Archive

This is an interesting time of year for me, mostly because there's so much to watch. I call it "analyst season," not so much because of anything I do, but because the big guys tend to publish a lot of new reports documenting their view of the pecking order. In addition to the publication of new ana...

Providing timely, reassuring and comprehensive customer service has been an axiom of good business for as long as people have been doing business. The inability of a business to provide competent, secure customer service is damaging to more than just revenues. Besides the direct monetary losses that...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. resident filed a lawsuit demanding $54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbell related her frustration w...

"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 ...

Two-year-old Demandbase has planted its own stake in the rapidly emerging next-gen lead generation and lead conversion space with the introduction this week of Demandbase. A Software as a Service platform, Demandbase Central consists of sales and marketing applications as well as a search, scoring a...

In a slow news week, Salesforce.com had no trouble attracting our attention with a $31.5 million acquisition of InStranet. The skinny on this company is that InStranet enables customers to build knowledge bases for service and support applications. It was an area where Salesforce was relatively li...

With the release of its August '08 version, RightNow Technologies continues to shift both its platform and its lineup of products and features to Web 2.0. This latest upgrade includes a customer portal that offers widgets, video, forums and blogs. Its studio development environment now allows users ...

Some of your employees have a blog -- approved, of course -- as do some of your customers. In addition, your employees have been posting videos from the latest trade show on your Web site, as well as on some of your partner Web sites. Your latest project is the funneling of customer comments from yo...

The real beauty of baking soda isn't what it does in the oven but what it does outside of the oven. It's flexible. It's dynamic. It does everything it does extremely well. In addition to playing a key role in cakes, breads and pastries, it keeps refrigerators smelling fresh, can clean a bathroom or ...

Talisma has introduced version 8.1 of its Knowledgebase application. The point release represents a significant shift in the company's approach to enterprise search, Bob Perry, director of Knowledgebase product management, told CRM Buyer. In this upgrade, Talisma has OEM'ed the Autonomy search engin...

Device makers are hard at it trying to crack the market for mobile enterprise software applications. While BlackBerry devices put Research in Motion in a front-running position, enterprise users have an increasingly wide range of choices when it comes to high-end smartphones and mobile devices. Rece...

CEOs across companies and industries have become focused in 2008 on the critical role that customer experience plays in keeping their companies competitive and driving profitability. These same CEOs are challenging their CMOs to move beyond CRM to Customer Experience Management, which takes an outsi...

Salesforce.com has acquired InStranet for $31.5 million, a transaction that includes the assumption of $4.2 million in cash on InStranet's balance sheet. This deal is grander in scale than any of Salesforce.com's previous acquisitions; the company's past purchases have been small one-off technology ...

I am sitting on a train heading to New York from Boston for a CRM conference. Not driving, not flying -- I prefer the train for this trip for a bunch of reasons. Rail brought us traveling troubadours like Woody Guthrie, circuses and baseball, and it helped define a job type: the traveling salesper...

It's rare to see Google command anything less than a large presence in just about any given e-business study these days, and the latest annual American Customer Satisfaction Index from the University of Michigan is no exception: ACSI scores for e-business rose 5.5 percent to 79.3 on ACSI's 100-point...