Archive

The State of Texas has charged electronics retailer Radio Shack with violating state identity protection laws, claiming the company dumped thousands of customer records behind a store near Corpus Christi and possibly exposing consumers to identity theft. Radio Shack is not denying the transgression ...

Data analytics vendor Alterian announced Monday its acquisition of the contact optimization technology product Campaign Calculus 2.0 from The Customer Partnership. The product uses advanced algorithms to evaluate the financial impact of all of the possible permutations for contacting prospects acros...

When Wal-Mart imposed its seemingly -- to the suppliers at least -- draconian RFID mandate, it also held out the future promise that the cost of the technology would someday be quite affordable, perhaps as low as 5 cents per tag. That day hasn't come -- at least not yet. Currently, the cost of passi...

The stage is set for further growth in VoIP communications with technological advances, telecom market deregulation and a growing web of fiber optic and wireless networks. India is now recognized worldwide as a center for offshore call centers, but a range of companies in other emerging market count...

When Royal Caribbean tapped Steelcase Applied Research to help it outfit a new call center in Oregon, the cruise line didn't require any guidance on what chairs it wanted its reps to use. In fact, the company had given a great deal of thought to what might seem to outsiders to be the most basic of a...

Two things impressed me about Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release: the community portal and the influence of the IdeaExchange on the direction of the product. A lot of people point to the portal as the more significant and I suppose it is, but maybe only by a whisker. At the end of the day, each is...

Open source CRM vendor SugarCRM is adding service-related capabilities into its product line now that it has solidified its hold on marketing and analytics. The firm just released Project Management for its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines. In April, it will be announcing the av...

Access Commerce on Thursday released Cameleon EasyQuote for Salesforce.com's AppExchange, an on-demand sales quotation system that aims to provide salespeople with an easy-to-use interface for handling complex business needs. Cameleon EasyQuote allows users to work with complex quotation processes, ...

There is a dandy little market share war taking place right now in the compensation management sector. Vendors are making claims to uniqueness and superiority and trashing each other in ways that we haven't seen in a few years -- and it's great sport. Compensation management is one of the hotter ar...

Salesforce.com's Spring '07 release, specifically the AppSpace product, is being hailed as a quantum leap forward in functionality that will support users in fulfilling their corporate missions. AppSpace, which hasn't been activated as yet, is a new product that provides users with a place to engag...

Apptix on Monday announced Apptix Voice, its new hosted VoIP product aimed at small and medium-sized businesses looking for an integrated e-mail and phone solution. A provider of on-demand messaging and collaboration products, Apptix is offering the solution via a SaaS delivery model. It works with ...

In his keynote address at Microsoft's Convergence 2007 conference in San Diego last week, CEO Steve Ballmer included a preview of the company's upcoming Dynamics CRM application, code-named "Titan." The biggest change in Titan is its full multitenancy -- that is, it uses the same multitenant code ba...

As the saying goes: You can't change the weather -- but you can prepare for it. Recent, highly-publicized airline and product call center overflow problems have highlighted the serious and potentially humiliating problems that can occur when a call center is not sufficiently staffed to handle a cris...

SAP has ratcheted up its campaign to increase its middle market customer base with the rollout of several new applications. At the CeBIT trade fair now taking place in Hannover, Germany, the company introduced an enhanced All-In-One application that offers some 80 micro verticals and is componentize...

As business intelligence and analytics hit full stride this year, dashboards are becoming ubiquitous. Typically marketing, sales, operations and, increasingly, quality management departments are all creating their own. Each are populated with their own specific metrics of interest and key performanc...