Archive

Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile. "We are on the path to deliver a significant new set of capabiliti...

TeleTech has been placed in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant: Customer Management Contact Center BPO, Worldwide, 2011, and Yesmail has announced the release of its "Look Book" in celebration of its recent awards for mobile-scalable email design. Meanwhile, West Interactive has rele...

Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. It is the byproduct of Salesforce.com's acquisition of Assistly last year. However, it is no mere product integration, said Alex Bard, former Assistly CEO a...

Every tool has a purpose. That's never more clear than when you see a neophyte do-it-yourselfer trying to use a tool for a purpose other than what it was designed for. For instance, anyone wielding a hammer while trying to fix a car's engine is probably not going to succeed. I've also seen people tr...

I take briefings from all sorts of vendors every day, from established companies with a new release to emerging companies with what they hope will be The Next Great Idea that the market will seize on. I am always happy to give my opinion and advice, and sometimes it's even taken. But I am usually ...

Oracle has closed on its $1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base...

At the National Retail Federation's annual convention,Retail's BIG Show 2012, Epicor debuted its latest mobile offering: the Epicor Retail Clienteling application. It is an add-on for Epicor's existing CRM app, said Dave Burton, product director of CRM services -- meaning a retailer has to be an Epi...

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...

My Aussie friends have an interesting saying that seems part compliment and part benediction: "Good on you." They pronounce it with an accent on the second word so that the phrase becomes a single word in the mouth, more like "goo-don you." At any rate, good on you. Last week's smackdown of the PI...

CSC and Infovisionix announced a new agreement at Retail's BIG Show 2012 in New York City. Under the agreement, Infovisionix's suite of retail reporting and analysis tools will be incorporated in CSC's Retail Enterprise Intelligence offering. The new capabilities will help retailers understand and i...

This was a big week for the Nasdaq-listed Blackbaud: The company announced its plans to acquire Convio, which offers a fund-raising application for nonprofits, for $275 million. The feature sets of the Convio application and Blackbaud's CRM software for the nonprofit space are complementary, to a la...

I'm ensconced at the Swan and Dolphin Hotels at Walt Disney World in Orlando this week for IBM's concurrent Lotusphere/IBM Connect shows, and all the announcements here paint the picture of a company and a partner ecosystem that is going all-in on collaboration. Big Blue's fuddy-duddy reputation is ...

Customer experience is leading off the year as an idea that we need to pay more attention to. In the last week, two important publications have surfaced that highlight this importance. SAP gurus Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer and Volker Hildebrand collaborated on a new book, The Customer Experience Edge...

There is an interesting discussion brewing about the nature of Silicon Valley companies. Are they "tech" companies, as Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo asserts, or are they "... companies in other industries that happen to make heavy use of technology," as CBS Money Watch blogger Erik Sherman says? The gentlema...

Companies commonly rely on a myriad of software suppliers, from internal teams that share and re-use code to third-party commercial software suppliers and outsourcing development partners. Companies are increasingly being held accountable by their customers for the quality and security of the comple...