Archive

"You can't get there from here." That's the classic gag about New Englanders giving road directions -- that somehow, the route that needs to be taken is so convoluted and confusing that there's no way to negotiate between two points on the surface of the Earth. Logically, we know that's not true. Yo...

CRM vendors that have wondered about the necessity of porting their applications to the small screen should take note of last week's acquisition of Instagram by Facebook. Instagram is the tip of a big iceberg and is perhaps a signal of yet another disruption in a disruption-prone industry. It repr...

When it comes to technologies that provide the foundation for customer experience management, there is no shortage of options. The marketplace today is deluged with platforms, including self-service solutions that offer multimodal and open response survey vehicles for soliciting customer feedback ac...

CDC Software Corporation, an enterprise software provider of on-premises and cloud technologies, has just released Pivotal CRM for iPad, an application that enables users to access CRM information whenever and wherever they need it. "Today, CRM is going in two distinct directions," said Jason Rushfo...

Sage is getting ready to enhance its mobile payments offerings. Next month, the company will roll out Sage Exchange.com, an interface for Sage Exchange, which it introduced two years ago. The rollout of Sage Exchange.com will considerably enhance what Sage Exchange offers customers, said Greg Hamm...

At last year's Dreamforce event, the word "koan" was used quite a bit, thanks to CEO Marc Benioff's Buddhist proclivities. The word means "a paradox that is to be meditated upon," typically used to train novice monks to abandon dependence on reason to achieve enlightenment. Most of the application...

Thanks for the overwhelming response to last week's post, "Why CRM Works." It was surprising and gratifying that so many people read and tweeted about it, given its length -- almost double my usual contribution. Since it was based on Daniel Kahneman's groundbreaking work, I give all the credit to h...

Cloud contact center provider inContact has released the first of what will be three major upgrades to its flagship product this year. New features in the release touch upon many areas, from agent scripting to a Web-connect module, new unified agent desktop tools and an expanded blended dialer. Most...

Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent ne...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk. I'm not saying this specificall...

The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM makes it easier for the managers to manage their sales staff. Which is tru...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing...

Customer Relationship Metrics has launched Text BI, its latest offering in its suite of managed analytics solutions. Text BI enables companies to take unstructured text-based data from surveys, emails, social media, CRM systems and other applications, and organize it into a format that makes it easi...

Can you tell me exactly where your employees are and what they are doing? Do you know what the top 10 most profitable projects were for your company last year? Can you make a bid on a project that has little or no margin of error? If you can't answer these questions, then you should know that someon...

When I go to CRM conferences -- and I go to many -- one of the things I relish is the opportunity to speak to leaders about thinking surrounding social CRM. That group is not limited to the pundits and authors most closely associated with SCRM; it also includes users at these events who have reached...