Spotlight Features

Dell made headlines a few years ago with the announcement that it was bringing its Indian-based contact center operations back to the U.S. because of customer complaints of poor service. Since then, however, apparently unable to resist the lure of cost benefits, the company has sent additional opera...

The best performing companies when it comes to customer-facing strategies actively attack the seven deadly sins of CRM with a vengeance. These observations come from their quantified success, and for certain publicly held companies, a rise in their Price/Earnings Ratio, stock price and valuation. ...

Companies that seek to automate the customer service process to cut costs often alienate customers instead, as Part 1 of this two-part series reveals. Some companies, though, are finding ways to incorporate informed, personal interactions into their customer service programs, and are treating every...

American consumers would rather have to deal with a rude or condescending customer service agent on the phone than one who speaks with a foreign accent, according to a survey released earlier this year. The survey seemed to indicate that the arguments against outsourcing of certain operations -- fro...

With tight budgets and plenty of alternative ways to invest their money, small and medium-sized businesses must always balance value with overall affordability as they pursue software solutions. Some solutions may seem like must-haves -- but if it is not affordable, then the "must-have" quickly beco...

Google made its presence felt in the front office market in a big way this week when both Salesforce.com and NetSuite announced within hours of each other their embrace of Google AdWords as an integral part of their marketing solutions. To be sure, the AdWords platform by itself will not solve the...

Accessing the Internet in India can be a major problem, discovered Akiba Stern, a partner with New York-based Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, on a recent visit to an outsourcing service provider's facilities there. It wasn't that the firm's connectivity services were poor. Rather, its security processe...

One of the most advanced communication hubs in the world crashed unexpectedly in Seattle on Sunday afternoon, July 30, 2006, due to a string of malfunctions in the facility's electrical power system. The facility, called Fisher Plaza, is billed as one of the most secure data centers and telecommuni...

Not long ago, if a company wanted to outsource non-core operations -- such as contact center or back office processes -- India was the locale to choose. End of story. That was then, though. Over the last few years, markets around the world -- as well as the outsourcing industry itself -- have evolve...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...

As senior director of product marketing for the identity practice at Sun Microsystems, Rob Beauchamp remembers -- and it was not that long ago -- when integration was considered a tactical process with the objective of knitting together systems and applications as quickly as possible. To be sure, th...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

A wireless expert I met on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago told me that more than 58 percent of people don't even know the brand of cell phone they use, and it made me wonder what else we don't know about wireless. More important, is that a good or a bad thing? I usually loath splitting ...

Asked to define CRM, most enterprise executives will tell you it's the process of moving a company from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one. Since customers ultimately write your paycheck, it's not hard to see why enterprises have embraced this concept and the technology to enable it.

With the CRM vendor landscape going through so many changes today, it's an excellent time to check up and see what your vendor's viability is, what their future prospects look like, and especially for the best-of-breed vendors, what their exit strategy is, if they have one. I have compiled some quic...