Archive

RFID has gained ascendancy in the corporate world more by fiat than through efforts to persuade suppliers that the technology could deliver internal returns -- at least, in the beginning. With the requirement to deploy it or lose contracts handed down by such entities as Wal-Mart and the Department ...

The fact that we pay the taxes that support the costs of government ought to make us the customers of the government, right? That seems logical, but often taxpayers and constituents are treated more like an annoyance than a valued customer. However, some government agencies are starting to see the l...

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has change...

Perhaps nowhere as in government services is the need for truly collaborative software and information systems so great. The organizational and information management challenges are as immense and far-reaching as government itself, and if anything have intensified in the face of budget cuts and cons...

NetSuite has introduced its own version of a development platform -- direct competition for the raft of initiatives and platforms Salesforce.com has designed to entice developers to its product line. The difference between them, according to NetSuite, is that it based its new platform on open standa...

Call center reps get a bad rap. They're expected to be constantly nice in the face of increasingly not-nice customer interactions, field the blunt of management's never-ending drive for increased performance, and solve every problem that randomly hits their line. It's no wonder the industry faces a ...

After reading the book Mindset: The Psychology of Success by Dr. Carol S. Dweck, I began to wonder if her concepts of fixed versus growth mindsets were either accentuated or diminished when it came to customer relationship strategies enabled with SaaS-based applications. The many benefits of the Saa...

RightNow has updated its flagship SaaS CRM product with new agent desktop functionality, customer-tracking abilities, enhanced analytics and chat features. The new version, which it calls "February '08," also includes a contextual workspace -- that is, a user interface for contact center service rep...

A community, aka "community of interest," is usually thought of as a large group of people with some common reason for associating. These days, that usually comes down to the user group, but in practice, a community can be any group that is passionate about a product or service and wants to improve...

The customer is always right -- except for, of course, when he or she isn't. When it's inconvenient for the company, or when the customer asks for something that could negatively affect the company's revenue streams or business model, the customer is never right -- even when he or she is. That's why...

Through a joint venture with the renowned Cleveland Clinic, Google is entering yet another software category: electronic personal health records. The two firms last week announced plans to develop a PHR pilot program that will test the secure exchange of patient medical record data -- such as prescr...

Empowering sales forces with tools to work remotely has evolved dramatically since the first wave of smartphones hit the streets. Sales reps have grown adept at basic applications such as e-mail and Web browsing, but often still wait for an end-of-day laptop session to access their CRM system. Still...

A new survey of European bank customers could prove useful to banks on this side of the pond. The Future of Communications in Retail Banking survey, conducted by Coleman Parkes and sponsored by Xerox, analyzed how retail banks communicate with their customers and presented an argument for more perso...

Oracle has introduced a new single-tenant option for its Siebel CRM customers. In contrast to the typical multitenant architecture, Siebel's Single Tenant, Enterprise Edition gives customers a path to connectivity via a fully dedicated database, middleware and application instance of Siebel CRM On D...

The dam has burst in regard to the demand for supply chain management services in the small business segment, according to recent Aberdeen research. The results of a December 2007 outsourcing survey of more than 300 organizations reveal that small businesses -- with annual revenues of $50 million or...