Archive

Respect is a vital ingredient in any mutually beneficial relationship, and that's never truer than in the case of business-to-business buyers and sellers. The most elementary way a seller shows a commitment to a healthy customer relationship is through an ongoing display of respect. That doesn't mea...

Fox News journalist John Stossel, who recently underwent an operation for lung cancer, on Wednesday wrote that although New York-Presbyterian Hospital's medical care is excellent, "the hospital's customer service stinks." Doctors "keep me waiting for hours, and no one bothers to call or email to say...

Fusion this week launched Contact360, an enterprise cloud contact center solution developed in collaboration with Technology for Business, the long-time partner it acquired earlier this month. "Fusion will be offering a clear migration path to the cloud for TFB's Fortune 500 enterprise and governmen...

Zuora, the company that made its bones in subscription billing and payments, held its annual Subscribed user meeting last week and staked out some new turf. It always has been focused on the back office, but its latest messaging included elements of the front office. Perhaps it's no surprise given C...

Shopify on Wednesday announced that it has agreed to purchase Kit CRM, whose Kit chatbot automatically sends out marketing text messages for online stores. It also lets businesses run targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, make recommendations based on store activities, post on social media and use...

There's an interesting connection between customer relationships in subscription businesses and loyalty, according to a recent article by Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. It had particular resonance for me, since I just wrote a book about customer loyalty myself. My research is full of old-style approaches to c...

Marketing will shape the customer experience by 2020, based on a recent Marketo study of nearly 500 chief marketing officers and senior marketing executives worldwide. The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted the research on behalf of Marketo. Eighty-percent of the respondents believed their depart...

MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce. The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words. "With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer custome...

Remember when your mother used to yell up the stairs to get you to turn your music down? Sometimes, in the age before sensitivity awareness, your dad would do the yelling and he'd substitute noise for music. Ah, the good old days. Too bad they aren't here right now yelling at vendors. ConsumerAffair...

Despite the numbers that show how lucrative retention is in an increasingly subscription-driven economy, the emphasis has been on new customer acquisition. That is still true, according to a recent study. Forty-two percent of the firms surveyed said they were increasing their budgets for customer ac...

IBM on Thursday announced that it has agreed to buy Bluewolf, a Salesforce system integrator. It reportedly will pay $200 million. Bluewolf will provide cloud consulting and implementation capabilities as part of IBM Global Business Services' Interactive Experience practice. The aim is to deliver di...

Virtually every CPQ -- configuration, price and quote -- software vendor on the planet has a credible solution for the processes from which the category gets its name. That's the good news. Unfortunately, the world has moved on. Most CPQ is effective for helping promote transactions, especially the ...

Companies have shifted their analytics efforts from consumer-focused processes to operations, according to the results of a survey released last week by Capgemini. Seventy percent of 600 executives at companies in the United States, Europe and China said they focused more on operational analysis, an...

For more than 50 years, the IT industry has followed a well-known script associated with emerging and evolving paradigms: First a product or category is introduced, then it gains wide market acceptance (or dies on the vine), followed by a long period when vendors and customers seek out ever more eff...

IBM last week announced its acquisition of Optevia, a Software as a Service systems integrator specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions. It will become part of IBM Global Business Services. Optevia specializes in the public sector market in the UK, where it is based. Its focus is on emergenc...