Spotlight Features

It's a universal reality: Customers dislike waiting on hold. Now call-backs and virtual queuing are changing all that. "Our basic mission is to improve the call center experience," said Shai Berger, CEO and cofounder of Fonolo. "The heart of what we do is replacing hold time with a call-back." Call-...

Call centers are increasingly migrating away from on-premises systems to cloud-based systems, which can save money and give greater flexibility. Everything from customer data to telephony software is making its way to the cloud, revolutionizing the way call centers manage their operations. "It's all...

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...

Mobile devices are changing both how customers get in touch with call centers and how companies respond to those calls. The days of customers sitting at kitchen tables on landlines waiting for agents to answer their calls are gone. Now, they're calling from smartphones and clicking on apps, and call...

Call center software can now identify everything from anger to dissatisfaction in the voices of customers. Since call centers are all about voices, it makes sense to analyze those voices in order to provide better customer service. The field of voice analytics, in fact, has become a big business. B...

When Double Cola wanted to encourage its customers to keep coming back for more of its vintage fizzy drink, it started a rewards program. Using tried-and-true loyalty methods, the company offered customers the opportunity to turn over the cola's caps, earn points, and get discounts and merchandise.

CRM is a mature software category with a decades-plus history of development and evolution. Still, one important problem remains unsolved: A lot of employees, especially sales staff, just can't be bothered with it. Corporate "solutions" have ranged from bribing to arm-twisting to appeals to corporat...

Without a doubt, mobile CRM has become a must-have deployment in the B2C world. Expect that trend to move into the B2B community for similar reasons: The devices are becoming ever more equipped to serve multiple needs, and their uses can soothe a lot of pain points. B2B, more so than B2C, is highly ...

Want to extend your company's CRM presence in the mobile world easily and effortlessly? Vendors are lining up to help -- at least with the first part of that sentence. Sales, service and marketing are all categories in which vendors are actively rolling out products aimed at the mobile space. Whethe...

Buried in a recent J.D. Power and Associates 2012 U.S. Credit Card Satisfaction study -- which showed consumers' satisfaction with credit cards was at a six-year high -- was this very telling factoid: Only 7 percent of credit card customers use their mobile phones to complete transactions, up from 4...

Jeff Hasen, Hipcricket's CMO, recently had what he called his "10 millionth" bad customer experience with Comcast. It's galling enough to be treated poorly by a company when you buy just about all of its services, as Hasen does with Comcast. Worse, though, is when you are a mobile CRM expert, as Ha...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...

WORX, a power tool company, has a unique Pinterest board: one devoted entirely to tools that aid in zombie defense. The WORX JawSaw, for instance, has a pin that tells consumers to "accessorize before they rise, and protect yourself now!" The board's sense of humor makes it especially effective on t...

Every time people post an update, "like" a page, or otherwise engage with social media, their movements are tracked, followed and recorded. For businesses, this data is a gold mine of information about consumer thinking, preferences and opinions. "Businesses should view social media as a treasure tr...

Financial site Adaptu serves people in all stages of life, from young people just establishing themselves, getting married and buying a home, to more mature investors planning for their children's educations or their own retirement dreams. "Some of these people are open to talking about their finan...