Archive

While CRM has always been "social," it's now starting to get "Social" -- in other words, it's starting to tap into the ways customers have seized control of their relationships with the people they buy from through technology, participation and the ability to reach more people -- and more-important ...

Over the last couple of weeks, I have maintained radio silence, hardly blogging as I tried to prepare a manuscript for publication. This piece is not the usual analyst fare with charts and graphs and interpretations. It's a simple book of my writings from the last year and a half. Many things came...

Once a small business successfully implements a new CRM solution, the next challenge will be maintaining it. Cloud computing promises to make the implementation process less painful, and it should also lessen the burden of system maintenance for the small enterprise. Traditional CRM tools typically ...

Some companies have a "PMO of one," which means that instead of setting up a sophisticated project management office, they assign one person the task of establishing and enforcing common project management processes. This person often has to deal with a broad spectrum of project work being performe...

Marketing Asset Management is an emerging category of Digital Asset Management technology that has been developed exclusively for the marketing function. With a host of digital asset technology available, many generic DAM products lack workflow capabilities, dynamic collateral development, and the ...

Tolstoy wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." CRM failures are very similar -- the ones that work do so for the same reasons, but those that go awry manifest a collection of diverse symptoms. CRM fails for a lot of reasons -- many of them traceable to...

I've recently been looking at a couple of applications that don't readily fit into the idea of conventional CRM but which are nonetheless valuable front-office tools that can make CRM a better purchase. They strike me as important additions to the front-office suite for sustainability reasons, too....

One of the greatest challenges to the successful implementation of a CRM solution is winning employee participation and cooperation. "It's a quandary," said Craig Klein, president and CEO of SalesNexus. If the sales staff is reluctant to use the new system, it will be very difficult to get it off th...

Contact center managers have started to think beyond "service levels," "average talk time" and "wait time." Slowly yet steadily, FCR has found its way into customer operations dashboards. A dual function of customer experience and contact center efficiency, FCR accurately portrays the overall health...

Excellent online customer service may be worth $17.3 billion in 2010, according to a new Ovum survey commissioned by StellaService. That's the round figure for the 10.7 percent premium the report suggests customers are willing to pay for good customer service. The survey was conducted across multipl...

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." If you haven't heard that one multiple times, you aren't really in business. It's a truism -- and part of being a truism is that it's true, for the most part. When a new business strategy emerges, it can temporarily topple truisms -- but soon, they're ...

I recently read Tribes by Seth Godin and I think it might hold some clues to the future of CRM. Godin is a business blogger and author of more than a dozen books with titles like Permission Marketing and Purple Cow. He's not about the status quo, he's all over change and leadership like a junkyard...

Business process management vendor Pegasystems will be acquiring CRM company Chordiant for $161.5 million, or $5 per share. While the deal will clearly provide synergies to both companies, it is also a function of the general consolidation in the CRM and BPM space, Nucleus Research Vice President Re...

A successful CRM implementation starts with good preparation. It is a good idea to document the goals and objectives of the small business first and test the system with the users, Sheryl Kingstone, director of the enterprise research group at Yankee Group, told CRM Buyer. "Be proactive," she advise...

Throughout the economic downtown, business managers heard virtually every cost-cutting measure, from furlough days to reducing IT investment. As we see shoots of recovery, we are reminded that no company can cost-cut its way to excellence; without some focus on the customer, eventually service start...