Archive

I have sympathy for customer service representatives -- really, I do. I know that customers can be ignorant, demanding and ill-mannered. On the other hand, CSRs should be trained to deal with bad-tempered customers. Also, CSRs should be trained to avoid provoking pleasant and agreeable customers to ...

Several news stories have provided interesting insights into the Black Friday phenomenon and into customer behavior. One indicates sales slipped by 0.5 percent from the same period last year, despite sharp discounting and stores opening on Thanksgiving. Another story shows how the Black Friday pheno...

AgilOne has rolled out an enhanced version of its predictive marketing platform with new tools, as well as improvements to fine-tune its forecasting capabilities, said CMO Dominique Levin. The focus of the upgrade was to automate even more of the analytics and subsequent decision-making by users. "U...

I am a nerd with a goofy hobby -- I build plastic model airplanes. However, that hobby affords me a view of customer relationship issues in an interesting and intimate way. Most of the time, the vendors in this space get things right, realizing theirs is a niche industry and their customers really a...

When DiGiorno tweeted, "You had pizza. #WhyIStayed," Twitter lit up with criticism of the brand. The hashtag "WhyIStayed" is associated with domestic violence. In response to the firestorm, DiGiorno peppered its Twitter feed with apology after apology, all of them essentially like this: "A million a...

Salesforce.com on Monday launched App Hub, an upgrade to its Desk.com customer service platform. App Hub features more than 50 apps for a wide range of functions including e-commerce, email marketing, telephony and text messaging. Partner apps available with Desk.com include Harvest, JIRA, MailChimp...

Evian ran a promotion to give away bottled water during August in New York. People had only to tweet using the hashtag #evianBottleService to get free water delivered to them on the streets. To pull it off, Evian coordinated its social listening efforts and its marketing strategy. "Social listening ...

CRM has been around for a long time now -- more than 25 years. Amazingly, many businesses, including large businesses with revenue in excess of US$100 million, still operate without it. That's amazing, because to many business leaders, CRM has become table stakes when it comes to creating a software...

There appears to be a new trend emerging in the enterprise mobile engagement space, according to OpenMarket. Increasingly, its enterprise customers are adapting its platform to use SMS in new ways, said Tim Fujita Yuhas, the company's director of product management. Sometimes those uses are obvious ...

The idea of an omnipotent software platform and the evolution of customer science go hand in hand. Customer science is the upshot of my idea that we're in the process of converting from random acts of CRM in the front office to a more structured, efficient and predictable approach to conducting fron...

With millions of active monthly users, Instagram is a prolific, lively social media community. Businesses want to get in on the Instagram game in order to boost marketing and enhance customer relations. It might not be immediately obvious to some businesses, however, just how they can get involved w...

There are lots of scary things out there -- killer viruses, Earth-smashing meteors, the possibility of yet another Real Housewives show. But those are easy to dismiss and push to the farthest corner of the back of your mind. What's really distressing? Numbers. Numbers are really scary -- specificall...

Salesforce.com has unveiled Salesforce1 Lightning Connect, a new component for its Lightning Platform as a Service for mobile developers, which it introduced last month. Lightning Connect, which is available immediately, is an integration tool that moves data in real time from back-end legacy syst...

Don't get me wrong -- I think very highly of CRM. I've been making a living writing about it for almost a decade, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who asks about it. Still, covering CRM is a little bit like writing an honest biography of a complex person. Yes, there were moments when your...

Showrooming, the bane of retailers, is the consumer practice of visiting a brick-and-mortar store to test out merchandise -- say a new TV or electronic gadget -- and then buying the same model online at a cheaper price. Now there's "webrooming" -- a new buzzword for a trend that's been gaining momen...