is a closer. Packaged and offered up to site visitors as a service, it provides an opportunity to close a sale when an uncertain customer wavers. Retailers were early adopters of this technology precisely because of the distinct return on investment, Conversive CEO Ro...

This summer, Bob Lyons was tapped to lead Avaya's contact center division. The new general manager and vice president of customer service applications -- a relatively new position at Avaya -- joined the company at a crucial time. It was in the midst of reorganizing its operations around three busin...

What a great time to be thinking about the future. Seriously. This is my last column of the year, and traditionally I try to forecast some movements in the market for the year ahead. This year it takes a special kind of fortitude to even read a piece like this, let alone write it, but if you think ...

The economic downturn is top of mind for every organization. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV and it's hard to dismiss the facts: Recession looms and nobody knows when or how it will end. As a Research Director in the Customer Management Technology Group at the Aberdeen Group, I'm constantly ge...

Have you ever answered one of those "how was our service?" questionnaires to let somebody know you weren't happy with the experience you'd had, and then never heard anything back from the business that asked? Or maybe this holiday season your boss asked where the staff wanted to go for the office pa...