Archive

John Fleming and Jim Asplund are the coauthors of Human Sigma: Managing the Customer Encounter. They believe that when it comes to human systems -- a company's employees and their relationships with customers -- businesses have dropped the ball. Their view is that by moving the customer experience a...

Oracle beat many Wall Street predictions in its second fiscal quarter, reporting $1.3 billion in net income and a year-over-year 36 percent increase in stock earnings. The increase in quarterly profit equated to 25 cents per share. The Redwood Shores, Calif., software giant raked in $5.3 billion in ...

The latest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM -- 4.0, formerly code-named "Titan" -- is complete and released to manufacturing. In other words, the long-awaited application has shipped from Microsoft's engineering group and is now available from electronic download for new and existing customers. The...

Incentive compensation is often the first place where management makes adjustments in efforts to improve sales productivity. Many organizations have departed from the straight commission model in favor of plans that prompt the sales force to target high-profit deals. However, when a salesperson is p...

NetSuite is going to the market for its proposed initial public offering with high hopes: The company has upped its estimated price range for the second time this week. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said it expects its IPO target price to be between $19 to...

Linda LaBeau didn't know her rights as a credit-card holder. She did know she was getting constant calls from a collection agency for a debt she wasn't sure was hers. Angry, scared and frustrated, she asked The Watchdog several smart questions. We found some surprising answers. Turns out consumers h...

Genesys is expanding its feature set with the cash acquisition of Informiam, a customer service performance management software provider. The new addition will enhance the company's reporting and analytic capabilities. Financial terms of the acquisition of the privately held company were not release...

Several years ago when Salesforce.com burst onto the CRM scene, it was difficult to imagine how the upstart firm could make a dent in the space. At the time, the gorilla in the room was Siebel and the thought of an Internet-based application -- an experimental delivery mode then -- besting the deepl...

Cognos has wasted little time in rolling out an integration map for its newly acquired analytics best of breed vendor, Applix. The deal, which closed at the end of October, is bringing to Cognos financial performance management capabilities. The integration of the app will take place in three stages...

Pluris, a provider of multichannel marketing applications, has added a fourth product to its lineup with the release of its Marketing Optimization and Recommendation Engine. MORE packages advanced analytics, a recommendation engine and an optimization engine that allows users to make tailored produc...

Every year I write two columns that are a little different. The first, which is this one, is my attempt at quality control and I use it as much for sport as to assess how I did a year ago in predicting the events of the year now ending. You might think I would learn from this, but the second colum...

On Wednesday, CentricCRM, a developer of open source CRM software, will announce it is rebranding its application after revamping it and adding new functionality. The company also is changing its name to "Concursive." Now called "Concourse," suite 5.0 offers an integrated CRM, Web site creation, con...

One of the most complex areas of online advertising -- what happens when a prospective customer clicks on an ad -- ironically happens almost entirely outside of the customer's awareness. The ubiquitous dancing Santa, robot or alien that we see on so many mortgage refinancing ads actually is only the...

As technology collides with forces of globalization, contact centers and the executives who run them find themselves in the midst of five megatrends. These trends present unique opportunities for these executives to add strategic value to their business, reposition themselves within their organizati...

Salesforce.com has rolled out a service for its customers that allows them to share data, sources and leads in a social network. The service, which the company is not making available commercially, is a cross between a partner relationship management portal -- which Salesforce.com offers commerciall...