Archive

The hoopla over vertical market or industry CRM might be eclipsing a similar move that does the same kind of thing but with less fanfare. In the end, we might be discussing two iterations and just a difference of degree. The proliferation of CRM development platforms by companies like Microsoft, Ora...

We should start discussing what's beyond CRM. I chose the word "beyond" advisedly. CRM is far from dead or even in decline, so "after" would be completely incorrect. However, CRM already has changed so much that it may be time to rethink it. Also, many of the tangential technologies that have turboc...

In Salesforce's recent revenue announcement, it described the vast majority of its nonprofessional services revenues as "subscription and support." Proserv revenues were appropriately small, at $224 million, while subscription and support was $3.17 billion, or 26 percent more than a year earlier. Ni...

Nurturing customer relationships has always been and always will be fundamental for company success. However, as the world becomes increasingly connected and more communications become instant, it arguably is more vital now than ever before.

Shopping: It's not what it once was. Forget the long drive to the mall and countless hours of browsing. Customers now simply log in from the comfort of their own home to have the world at their fingertips. The massive uptake of e-commerce is an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior, expectations ...

Today's customer feedback world is extremely complex with data coming from a variety of sources. With the growing number of cross-functional teams and silos within an organization, leaders have been finding it increasingly difficult to capture the full 360-degree view of the customer to drive true c...

Shopping: It's not what it once was. Forget the long drive to the mall and countless hours of browsing. Customers now simply log in from the comfort of their own home to have the world at their fingertips. The massive uptake of e-commerce is an unprecedented shift in consumer behavior, expectations ...

How do they really know? That's the question that immediately comes to mind in reviewing the top-level data from Voxpro's recent survey of customers and their relationship with chatbots. The data show that 68 percent of consumers haven't used chatbots to contact a brand. About 1,000 people answered ...

I don't have to tell you how difficult it is to find and attract customers online. With millions and millions of businesses all vying for attention, the Internet has quickly turned into a very crowded place. But, believe it or not, there's opportunity in all that clutter, and if you approach your ma...

The gap between B2B buyers and sellers has been growing. More than 70 percent of B2B buyers preferred to wait to engage a seller until the latter demonstrated a clear understanding of its needs, a CSO Insights survey found. Nearly 58 percent of buyers saw little difference among sellers; more than 1...

Gamification is one of the hottest trends in the business world. Incorporating game elements can be a great way to motivate and engage customers and employees alike -- using an activity that has appealed to humankind since its beginnings. "Humans have been playing games for thousands of years. Some ...

Before I was a parent, I was a youth leader. As individuals, teens had unique personalities, skills and stories, but one thing that was universal was the effect that parental communication had on them. Whether it was a criticism, a suggestion, or merely a bit of helpful information, the teens tended...

The conventional sales funnel exceeded its usefulness a long time ago, roughly when the Internet gave us the ability to gather our own information about vendors, products and services. Without having to contact a salesperson, individuals and businesses could eliminate the middleman. The result was s...

Until fairly recently, industry pundits had all but written off voice as a customer engagement channel. Considering there were more than 100 billion inbound calls via mobile devices alone in 2018, the past year has proven them wrong. There has been an incredible resurgence of voice as the new UI of ...

Data science has become mission-critical to many enterprises. Internet Advertising Bureau projections indicate that companies in the United States will spend billions on third-party audience data in 2018 and even more on third-party solutions to use that data as they move toward becoming model-drive...