Archive

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions bet...

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in. I write a lot ...

Genesys has always been a distinct entity within the Alcatel-Lucent line of divisions, products and services. On Jan. 1, though, it was folded into a larger group called the "Applications Software Group." Genesys' mission of offering contact center products and services geared toward enterprises and...

For the last few years, Amdocs has been introducing modules, or "packs," to customers. These are packaged applications that are equipped with features that address a specific task or functional area and are designed for fast implementation. This strategy was on display last week when Amdocs rolled o...

Among the new tools and features SugarCRM introduced at its global developer conference this week are a new Web services framework and mobile customizations. The open source customer relationship management company also reiterated its support for the cloud, with the rollout of several additional c...

The home-agent contact center model has undergone a metamorphosis in the last few years. A few short years ago, it was the refuge of small companies that couldn't afford to outsource operations to typical brick-and-mortar contact centers, said Alpine CEO Christopher Carrington. However, larger compa...

The two biggest dogs in the CRM fight are Salesforce and Oracle. You could debate that, but not with me. Salesforce has had a good run lately with announcements about its platform technology, its community of developers and its new foray into social media and social networking. Oracle has been plowi...

"Not to beat about the bush, but the budgeting process at most companies has to be the most ineffective practice in management. It sucks the energy, time, fun and big dreams out of an organization. In fact, when companies win, in most cases it is despite their budgets, not because of them." These a...

Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, has been on the job since March 2008. It is no small irony that one year ago he was tasked with the assignment of strengthening the services group's financial and operating performance -- a significant undertaking, given that the services division t...

It may be as sexy as grandma's underpants, but data is the foundation upon which everything else is layered. Without the right support underneath, the fat will roll over your margins, creating an unsightly, unseemly, unprofitable business bulge. "While it sounds a little boring, managing data as the...

The budget cuts and spending freezes resulting from the current economic downturn have reduced the number of legitimate opportunities for sales representatives; therefore, organizations are placing a renewed emphasis on cutting costs and customer retention to combat certain economic realities. In an...

Perhaps the new slogan in this merciless economic downturn should be "All Hail the Salesman." For it is the salesman that brings home the bacon upon which all other jobs will feed. It is key, then, to see to it that salespeople are equipped with the very best technologies and that they are supported...

This year, companies seeking to invest further -- or for the first time -- in a CRM software system will find not only a wide array of vendors, but also a large selection of computing platforms to support the application. These can range from Software as a Service offerings typified by the standard-...

It's no secret that customers aren't buying much these days. The economic engines have locked and stalled, leaving businesses everywhere in freefall. While companies around the globe are jettisoning anything they can to slow the descent, none are ditching CRM. In fact, CRM may be the last remaining ...

As a result of having little to no visibility into business processes, many companies have turned to the integration capabilities of Business Process Management tools. In the Aberdeen Group benchmark report "BPM and Beyond: The Human Factor of Process Management," Best-in-Class companies are working...