Archive

Insightly has announced the availability of Insightly Marketing, which integrates marketing, sales and project management into a single platform to support dynamic customer journeys. The company also released the results of the Insightly Marketing Study it conducted last month probing trends and cha...

From e-commerce to banking applications to healthcare systems -- and everything in between -- if it's digital, users expect it to work at every interaction, and on every possible platform and operating system. However, despite the need to provide a digital experience that delights, research suggests...

Salesforce continues to grow, albeit a little slower than in prior quarters. At least that's my reading of a $4.0 billion quarter that's 22 percent better than the same quarter a year ago. I am used to seeing growth percentages in the high 20s but I am not concerned about a slowdown. I don't know if...

The business-to-consumer shopper experience has undergone a seismic shift in the past few years, thanks in large part to new technology. Improved personalization enables consumers faced with a vast field of purchase options to select the brand that best meets their needs and desires. Business-to-bus...

In a world where information is expected to be free, G2 just made its research reports available to the public gratis. Sure, you have to be a registered user, but how hard is that? From what I know so far, these are interesting reports, but they may not be the last word because they're primarily hig...

What's the big deal, I thought? Last week Salesforce announced it was paying in the range of $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware, a private field service automation and workforce management company. At first, I attributed it to a slow summer news cycle when many people in the industry are off trout fish...

These days, what business isn't pushing to become more customer-centric? And for good reason --88 percent of businesses view customer experience as a competitive differentiator. A customer-centric culture is a source of long-term strategic competitive advantage. Culture is the one aspect of a busine...

E-commerce has exploded since Amazon and eBay were founded in 1995. Today, e-commerce is part of everyday life. By 2023, retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. are projected to surpass $735 billion. Even industries like food, healthcare and banking, which previously were dominated by offline transactio...

Oracle just published some commissioned research that gives us insights into both CRM generally and the times we live in. A study of more than 1,100 people across several generations found the following: Almost half of consumers have blacklisted a brand as the result of a bad experience; more than o...

The contact center uses familiar benchmarks to determine if a call, chat or email is successful or not. Call metrics such as net promoter score, handle time, and amount of silence are correlated with positive or negative outcomes. However, insights from speech analytics technology prove that these m...

It was bound to happen. Salesforce was going to China at some point, and it announced that action this week saying it was partnering with Alibaba. There are so many ways to read this, but I don't have the filters to resist comparing the announcement to what Robin Williams once said about cocaine: "C...

CRM systems are the lifeblood of many businesses, and the volume of customer data within them keeps growing as companies digitize more processes. That data often is not being used to its full potential, beyond basic reporting on sales metrics and marketing campaigns. With the advent of mainstream ML...

Technology has enabled and empowered today's customers and as a result, they are totally in control of the sales process. This means that the quality of the customer experience is a determining factor in whether a sales organization succeeds or fails. Consider, for instance, that more than half of c...

I've been spending time this summer barnstorming Barnes & Noble bookstores in New England signing copies of my book on repairing climate change, The Age of Sustainability. These were my first visits to bookstores as a seller, not a customer -- and I previously hadn't visited a store in a while. ...

Cloud marketing company Signpost has raised $52 million in new funding to "increase the scale of our business and invest in our technology," CEO Stuart Wall announced. The company's Software as a Service platform for small and mid-sized businesses consists of artificial intelligence-based customer r...