Archive

Earlier this month SugarCRM announced that it had secured $20 million in a new financing round, bringing its total funding so far to $46 million -- a significant accomplishment for several reasons. If SugarCRM is not familiar to you, it's not a new Caribbean restaurant in SoHo. I never bothered to f...

RightNow has enhanced its retail industry-specific app with chat and feedback functionality -- changes that give users more outreach options to customers using self-service channels. "With this app, retailers can incorporate feedback into chat," said Susan Meriwether, VP of product marketing, "to ma...

A frustrated Best Buy customer has filed a $54 million lawsuit against the electronics retailer in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Her complaint? Best Buy lost the laptop she had brought in for repair; the tech staff was evasive about its whereabouts; and the store refused to compens...

Even in a recession -- if in fact we've crossed that line -- there is still significant economic activity. For example, according to the most recent data I can find, the U.S. economy generated about $13.13 trillion in activity in 2006. That's also known as the "GDP" or gross domestic product. Absent...

"Opportunity computing" is a term that Danny Kolke, founder and CTO of Etelos, has coined -- or at least introduced into general use in the CRM community, thanks to his recent blog post, "Utility v. Opportunity." A partner recently asked Kolke about Etelos' move into the utility computing business. ...

Salesforce.com has released its Spring '08 update, building on the Content and Ideas modules that debuted in its Winter '07 edition and boosting standard customer relationship management functionality. The primary purpose of the Content and Ideas applications is to give users more tools to manage un...

An increasing global customer base is driving companies to provide "follow-the-sun" customer support services. In order to enable this level of support, agents are now being located in any part of the world. The challenge is to merge technologies and provide seamless, accurate and real-time customer...

SugarCRM will be building out its global footprint and investing in its engineering bench now that it has completed its latest round of funding. The open source customer relationship management provider just secured a $20 million package, led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing its total funding ...

Amdocs has introduced a new lineup of service offerings designed to help its customers make the transition to marketing their own products and strategies in the digital medium. Amdocs began realigning its product portfolio in this direction last year, when it introduced the Customer Experience Syste...

Retailers are increasingly focusing on the use of business intelligence as a tool to profile customers and increase loyalty. A survey of Aberdeen's retail community in November 2007 revealed that business intelligence is the top technology that retailers will be focusing on in 2008. In order to prov...

It wasn't so long ago that the chief technology officer was sequestered in the IT department, cut off for all intents and purposes from the hub of enterprise power. It is different now, of course: The CTO position has grown in visibility over the last 10 years and become more closely tied to that of...

I got a statistic stuck in my head last week during a visit to a client in California. Sometimes you hear or see something so interesting for its oddity that it stays with you no matter what. For me, this was one of those times. There are actually two closely related bits of information, and both r...

There were approximately 40 million women among the 90 million people watching the Super Bowl on Sunday, and Pats fan Andrea Learned was one of them. The night was a letdown for Learned the sports fan -- but not for Learned the marketer and author. This year's Super Bowl ads are illustrative of a fo...

Database vendors, as well as human resources, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and specialist recruitment management systems developers are all working with organizations to improve their recruiting and personnel management capabilities -- and they're taking advantage o...

Scanning the RSS feeds from the blogs -- many of which are all about the benefits of Web 2.0 providing greater customer intimacy and building trust with customers -- one begins to wonder if telemarketing is on its way to becoming obsolete. I asked a group of marketing vice presidents and directors a...