Archive

Memo to telecom service providers: "We never thanked you, but you did a great job offering us consolidated billing. It is hard to remember now, as for the last few years you have been so aggressive in promoting bundled services, but five years ago, this was a major pain point. Three bills for ISP, c...

This summer, Bob Lyons was tapped to lead Avaya's contact center division. The new general manager and vice president of customer service applications -- a relatively new position at Avaya -- joined the company at a crucial time. It was in the midst of reorganizing its operations around three busin...

There is little doubt that these are increasingly uncertain times for managers. In 2008, U.S. businesses cut nearly 2 million jobs -- amounting to 11 straight months of shrinking payrolls -- and some economists predict that we could lose another 3 million jobs in the next two years. In the past fou...

"Smart" shopping carts have been around for a while, but until recently, they haven't managed to gain much traction. Now, some momentum is building, according to proponents of the computer-rigged market baskets that -- with a swipe of a card -- can flash an alert that a customer's favorite brand of ...

When it comes to security software, who really knows what lurks in the minds of today's users? It appears that most people seem to choose their security products based on a lot of other factors beyond their ability to protect their computers from the malicious forces at work. Whatever the label on t...

What a great time to be thinking about the future. Seriously. This is my last column of the year, and traditionally I try to forecast some movements in the market for the year ahead. This year it takes a special kind of fortitude to even read a piece like this, let alone write it, but if you think ...

The Internet provides opportunities for businesses to interact with customers in new ways. As innovations in social media appear, enterprises slowly adopt those same trends to offer alternatives for making the sale online. Some companies are attracting potential new clients through live video stream...

The Federal Reserve Bank has issued new rules that will take effect in 2010, radically changing the way credit card companies treat their customers. Essentially, they are strong protections that regulate interest rates and billing methodologies. For instance, card companies will be prohibited from ...

The economic downturn is top of mind for every organization. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV and it's hard to dismiss the facts: Recession looms and nobody knows when or how it will end. As a Research Director in the Customer Management Technology Group at the Aberdeen Group, I'm constantly ge...

I don't know about you, but I will be happy to write "The End" on the chapter we call 2008. Normally, at the end of a year I look back at some of my predictions from a year earlier and look for some indication that I was on track at least some of the time. This year is different. Who cares, really...

The number of diabetes patients and those with the potential for diabetes has grown substantially over the past decade and continues to expand. This trend creates a tremendous demand for innovative care solutions and service models. New service innovations will take advantage of the latest monitorin...

Have you ever answered one of those "how was our service?" questionnaires to let somebody know you weren't happy with the experience you'd had, and then never heard anything back from the business that asked? Or maybe this holiday season your boss asked where the staff wanted to go for the office pa...

Nearly five years ago, I wrote a white paper that resonated around the industry like a three-point shot clanging off the front of the rim as time expired. A "brick," in the vernacular of basketball; nonetheless, I view it as some of my finest work. The paper, "The New Garage," takes as its premise ...

Voice today is at center stage in the enterprise. Carrier Session Internet Protocol trunks, enterprise SIP trunks, converged IP networks, federating private branch exchanges, unified communications and communication-enabled applications are but a few of the many voice initiatives you'll find underwa...

SugarCRM has released Sugar 5.2, which packages some existing Web 2.0 features with new technologies. The company is also introducing Cloud Services -- a framework for developers to build links to third-party data sources such as LinkedIn or JigSaw. SugarCRM is no stranger to Web 2.0. It has made th...