Archive

Ribbit announced that it had been purchased by British Telecom on Tuesday for $105 million in cash. As deals go, that might not seem like a lot, but given the fact that it's all cash and given the relatively slow market for "liquidity events" these days, it's worth pondering. Peeling the onion and t...

One best practice forward-looking companies have adopted is being proactive with online conversations that criticize, question -- or hopefully compliment -- a company's products or services. Not enough companies do this, of course, and of those that do, most do it more out of curiosity than anything...

It's not easy to find something to like about air travel these days -- the industry, after all, has the lowest customer satisfaction ratings in the economy -- but Gail Bower, president of Bower & Co. Consulting, has: the self-service kiosks that just about every airline now uses to handle automa...

On July 11, when Apple had barely started to sell its much-anticipated iPhone 3G, Salesforce.com became the first customer relationship management vendor to announce the availability of its mobile applications for the iPhone in Apple's App Store. Now, two weeks after the phone's release, a few other...

NetSuite has added new features to its NetSuite CRM+ flagship product, focusing on building new and tweaking existing marketing automation and knowledge management workflows for customer support and service. NetSuite also announced support for Firefox 3, the latest version of the Web browser from th...

Never before has the voice of the customer been so loud. And never before have companies been so keen to not only pay close attention to the wants, likes, experiences, preferences, opinions, suggestions and complaints of customers, but to carefully analyze and act upon the information in a systemati...

One of the hallmarks of CRM is that its footprint keeps expanding. I think part of the reason is that we have taken to lumping everything that is not a back-office application area into CRM. In fact, some people are even using front office interchangeably with CRM these days, myself included. I am o...

At $2.4 billion, the global contact center marketplace has grown mature. However, trends in the industry are still driving much growth in the space, according to a newly released report by Gartner that looks at the market and its players. These trends include a move to IP-based systems, which in tur...

Working from home has become an acceptable option for a wide range of professionals, including salespeople and lawyers. Until recently, this option, dubbed "homeshoring," was unpopular in the call center, although that perception has been changing. "Companies are becoming more comfortable in letting...

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...

SAP is transitioning its customers to the recently released SAP Enterprise Support package next year -- a change that will ultimately increase maintenance and support costs to 22 percent of license fees. Companies will begin moving to the new package immediately, with price increases set to take eff...

On my blog, I have been writing about my experience with my new computer: an iMac. In addition to the usual functional comparisons, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the whole cultural difference between the Windows world and the Apple world. As a longtime user of Windows, I felt I ...

Microsoft held its Worldwide Partner Conference last week, and Sonoma Partners' Mike Snyder summed up the event's highlights. "Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention," he wrote. "During the opening k...

As more buyers and sellers look to the Web and as other parties in the real estate value chain move to Web-enabled business software platforms, the real estate industry has begun to embrace CRM as a sales tool. While enterprise-level leaders such as Oracle and SAP don't have specific CRM offerings f...

Despite progress made against key warranty chain improvement initiatives, service and warranty management executives still wrestle with post-sale customer satisfaction issues and escalating warranty costs. These executives are revising business processes and adopting technology solutions to better m...