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Salesforce.com is marrying its cloud computing bona fides with its growing expertise in collaboration in Salesforce Chatter, a new application and development platform. The company introduced the product at its Dreamforce tradeshow and conference under way in San Francisco. Salesforce Chatter, which...

The health insurance industry, especially in the U.S., has a long way to go before it achieves a high level of performance in the use of customer relationship management tools. However, pressure is coming from market forces -- including new government healthcare reform policies -- that will compel ...

This fall has not been kind to T-Mobile. First, the mobile operator had to account for mountains of lost data that Sidekick customers had stored on the infrastructure of Danger, the Microsoft-owned company that developed the Sidekick device. Then there was the nationwide service outage for millions ...

I was re-reading Eric von Hippel's excellent book Democratizing Innovation and found something in it that might help explain the popularity of cloud computing and Platform as a Service. I am on the way to Dreamforce and have little visibility into what Salesforce.com might announce in the next day ...

Those of us immersed in CRM take it for granted that people understand what the acronym stands for and what it really means -- the technology, people and processes that go into building stronger relationships with customers. Quite naturally, the people who sell, support and comment on CRM understand...

One of the most important ways marketers can differentiate their offerings in today's unique selling environment is by creating a remarkable customer experience. One step toward achieving this goal is to ensure they have a single database that is tightly integrated with their CRM system to capture i...

The market for CRM programs will expand in financial services, although the pace of spending will likely slow down in the near term. Still, the rate of CRM spending by financial firms is not the only element that could change in the future. Whether a financial firm already has implemented a program ...

Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social ...

Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,...

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. There are still 6,600 main...

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious...

Contact center operations are constantly under scrutiny. They're complex, they're expensive to run, and employee retention and training can be problematic, to say the least. Contact center managers have a never-ending desire to streamline operations to keep spending in check. If they're not focusing...

The chastening effect of the recession has many financial services firms taking a cautious view of future CRM investments. One reason is that these firms are husbanding their resources. Another is a growing awareness that investments in CRM by the financial sector have not been all that successful. ...

Customer relationships are damaged when companies hear too late about customer concerns or issues to do anything to repair them. Even worse, many crucial concerns aren't being heard by the right people at an organization. For example, are managers aware of which customers are unhappy? Did an employe...

I just finished reading The Black Swan, a book that has been on my list since it came out in 2007, and I highly recommend it, though it is not easy reading. There is a great deal of set up before you get to the whole point of the book in the last 50 pages. The Black Swan is about uncertainty in the...