Archive

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...

Enterprise sales organizations are under increasing pressure, often both from internal and external stakeholders, to provide more accurate sales forecasts of top-line revenue in order to better predict, and improve, the long-term health of their company. The upcoming Aberdeen benchmark report, sche...

CRM is not a technology; it's a discipline that encompasses people, processes and technology. How many times have you heard that truism? How many times have you heard it from a CRM vendor? Many times, I'd imagine -- but internalizing that concept is not as simple as it seems. Practicing a truly comp...

I had the pleasure of attending two events last week: Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta and the Salesforce-VMware VMforce.com announcement in San Francisco. Each event was useful and informative in its own way, and I am pleased to have witnessed each first-hand. I have written exhaustively -- ...

Siemens Enterprise Communications has announced an upgrade of its OpenScape Contact Center. The V8 release will be generally available May 18, Ross Sedgewick, senior director with Siemens' large enterprise solutions group, told CRM Buyer. The new version will provide virtualization from both the ser...

What if you answered the phone one day to a friendly voice offering tech support for some software that had been troubling you? "Not possible," you'd say. We all know the drill with technical difficulties. We call up the software company during business hours and then sit on hold only to get an agen...

There's been much ado about social media as the latest, greatest customer service tool -- but all that ado does little to help a corporation steer the conversation around perils and toward profits. So, buzz aside, where is the leverage in a set of tools that is seemingly all talk and little substanc...

If you think long enough about acquiring a CRM system, you will come to vendor lock-in, the idea that you won't be able to easily change vendors down the road for whatever reason. It's almost an existential problem, like rent and alimony put together. Every approach to CRM has its benefits and def...

Salesforce.com and VMware jointly announced Tuesday a new platform for enterprise application development in the cloud. They will offer application development as a service in their VMforce venture. "[Information technology] needs to be transformed into and accessed as a service whether it's into th...

For B2B marketers, social media has quickly become a desirable component of most cross-channel marketing campaigns. According to an August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education, the vast majority of professionals worldwide are using social technologies for business purposes. Eighty-si...

Pegasystems will demonstrate examples of simple integration between its BPM applications and the CRM functionality it will inherit from Chordiant at its upcoming trade show. Then, in the May/June time frame, the company will announce a detailed road map for integration of the two applications, accor...

Businesses are extending their reach across multiple channels of commerce -- from stores, call centers and kiosks to the Web 2.0 reality of social networking sites and blogs -- to maximize sales opportunities. As customers get more demanding in this competitive environment, it pays to listen to them...

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progress regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. Recent Aberdeen research published for "Inside Sales Enablement: Let Them Drink Coffee!" reveals th...