Archive

Customer events have replaced trade shows as the big-spend item in many software vendors' and analyst and advisory firms' marketing budgets. Implicit in this shift of spending is the precision possible for targeting CEOs and CIOs with relevant content. The challenge however is getting these senior ...

Aspect Software has announced it is supporting the emerging open source Internet protocol for PBX -- the Asterisk Business Edition -- with a software package that includes the Asterisk Business Edition license; SIP phones; application servers and IP gateways; interoperability with Aspect contact cen...

Personal banking is called retail banking in the biz because traditionally consumer banking occurred in a building on Main Street, Anytown, U.S.A. The bank sat among department and hardware stores, coffee and flower shops. In the eyes of consumers, it was another downtown retailer. But in the mid-1...

You don't need to go far to see how different the 00s are from the 90s, just take a look at selling. Ahh, the 90s, lots of people in sales tell me you didn't make sales calls in the 90s, it was more like making appointments to take orders. Gurus of selling like Jim Dickie of CSO Insights, reported...

Oracle has given Siebel customers an idea of what measures need to be taken for their existing applications to work with Oracle Fusion Middleware. On Tuesday, it rolled out its road map to certify Siebel's business applications and analytics products on the Oracle middleware platform. Oracle has pre...

Acquisition of existing enterprises offers the quickest, safest route to entering new markets and expanding rapidly within existing markets. The alternative route is organic growth through traditional sales and marketing efforts. We begin here by recognizing the limits of conventional sales and mar...

ACT is offering users new collaboration and productivity functionality with the addition of five companies to its Add On partner network. Launched in August 2004, the program grew to include 25 featured products in the first year. It currently includes 61 add ons. The new partners announced Monday, ...

Over the last several weeks, Kimberly-Clark has shipped approximately 100,000 cases of Huggies brand diapers and similar products to Wal-Mart using Gen2 RFID tags -- the initial step in a full deployment to all customers using this technology, the company said. Gen2 is the newest RFID protocol avail...

For retailers, there is nothing more sacred, outside of the holiday shopping season, than a successful multichannel operation. Same-store multichannel buyers -- that is, those who shop both in a retail store and online -- spend 14 percent more annually than single channel buyers do, according to Jup...

Oracle has rolled out its CRM On Demand Release 10, upgrading the customization features, deepening list management functionality and introducing additional vertical expertise. Typically, releases of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications tend to be more frequent than enterprise software upgrades...

Several CRM and BI vendors have announced support for Google's new addition to its enterprise search feature, OneBox for Enterprise. The list includes Cognos, NetSuite, Oracle, Salesforce.com and SAS Institute. Google has released a number of tools aimed at the enterprise in recent months, some of w...

Kana has updated its knowledge management and customer service suite, IQ 9.1, with new workflow capabilities that give users more control over content translation. Other upgrades provide more precise ways to document changes to the knowledgebase for compliance purposes. A new workflow automatically ...

According to a February JupiterResearch survey, 59 percent of small businesses that generate between US$100,000 and $5 million in annual revenue and 74 percent of those making in excess of $5 million are heavy users of mobile phones. Whether they work on their own or have 100 employees, more than ha...

The trend of Americans and Canadians buying call centers in India is driven by the low cost of these facilities and by the speed with which buyers can begin using them. The first article in this series focuses on the advantages of buying a facility with less than 100 seats in Bangalore, primarily ...

Paul English, a Massachusetts-based software engineer turned customer service "guru," has become famous nearly overnight for his "dial zero for a human" automated phone system revolt. Judging from the widespread phenomenon and national attention, this is a customer service movement long overdue. H...