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Consider the advantages of joining an airline frequent flier program: The more you travel, the more points you earn. On the other hand, the more you travel, the more likely your baggage will be lost. Or the airline will still charge a fee for converting frequent flier points into a "free" extra trip...

Aberdeen Group's September 2009 report "Enterprise Search - Discover the Next Opportunity for Growth" investigated the strategies and tactics companies have used to drive productivity and improve customer service using enterprise search. In that report, Aberdeen used four key performance criteria to...

One of the reasons that sustainability is such a big issue for all of us is the way the marketplace has shaped up in the last few years. A telltale sign is the initial public offering market. The once-vibrant activity of bringing new companies to the stock markets has shriveled up, and with it you...

It often seems that an agile development environment will always be at odds with the structure and constraints of the project management office. Yet it does not have to be this way. Creating an agile PMO that bridges the gap between these two very important groups can help organizations to prioritiz...

Major hotel chains have been wooing travelers for years with CRM tools focused mainly on "loyalty" or rewards programs. The CRM programs help hotels and resorts determine which customers patronize the same hospitality brand on a regular basis. Those frequent customers accumulate points that can be e...

Move over Data.gov. The United Kingdom has unveiled its own version of an open source database for its citizens, and the U.S. version pales in comparison. The site, data.gov.uk, which has been running in beta since last September, opened to the public this week to much fanfare. The brainchild of Web...

"Sustainability" has been the key issue capturing my attention this year, so it makes sense to tease apart just what that term means for CRM. To me, sustainability is about business processes that are repeatable and, more to the point, processes that both sides readily engage in. However, in addit...

As financial institutions gear up for 2010, many companies are still on the long road to recovery after facing some of the most difficult challenges in years. Mortgage defaults and foreclosures, new regulations on credit card and bank fees, and the constant barrage of related news stories sent custo...

Pick a room -- any room. There are lots of choices of places to stay for travelers in the U.S. In fact, there are 4.4 million guestrooms across the country, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. And that's a problem. Competitors in the hospitality sector need some kind of an edge...

Businesses are increasingly adopting customer-focused business processes to gain competitive advantage. Especially prevalent in industries where product offerings and price no longer provide sufficient differentiation, this new focus offers a myriad of benefits. Customer experience is the battlegrou...

Whether driven by lack of product differentiation, customer demand for better service, or simply the need to improve the prospect/customer experience, companies are seeking to better understand their customers in order to more effectively acquire and retain business. Yet recent Aberdeen research sho...

News that the economy shed an additional 85,000 jobs in December is enough to put a damper on any New Year's celebration, and it was a sobering reminder as we trudged back to work in January that we are only in the early stages of a recovery. Just to review, we know that employment is a lagging indi...

SaaS and cloud solutions continue to represent key drivers in the CRM market, up from 8 percent of the CRM market in 2005 to 20 percent of the market in 2008, according to Gartner. SaaS and cloud CRM solutions spurred the evolution of computing -- with no more software installations, no infrastruct...

Retailers in the U.S. are convinced that CRM is one of the most important aspects of their business. However, the sector in general has failed to utilize the full potential of these programs, and the industry will be striving to elevate its CRM game in the future. That's good news not only for custo...

A new year! Blank screen! OK, let's talk! I think sustainability will be a big theme for me from this year onward. If your idea of sustainability is mostly about rain forest preservation and similar topics, I hope you will read on and think new. I have given a lot of thought to the concept and do...