Archive

After a long build-up, I think we're finally at the real beginning of a new era in computing. The previous 10 years have laid an important foundation, by which I mean on-demand computing, but if you thought that was it, I think the next few years could blow you away. Take a look at the driving force...

RightNow is adding chat to its expanding Feedback feature set. The new functionality is part of the application's May '08 update to its flagship CRM product. "By adding feedback into RightNow chat, we have filled out our multichannel story," Andrew Hull, director of product marketing for RightNow, t...

Responding to heightened concerns about the privacy of individuals' medical and healthcare information, the federal government in 1996 introduced HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It empowered the Department of Health and Human Services to develop and manage the methods...

Salesforce.com was created during cloudy economic times, and its business model -- per-user, per-seat pricing when the market offered nothing but million-dollar enterprise-based pricing -- took off precisely for that reason. Now the company, which has since remade itself into an enterprise class ven...

SugarCRM is repackaging its functionality to target both companies that wish to resell SugarCRM to their own customers as well as large-scale enterprises that wish to manage multiple instances of the application through one console. Its new product, Sugar Data Center Edition, bundles existing softwa...

A recent report from the Aberdeen Group explores the critical role closed-loop marketing plays in today's Best-in-Class organizations, and the dynamic shift in the tools, technologies, and processes that support today's top-performing closed-loop marketing initiatives. Significantly, 88 percent of t...

Results of a customer satisfaction survey released this week are timely for one industry in particular, as it faces a perfect storm: the collision of potentially stringent new regulations affecting customer service with a host of economic factors that are driving perception of that service deeper in...

Zuora introduced itself to the world this week, and while it is not a typical CRM company, its position should have a big impact on CRM and all other markets that offer on-demand solutions. Founders Tien Tzuo, K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou, formerly of Salesforce.com and WebEx, chose the usually sedate bi...

Sage Software owned the CRM vendor conference spotlight this week, with Insights 2008, held in suburban Washington, D.C. Sage updated attendees on its product road map and better acquainted users and partners with the new CEO Sue Swenson. She is not a software person, writes Beagle Research Managin...

It is difficult to think of an area where the pharmaceutical industry is not under siege these days. Regulators spawning new rules, governments putting price caps in place, safety advocates demanding more information on side effects, health maintenance plans implementing their own cost controls, and...

Retailers' approach to interaction between e-commerce and the contact center is changing. The online and call center channels are starting to meld together, and perspectives on how retailers handle the two have to change. A typical shopping experience today may go something like this: The customer b...

I sometimes forget about the fact that people are trying to do business and that their business is top of mind -- not CRM. That point was brought home to me last week when I was on-site with a client. I won't give too many details, but the company has no CRM per se, just some spreadsheets they use ...

SAP held its massive annual conference, Sapphire, last week and made the usual flurry of announcements and presentations to its 15,000-some attendees. Still, as is typical of most conferences, the best information filtered out between the official scheduled events. Among the observations CRM guru Pa...

Most health insurance companies have plowed resources into self-service Web sites for their policyholders -- Web site portals that display page after page of details on coverage. Yet the general perception, even among many industry insiders, is that health insurance providers are not customer-friend...

If you could clone your best agent hundreds or thousands of times over, you could ensure that each and every customer calling your contact center receives the same high-quality, friendly and informed response. In reality, natural language speech self-service is probably the closest and best alternat...