Archive

IBM on Monday announced new capabilities for its Connections business social network platform. The functions will let users customize communities by role or function, manage files with personal subfolders, and remain productive on the go with polls and surveys for mobile devices.

We're almost a quarter century removed from the coining of the phrase "sales and marketing alignment," a concept that dates back another 30 years. Businesses have been wrestling with the idea of coordinating two teams of people with different skill sets, ideas, personalities and goals ever since the...

Sprint plans to lay off about 2,500 employees, including five vice presidents. About 2,000 of the cuts are in customer service.

Whether you call it "industry CRM," "vertical CRM" or something else, the concept is gaining altitude. Not that it's new or ever been gone, but today's vertical CRM is different -- a constellation of quantitatively and qualitatively different and better CRM solutions than we've ever seen. Vendors li...

Almost a decade ago, the first edition of this list was tough to compile. There simply weren't that many CRM blogs that were consistent (we set the annual minimum number of posts at a mere eight), vendor-agnostic and -- most important of all -- high quality. That number has increased over the years,...

Last year, uber-analyst Esteban Kolsky and I did a research project to better understand cloud computing's uptake and related issues, and last week Financial Force, our sponsor, made the results public. The findings are interesting to me because they reveal a more or less typical adoption cycle for ...

Demandware and eBay Enterprise on Monday announced an alliance to develop a fully enabled omnichannel commerce solution that will provide integrated access to Demandware's Commerce Cloud platform and eBay Enterprise's suite of back-end and fulfillment technologies and services. The solution will let...

What makes a great CRM blog? Generally, the same things that make a great CRM implementation: good planning, thoughtful responses to a changing market, consistent posting, the right technology, and people with the right personality. It's the classic "people, processes and technology" trilogy, really...

I spent part of last week listening to presentations about the customer of the future, and of course it made me think. As usual, I didn't think in a straight line. As you've heard from me before, customers are still the human beings that walked out of the ice age 10,000 years ago or even the Cro-Mag...

Ford on Monday announced FordPass, a platform focusing on enhancing the customer experience. FordPass includes a Marketplace offering mobility services; 24x7 access to FordGuides, which are personal assistants to help customers with mobility challenges; membership loyalty rewards; and FordHubs -- se...

The Taxpayer Advocate Service on Wednesday released its annual report to Congress. Among other things, the report warns that a five-year plan to revamp how the Internal Revenue Service operates may result in a substantial reduction in telephone and face-to-face interactions with taxpayers. "Based on...

I've been trying to analyze modern rewards programs and customer loyalty recently for a project. It's a complex issue and so it is tricky to tease apart -- nothing like trying to defuse a bomb, but intellectually challenging for sure. At the heart of the issue is a body of research that says rewards...

Amazon UK recently introduced a monthly payment plan -- Pay Monthly -- for customers who purchase products it directly sells and ships. The offer doesn't extend to third-party retailers' products on its site. Customers whose order, including shipping and taxes, totals Pounds 400 are eligible for the...

At this time of the year, there's a great clamoring among the business publishing class for predictions. That is partly because prediction stories are considered easy to write, and once they're done the staff can go celebrate the holidays while their publication continues to deliver content. However...

Temkin Group on Tuesday predicted 2016 will be the year of emotion. That's one of 11 customer experience trends to watch for in the coming year, managing partner Bruce Temkin wrote in a blog post. "Emotion is the component of customer experience that has the largest impact on loyalty, but it is also...