Archive

Not long ago, if a company wanted to outsource non-core operations -- such as contact center or back office processes -- India was the locale to choose. End of story. That was then, though. Over the last few years, markets around the world -- as well as the outsourcing industry itself -- have evolve...

Software systems -- from off-the-shelf applications to enterprise suites -- have become easier to use and implement, consultant Stephen Kerr is the first to admit. That relative ease of implementation is obvious from the end-user's perspective, at any rate. Does that mean that systems integration of...

The service revolution in CRM -- and, in fact, throughout customer-facing strategies -- is well underway in many companies. The reason the remainder of the industry doesn't see it yet is because many CRM vendors' responses to the revolution are so slow that they make lagging economic indicators loo...

Loyalty Lab, an on-demand CRM application for consumer brands, has introduced Loyalty 2.0, an upgraded product to help retailers and grocery stores incorporate e-commerce channels into their first-generation loyalty programs, and to better segment their customers. It is part of the summer 2006 relea...

The idea of the customer ecosystem is a strong one, and I believe we'll be hearing about it for the foreseeable future. The customer ecosystem is only one half of the story, in my opinion. The other half is something I call the "sales web," and the two fit together rather neatly if you know how to...

Wincor Nixdorf, a German-based provider of IT applications for the banking and retail industries, has introduced its eServices platform in the United States for the first time. Bits and pieces of the application, which connects Wincor Nixdorf service management with customers via an electronic netw...

As senior director of product marketing for the identity practice at Sun Microsystems, Rob Beauchamp remembers -- and it was not that long ago -- when integration was considered a tactical process with the objective of knitting together systems and applications as quickly as possible. To be sure, th...

Earlier this year, IBM announced that its joint sales revenues with mid-market independent software vendors (ISVs) reached US$1 billion worldwide. This is just one measure of the success IBM has realized in the SMB partner strategy it launched in 2002, finds a new report by Access Markets Internatio...

Global shipments of scanners that read wireless tags used to track products in business supply chains climbed 14 percent in this year's first quarter compared to the same period a year ago, according to figures released Wednesday by ABI Research, of Oyster Bay, N.Y. The research firm also revealed t...

Increasingly, healthcare and financial services firms are investigating contact center applications that offer biometric security features -- specifically voice authentication -- as a way to meet new regulatory demands, according to one company active in this area. "The speaker verification market h...

For many companies, there is an uncomfortable truth that even with CRM systems in place, one big gaping hole comes up again and again in customer experience: it's the nagging issue of saving customers time. Does your CRM system really respect your customer's time, rather than your sales person's tim...

FrontRange has upgraded its HEAT Service and Support, a help desk and external customer support tool, for the first time since the beginning of last year, excluding the handful of patch versions the company has issued since then. This version, release 8.4, focuses on improvements to the user interfa...

When designing a Web page, where exactly should one place the icon to let the consumer know Live Chat is available? On the home page? In the service section? Should that icon be flashing? What color should it be? Believe or not, a group of executives spent at least half an hour of earnest conversati...

A wireless expert I met on a flight to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago told me that more than 58 percent of people don't even know the brand of cell phone they use, and it made me wonder what else we don't know about wireless. More important, is that a good or a bad thing? I usually loath splitting ...

Governments are turning to private sector techniques -- namely benchmarking -- to ensure that their back-office processes meet industry performance standards, according to a new study by Accenture. The resulting savings are, at least in theory, being applied to constituent-facing processes. "We know...