Social CRM

Most of us understand how overwhelming it can be moving to a new city. Surrounded by a host of options for dining, shopping, daycare, leisure time, auto mechanics and everything else under the sun, making an educated decision on where to go involves some groundwork. So what is there to do? While man...

Social is nearing the end of its "hypecycle." During that early phase, an innovation is seen as everything from a cancer cure to free lunch. Most of the claims prove baseless, but then something curious happens. Users take another look and discover some things that the innovation is a perfect fit fo...

I fear CRM could be tainted by the failings of social media and the bad actors who exploited social platforms. Today it seems especially important for CRM to separate itself from the worst aspects of social to the extent that we can. There's certainly a lot to say -- from continuing to talk about th...

The close of Q2 ends the first wave of vendor customer events. Still to come this fall are Salesforce Dreamforce and Oracle OpenWorld -- and others -- but mercifully, we have the summer to digest all the information absorbed this spring and re-sync with our native time zones.For starters, CRM doesn'...

HubSpot has rolled out platform integrations with Shopify and Workplace by Facebook, which are designed to support the marketing and sales efforts of small and mid-sized businesses. The Shopify integration lets e-commerce marketers sync specific merchant sales data from Shopify into HubSpot for use ...

"The rise of artificial intelligence, for sales teams both internally and externally, is the biggest trend in the industry," observed Rodrigo Vaca, vice president of marketing for CRM at Zoho. "If you think of CRM as the centerpiece for your company, and you marry that with the escalating amount of ...

Adam Smith famously referred to "the invisible hand" of the free market in his landmark book The Wealth of Nations, and with that made himself one of the very first political economists. Smith's observation was so on point that most of us assume markets run through the agency of individuals pursuing...

"The most important thing an SMB can do ... is be proactive and ready to help [customers] right at the moment they need it," said Linda Crawford, CEO of Helpshift. Companies must streamline support systems to resolve issues faster and more efficiently, she said. An up-to-date knowledge base enables ...

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it was preparing a plugin to its popular Messenger platform that will allow a website's visitors to chat with a human or bot without leaving the location. Customer Chat is one of a number of changes in the version 2.2 update of Messenger platform revealed at the We...

Getting customers -- and keeping them -- is the name of the game in e-commerce. "The e-commerce market is crowded and noisy, and brands need to do everything they can to differentiate themselves from the pack," said Eric Hansen, CTO of SiteSpect. "Loyalty programs do just that, giving a brand the ed...

Social sales and marketing software provider Nimble and cloud services consultant NeoCloud on Thursday announced a partnership to deliver a simple, affordable contact management and CRM package for Microsoft Office 365 and GSuite users. NeoCloud has agreed to bundle Nimble CRM into all of its Office...

Salesforce earlier this year introduced its Einstein Vision capability, an idea with a lot of promise but not a great deal of precedent. Who had applications that could see, and how would this be used? For decades, we've been content with scanning documents and analyzing them with optical character ...

Consumers want mobile apps with good in-app customer support, suggest results of a survey Helpshift released last week. Radius Global Market Research conducted the online poll of adults in the United States this spring. Among the survey's findings: Eighty-nine percent of respondents said they would ...

As an industry, CRM continues to grow and shower benefits on its users. It's hard to imagine that some businesses still don't use some form of CRM, but recent data suggests there are still businesses buying their first CRM solutions or changing vendors. It's a compilation of data from all over, with...