Archive

Some years ago, Marc Benioff told me he was not interested in developing back office apps that would compete with SAP and Oracle in the ERP and finance market. Many people, myself included, looked askance at that idea and wondered out loud how the company would continue to grow because, hey, there's...

If you search for "why CRM fails" you get over three million results. Analysts report that close to half of all CRM projects fail and about 40 percent of CRM software purchased goes unused -- because sales teams don't want to use software that makes them glorified data entry clerks and still doesn't...

In a CRM situation, an algorithm that gets the right answer is accurate and nice (we got the deal!), but if the business process supported by CRM has a lot of returns or unhappy customers, it's not very precise.

As the dust settled on what most have deemed the "new normal" of working from home, many industries -- including customer service -- rapidly shifted operations to be remote work-friendly. At the same time, call volumes increased exponentially: During the last few months, airlines saw a 199 percent i...

A pandemic, economic uncertainty and social distancing -- what a kerfuffle we are in right now. As marketing leaders, it's an incredibly difficult time to direct our teams. Everyone is struggling to navigate our current situation. Yet, while we're all figuring out how to juggle emotions, families, d...

These are extraordinary times, in case you haven't noticed. One of my contentions these days is that CRM is penetrating society to a point that it is taking on an outsized role -- the "CRMification" of society. In economics we often see a disruptive innovation climb a ladder as it becomes something...

CRMification is the process by which the culture absorbs CRM technology, processes and techniques to achieve some kind of new utility for getting things done better, faster and cheaper. Today we should add safer too. Another way to state it is that CRM is a disruptive innovation in the culture. The ...

Oracle appears to be undergoing a kind of resurgence during the coronavirus crisis. Financial analysts are saying nice things. Its technology, which always has been good, is seeing an interesting uptick. All of this is buffing the company's image after years of, yes-but responses from the market -- ...

Customer service doesn't have to suffer while your company goes through a difficult transition. In fact, 78 percent of consumers said they stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service. Now is the time to show your most valuable buyers how you'll keep them informed, updated ...

You can reduce the story of CRM to a lot of things, especially its many component parts. Social networking, cloud computing and analytics are mentioned often. We don't need an exhaustive list, but if we stop there we miss a lot.

Oracle and Zoom just entered a deal that for once is more about technological audacity than about dollars -- a partnership to host Zoom on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. As important as this deal is for Zoom, by helping it to scale massively, the announcement also provides a concrete example of Oracle...

The enterprise IT environment is complex. Many systems, technologies and practices that were developed at various times coexist in the same world. With expectations for technological advancements at their peak, we're tasked with enabling these systems to work together harmoniously to support the con...

In contact tracing, Salesforce's core CRM technology is coming to the forefront. It has most of the big modules you might need to build a tracing app, a development facility for making customizations, and analytics to help identify patterns in the data.

One topic that has a substantial impact on CX is the transformation of customer service operations using digital tools. Although it is often the engine room for driving transformation and change, it is met with limited success.

Adobe just announced what it calls the first digital economy index. It seems like it's modeled after other indices usually kept by the federal government to measure economic output and consumption. The Adobe index captures only consumer consumption behavior though. Some of its insights include new s...