Archive

Both marketing and loyalty had delayed starts in the CRM world, and both exhibited traits of confusion among those charged with their rollouts; strongly evidenced by a lack of specificity in the early applications that carried their badges. Loyalty is back in the spotlight now; as multiple vendors h...

Live chat and conversational platform technologies have made significant advancements in recent years. Thanks to AI and machine learning, these implementations have gone beyond just being a customer support tool, to a crucial component of an e-commerce revenue engine.

Oracle learned a lot from its customers and plowed its findings back into its core product just as others were getting restless and seeking alternatives. Oracle is now calling its product a "converged database" to help with differentiation by highlighting that many businesses don't often only focus ...

This might be a big year for CRM. I say might because I am not clairvoyant, and humility is on the resolutions list. CRM has gone through five 5-year cycles during the past few decades. That trend feels as old as SaaS at this point, and I think we're going to embark on a new cycle that will take rou...

The idea that CRM products should be priced according to the utility they deliver sounds good, but it raises a lot of questions too. With value pricing, you might expect the cost of CRM to rise and fall as a business gets more or less use and value from its investment, but who gets to determine the ...

Three announcements at Dreamforce tell a credible story of the future in which algorithmically driven assistance drives business -- and much more. We've long known that we can't manage what we can't measure, and measurement requires data to deliver real information. These announcements provide an in...

The front office is moving out the front door and into the world. Actually, it's exiting via the Internet, the windows and side doors, to form the basis of what will be the 'next normal' or whatever future historians want to call it. For a while, when we were just dabbling with mobility and social m...

Back in Q1 Salesforce threw out its annual plan and did a pretty good imitation of a startup or a jazz band. They developed products like Work.com and Salesforce Anywhere as solutions to the evolving need for systems that would help their customers cope with the pandemic. The products supported both...

It is often said that only a poor workman blames his tools and only an inferior vendor blames the customer for their troubles with a product. But too many user organizations just don't seem to be adopting CRM to the degree that it takes to be successful -- even after more than two decades of trying.

High-performing businesses reach peak commercial performance by reducing friction in customer interactions in the face of a market with increasing complexity. If you look at who's winning, it's the companies that not only embraced digital transformation early, but also made it a core building block ...

New commerce research reveals that at least two-thirds of firms using chat apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat see greater commerce gains than competitors that do not.

To survive in this new business reality, it is imperative that remote employees have the skills to succeed while away from their physical offices. How to do that effectively is a multifaceted process. CRM Buyer discussed that journey with Heather Caudill, senior vice president of relationship manage...

Last week my good friends Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg opened up their online show, CRM Playaz, to an executive roundtable discussion with some of the movers and shakers in our CRM world. Unfailingly, each speaker espoused the centrality of the customer and visibility through 360 degrees of custom...

Many businesses have bought into CRM, of course. It isn't an 80-billion-dollar industry for nothing. Still, there's a disconnect between the wonderful features and functions of new technologies and the realities of how companies use them -- or not. Only about a quarter of organizations use CRM appro...

Many of the workarounds that have kept old systems running have reached the end of the line. If people are already working in their cars, the gym or the bathroom, it's hard to see how things get any better without replacing systems. That requires a different approach for the customer. The old adage ...