Social CRM

CONFERENCE REPORT

Benioff Foresees New Clouds on the Horizon

Salesforce.com has added 50 new features to Force.com, which it will roll out on Wednesday, company chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said. He disclosed the information during his keynote speech opening the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center Tuesday. Benioff also described what...

NetSuite CRM+ is a customer relationship management tool that provides users with more than just standard customer service functionality. NetSuite's system gives users the capability to run their entire business by providing a single view of the customer. "NetSuite provides a complete business manag...

Social media have practical applications throughout the buyer cycle for corporate and retail customers. The first step in this direction is to get familiar with social media and then connect the channel with CRM processes. There may be challenges in seamlessly integrating the social media channel wi...

INSIGHTS

Chatter's Arrival Is 2010's Signal Event

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try so...

Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2, a Web-based platform designed to help companies handle their customer service needs, includes integration with Salesforce Chatter, the service provider's new real-time collaboration tool. "Service Cloud is the fasting-growing product offering," said Fergus Griffin, ...

Salesforce.com is planning to release a free version of its real-time social collaboration application and platform, Chatter, according to comments CEO Marc Benioff made during the company's recent earnings call. Specifically, the company is working on "a kind of virally based" product, he said. The...

For all the talk of social CRM, there's not so much talk of social CRM successes. Oh, sure -- there are scattered success stories, but there's not a wave of SCRM home runs being hit out there. As a result, there's been talk of SCRM having "jumped the shark" or "outlived its hype." In talking to user...

SugarCRM has released an upgrade to Sugar 6, expanding its CRM suite with new features that will build up its social bona fides. For the first time, it is giving users a mobile app -- Sugar Mobile for iPhone -- developed directly by the vendor. Other new features bolster Sugar 6's global functional...

PRODUCT PROFILE

Shoutlet Cuts Through Social Communications Din

Shoutlet, which last year launched an app designed to help companies manage their social media operations, has expanded its feature set to include CRM functionality. It is a natural extension of Shoutlet's original feature set, explained President and COO Aaron Everson. "Shoutlet lets a company set ...

Cisco on Wednesday announced two products and a rich media capture platform to extend its contact center capabilities. One product is SocialMiner, software that lets companies search the Web for relevant material. The other product is Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care ...

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable. Last week...

Swix has enhanced its original application, Swix Analytics -- a dashboard that tracks ad campaigns and subsequent user engagement across 20 social media communities -- with Swix Social Marketer, a new product that tracks the returns those campaigns are delivering. "Businesses realize there is power ...

INSIGHTS

Sharpening the Social Toolset

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and num...

Social CRM is quickly transforming from a concept to a reality. However, because of the diverse nature of customers and the broad range of options they have among social media channels, the best practices for capitalizing on Social CRM vary from segment to segment. That means some industries may hav...

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