Archive

There are those partnerships where the companies swap logos and do joint press releases and that's about it, and then there are partnerships where true integration happens. This latter type of partnership is starting to emerge between Salesforce.com and Google, and that's a very good thing for the C...

Contact consolidation is not for the lighthearted. For years, contact center management has been attempting to control costs by reducing the number of agents, physical sites and consolidating software and hardware solutions. Often these attempts are in conflict with customer and corporate demands. ...

Rapid and cheaper deployment and the enhanced information sharing and communications collaborative applications afford organizations are helping the technology catch on in government agencies just as in the private sector. "Today's government agencies face growing pressure to improve efficiency, inc...

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...