Archive

CloudApps, a carbon management software company, and FinancialForce.com, which makes accounting software built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, have announced a partnership integrating their two products. The CloudApps Carbon solution is designed to allow companies to perform end-to-end carbo...

Adoption is truly the CRM killer. If your employees won't use your CRM system, your investment is an utter waste. However, the way many organizations look at adoption doesn't help matters. All too many adoption failures are attributed to the users -- those darned stubborn employees who can't be both...

Last week was busy in a good way, and also in ways that we have not seen in a while -- and at least some of that busy-ness showed promise for the economy and our industry. In no particular order, Cloud9 Analytics announced it closed its C round financing, SAP held its user meeting in Orlando, Sage ...

A typical physician's office features several common elements: a reception area, a stack of outdated magazines, and shelves of slim file folders holding hundreds of paper medical records. The U.S. government is hoping to change one of those elements with a major initiative designed to convert all pa...

Smarter organizations today realize that attending to the quality of customer experience could just be the differentiator that they were on the lookout for. When Patricia Seybold introduced "Quality of Customer Experience," the entire world sat up and noticed. Why QCE? There area several reasons: QC...

Marketing data does yet not evolve the way individuals evolve. The inability for marketers to quickly adapt to rapid changes in how their customers behave is undermining the effectiveness of their communications. How, then, can what is learned about an individual be leveraged into a better experienc...

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...

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Seattle against Salesforce.com, alleging that the company infringed nine of its patents. Microsoft is seeking an injunction as well as damages. The patents touch upon a range of functions having to do with cloud-based CRM. Several f...

By this point, most businesses understand that they exist in a new reality -- the reality that allows customers to communicate with them and with each other in new, faster and in a more pervasive way. Some businesses are actually doing something about it, too -- hence, the emergence of social CRM, s...

The U.S. healthcare sector is about to embark on a multibillion dollar information technology investment program to provide electronic medical records for tens of millions of patients. Doctors will receive as much as $44,000 each to implement an electronic health record system, and hospitals will re...

Over the years, Salesforce.com has gradually transformed itself from being a CRM company to a cloud services provider. Along the way, it partnered with leading-edge Web 2.0 companies such as Google and Facebook, and most recently, it teamed up with virtualization giant VMware to offer VMforce, a new...

The majority of today's contact centers employ well-designed, sophisticated self-service strategies, but even with a highly successful self-service application boasting a high call-completion rate, people will always need to talk to people. That is why there will always be a need for live service in...

One of the frustrations of new technology is that quite often even the vendor lacks a coherent understanding of an innovation's business context. Too often we receive a new product category and the best we can say about it is that it is "cool." This should not be surprising because that's what ear...

When politicians are campaigning, voters get close attention as prospective buyers and customers. After they take office, however, and are charged with actually running a government, how often do the elected officials maintain a real customer orientation to the voters? In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Purdue ...

The first point of contact between a business and its customers is increasingly a website, not a phone call or an in-person store visit. For government agencies, where store-like "walk-in" access is either difficult or unavailable -- especially at the national level -- improving customer contact t...