RightNow Technologies certainly has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the company used its industry influencers day in Colorado Springs this week to remind us. I saw the day as a marker of a turning point in the company's development, a time when it said to the world, "The first phase of lif...
Sage's introduction of SalesLogix for cloud computing has caused me to do a lot of thinking. The operative terms we use in the industry for software functionality delivered across the Internet is "SaaS" or now "cloud computing," and numerous vendors find themselves twisting themselves and the defin...
While we're on the subject of the customer relationship, it's important, even vital, that we do a better job of teasing apart customer types. It seems to me that the vast conversation about social CRM and the social customer has focused on the end consumer -- the business-to-consumer relationship -...
I recently read Tribes by Seth Godin and I think it might hold some clues to the future of CRM. Godin is a business blogger and author of more than a dozen books with titles like Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He's not about the status quo, he's all over change and leadership like a junkyard...
Making sure that every customer gets the personal touch may be fairly easy for the owner of a neighborhood bakery, but in a mass market of millions, making each customer feel like an individual is a formidable challenge. In the information age, tools like customer relationship management software ma...
Am I kidding me? Forecasting the year ahead? Sheesh! One of the reasons the task I set for myself is so daunting this year is that I believe we are in a massive transition state that affects the whole economy, CRM included. I think Tom Friedman got it right in version 2.0 of his Hot, Flat and Cro...
Let's say you're a CRM vendor. Your constant mission is to provide users with what they need, and your biggest fear is that your competitors will be better at that than you are. How do you stay in front? If you come from a traditional software background, your default answer is likely to be "new fea...
Colorado Springs is an interesting place. Despite the name, there are no "springs" -- it's an arid place in a valley surrounded by the southern Rocky Mountains and Pikes Peak National Park. The springs were an invention of the railroads seeking to establish a destination for vacationers. Good ide...
What is it about customer service that drove three major CRM companies to make announcements about their service products within days of each other last week? Oracle and Salesforce.com each announced new or completed development of functionality, and RightNow said it bought HiveLive, a social netwo...
Right now, about 2 percent of the contact center infrastructure market uses Software as a Service, said inContact CEO Paul Jarman, citing research by Gartner. That statistic seems reasonable, given that the contact center infrastructure space has traditionally been dominated by on-premise players --...
Last week Salesforce.com marked its 10th year in business. To celebrate, the company held a conference call to discuss its earnings, and CEO Marc Benioff brought presents for his investors. The big announcement was that Salesforce had succeeded at generating just over $1 billion in revenue for its ...
By any measure, SaaS vendor RightNow Technologies closed the year on a high note, completing seven million-dollar-plus deals in the last quarter. In fact, CEO Greg Gianforte told CRM Buyer, "our sales teams delivered the highest total bookings in any quarter over the last two years. In the current e...
It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining ...
Last week Salesforce.com introduced its new support concept dubbed "The Service Cloud." I have to say it makes a lot of sense both as a product direction and as a business decision. The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in t...
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CX Center Stage at Oracle CloudWorld
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New Sweetwater CEO Amplifies Vision for Music Retail
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Is Generative AI the Next Big CX Thing Despite Its Risks?
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5 Ways Retailers Can Sell More Online With a Personal Touch
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Marketers’ Texting Schedule Can Make or Break Consumer Engagement
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Subscription Sales Spur Superior Selling
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Customer Commerce Offers SMBs an E-Commerce Path to Better CX
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The Price Retailers Pay for Flawed Product Information
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AI Is Already at a Tipping Point
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