Archive

Many organizations spend months and endure significant costs to obtain the reporting and analysis capabilities that BI technology promises, only to find that different "versions of the truth" still exist without any definite way of determining which one is real or accurate. This raises the question:...

We can all read the news. Credit is frozen, or nearly so, and the federal government is laboring mightily to get credit flowing again. Unfortunately, here in the U.S. as well as in other places, like the UK, banks have become averse to doing business. The news reports I read say that after being too...

Cable company and customer satisfaction: The two terms are often considered antithetical. Through the years, these corporations have earned a reputation of being slow to respond to customer inquiries, inflexible and callous. Now as new competitors tread on their cash cow video services, will these p...

Microsoft CRM operations are in full swing, and bloggers are sharing tips and information. Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is now available. No, it's not a new release -- but as with anything Microsoft, the cyber-community is talking about implementation do's and don'ts. Microsoft is ...

In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later -- eight years, actually -- the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green movement, among other things, would have pushed this concept al...

You're the manager of a Hilton Garden Inn, and it's the height of family vacation season. The lobby is abuzz with kids toting skateboards and moms pushing strollers; your front desk agents are overloaded with check-ins. In the middle of all this, a harried business traveler calls to the front desk f...

I have in my hot little hand a two-page handout that I got at the recently concluded Dreamforce 2008 event in San Francisco. With all the excitement about the election and the economy, as well as this day job I have, I had not really taken the time to peruse it. A quick glance a couple of weeks ago...

The joke used to be on the U.S. Postal Service. Indeed, jabs about the government's mail system may have driven business to private-sector competitors like United Parcel Service, Federal Express and DHL. That was decades ago; now, it seems, some of the same companies designed to outperform the USPS...

At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce.com and several of its partners -- Facebook, Google and Amazon -- made announcements intended to encourage more businesses to pursue Web-as-a-platform using their Force.com business process platform. Taking away significant amounts of hype, there were three...

It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in s...

RightNow Technologies has gone deep with contact center functionality in November 08, the latest quarterly update of its flagship Software as a Service CRM application. The new version builds on RightNow's strong self-service platform with the addition of agent-scripting technology, a desktop add-in...

What mistakes will cause emergency communication systems to undergo excessive stress or possibly fail in a disaster, and what steps should be taken to improve performance? One of the biggest challenges for emergency communication centers is the wide range of situations that require responses -- incl...

Saturday, Nov. 8, 6:15 p.m. The Wheaton, Md., Metrorail stop in greater Washington, D.C. I am meeting a friend at 7, and I'm later than I wanted to be getting to the Metro. Unfortunately, I'm a bit off my stride. I forgot to get dollar bills and now have to scrounge through my purse looking for eno...

If you've flown lately, you know the drill: long lines, delayed flights and higher ticket prices. Consumers have come to expect no less, and no more, from air travel. Even without the stress from a struggling economy, air travel in particular tends to bring about discomfort, dissatisfaction and anxi...

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features -- as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions. The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for...