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Despite repeated pleas of "Do you hear me now?" from customers the world over, few companies have done much more than turn a deaf ear. As a result, consumer frustration is at an all-time high while brand loyalty has hit an all-time low. The technologies that were supposed to open lines of communicat...

Oracle has released the third in a series of small, plug-and-play Web 2.0 tools designed to enhance specific features of its customer relationship management platform. Oracle Sales Prospector, previewed Monday at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, recommends prospective leads, rating the likel...

Lately I have been working on a keynote speech that I need to deliver in a few weeks, and in the process of doing my research, I came across some very interesting ideas that fit in well with my research focus. In the last half of the 20th century, a number of thinkers became increasingly dissatisfie...

As we've said here before, blogs have been an excellent leveler of the playing field for consumers. Had a poor customer service experience or are just feeling aggrieved with a service provider? Complain to management, yes, but then blog about it. While such posts are generally considered to be the r...

Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente announced plans for a pilot program that would exchange health information between the insurer's My Health Manager service and the HealthVault personal health records service. The partnership comes amid a push to give people greater control of and access to their medi...

SAP is a company in transition. The Walldorf, Germany-based enterprise software firm has been around since 1972, which makes it older than Microsoft. To hear observers and insiders tell it, the firm has been showing its age in recent years. A combination of its massive size -- it is the third-larges...

As a company grows in size, various information sharing challenges appear that can stifle that growth. One such speed bump sets in a few years into the growth cycle, when the company expands and each department develops its own information needs. That problem is called "Islanditis." The system that ...

Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo has filed a civil lawsuit against Time Warner Cable, alleging it deceived and ripped off its subscribers, providing inferior service for months. The complaint accuses TWC of engaging in numerous fraudulent acts and business practices that resulted in consu...

Jigsaw, a provider of corporate information, sales and marketing leads, is providing some of its contacts for free to customer relationship management vendors under a newly launched Open Data Initiative. Several companies are taking advantage of the open source program and have inked partnership agr...

I once played organized football -- not that I was any good at it, but I played it with relish. My favorite parts were anything that had to do with disrupting the opponent's carefully planned plays, which included covering kickoffs and punts as well as regular defense. This bit of information has a...

The Cluetrain Manifesto, written 10 years ago by Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger, has won over a sizable number of devotees with a simple premise: As the Internet introduces new levels of communication among consumers -- and between consumers and companies -- those co...

There was a time when customizing enterprise software was a long, drawn-out, often painful affair. Then along came Software as a Service, recalls Dan Druker, senior vice president for Intacct, an on-demand financial management and accounting application. It was really easy for Ingres -- a provider o...

One of the common myths surrounding HIPAA is that it is not a privacy law at all, and that it weakened rather than strengthened individuals' rights to health information privacy. That's not the case at all, according to Deven McGraw, recently appointed director of the Center for Democracy & Tech...

Growing companies encounter various bottlenecks that inhibit growth and cause them to plateau. It starts innocently enough. Everyone reaches for a spreadsheet to make lists. Things are fine while there are only three or four of you. Then the new hire in sales creates his own list of customers. Acc...

We've all seen the promotions: Brand X donates a portion of its sales to a worthy cause, which can be anything from support for a local school to breast cancer research. It's called "cause-related marketing," and it is rapidly becoming one of the best ways for businesses to embroider their brands, s...