Archive

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...

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 ...