Social CRM

We all know about the idea of total cost of ownership and the concept of return on investment. Both have their place in business evaluations of CRM. There's another measurement, however, that should be considered -- one I like to call "time to value." The T2V test is simple: From the time you begin ...

I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market. Buying and owning three C...

Surprisingly, many customer service organizations have yet to put their toes in the water when it comes to social media engagement. In fact, fewer than half of them actively respond to consumer complaints via Twitter and other social media channels. For companies that do actively engage in social me...

Intelliverse has rolled out a new cloud-based tool that monitors social media for brand mentions and responds when appropriate. IntelliBuzz is simple enough that a company with minimal IT resources in-house -- that is, a computer and an Internet connection -- can manage this outreach just using the ...

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said ...

NextPrinciples has launched Insight-To-Action, a social analytics and engagement product that integrates with a handful of CRM applications. The company is in talks with other vendors to expand the integration of the platform, said Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management for NextPri...

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are ...

LiveOps this week debuted LiveOps Engage, a browser-based desktop agent app that centralizes myriad channels -- phone, email, live chat, SMS, Twitter and Facebook -- on one screen. The screen also displays the history of past interactions with the customer. "This release is bringing together all of ...

It's fairly common practice today for major brands to have a social media team at the ready to respond to customer complaints on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. The practice is so widespread that the Call Center Satisfaction Index report released last week by CFI Group found that ...

2013 is just two weeks old, but executives in the mobile CRM space have a clear idea of how they hope the rest of it will unfold. What they want, in a word, is more: more mobile CRM functionality; availability on more devices; more vendors supplying applications. More mobile CRM is indeed on the way...

By now, common sense, the business media and practical experience have taught the lessons of multi-channel engagement for service. Businesses have come to realize that they need to provide service in whatever way their customers wish to receive it, whether it's through the phone, via chat or text, o...

Last summer, open source CRM provider Zurmo threw its hat into the CRM ring with a beta version of its particular take on the hot new gamification software category. The theory is simple: CRM, especially sales force automation, has notoriously poor user adoption figures. Why not use some of the fu...

Everyone has a year-end synopsis these days, and it's fun to see what each person deems important. Sometimes you wonder if you lived through the same experiences, but it's a good thing to recall everything one more time and maybe reconsider how you'll remember each. Here's my synopsis -- which is no...

Salesforce.com rolled out an integration between Sales Cloud and Work.com this week. The integration is currently available in pilot and will be made generally available to all Salesforce.com customers in the first half of 2013. To understand the value-add the integration offers, one first has to b...

Enterprise CRM of the future is all about social and mobile. In fact, Blackbaud, which specializes in providing CRM products and services to the nonprofit sector, even has an acronym for it: SOMO. "We're looking at how we can extend our technology into social and mobile spheres," said Tiffany Crumpt...