Social CRM

The emergence of the social customer is forcing businesses to think differently about how they reach the people to whom they sell, and much has been written about ways for businesses to cope with this. However, as is all too common in CRM discussions, the customer is often forgotten as we default to...

The long recession and the rise of social CRM were not simply coincidental. I believe they happened together. That's not to say that social CRM happened for some cosmic reason; I neither subscribe to the belief that all things happen for a reason nor do I believe I am qualified to hold forth beyon...

Consumers are spending more time and money online today than ever before. They start and end their day checking email and popping onto social gaming and shopping sites. This often comes at the expense of other entertainment options like traditional television, film or even spending an evening out....

Wouldn't it be great if customers who had questions about your products could get the answer from other customers? Wouldn't it be wonderful if customers brainstormed on ways you could improve your service processes? Wouldn't it be tremendous if you could see trends in service needs and adjust your p...

Back in the mid-1990s, then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates offered a prophetic observation. The impact of the Web, he wrote, would be greater than most people thought, but would take longer to happen than was commonly supposed. Turns out, happily for Microsoft, that he was right. Yet now, perhaps not so...

Consumers today don't want to interact just with other consumers. Increasingly, they expect to interact and communicate directly with brands and companies themselves. Over the past few years, companies have come to see these communities as a valuable asset, nurturing them as part of a brand's offeri...

Recessions are always a good time to rebuild your competitive infrastructure, and the slow growth/recession of the last couple of years has been no exception. On the stock market, the technology sector seems to be doing quite well. After bottoming in the middle of the summer, the software companie...

'Tis the Season. And it's better to give than to receive. And you'd better watch out. Besides being Christmas gibberish, those statements apply neatly to CRM. It's always the season to think about improving how your employees use CRM. It's better to give them tools that reward them for using them ...

"Call rewrite!" That's what they said in the olden days on movie sets when the script needed doctoring. It's also what the technology industry metaphorically does about every 10 years. We rewrite much of what we've been relying on for information processing because the accumulation of new technologi...

Email marketing has been a mainstay marketing tool for 10 years or more. When social media's clout with consumers became apparent -- Facebook now has 500 million users and counting -- there was much talk about whether email marketing was even still relevant. Email marketing providers responded quick...