Archive

In-application features have been all about revenue so far, but as the technology evolves and mobile becomes ever more entrenched in consumers' psyches, the in-app phenomenon will likely spread to other forms of customer outreach as well, including messaging. First, though, let's talk about the mone...

Constant Contact has rolled out enhancements to its platform, beefing up functionality in its reporting tools, customer tracking and reporting, and mobility options, as well as in a library tool designed to make storing and using content easier for users. The upgrades are a culmination of a lot of e...

There is a significant performance gap between companies that fully apply best customer service practices and those that are inconsistent in their approach, according to a new report from the Miller Heiman Research Institute. There was a gap of 13 percent between the two groups of companies in perf...

On Wednesday Groupon announced that it has added new CRM features to its Breadcrumb point-of-sale app with the potential to drive traffic and improve customer relations for Groupon merchants. Customer tracking, for instance, is one of the new features now included in Breadcrumb, which was acquired b...

I took a trip in the Wayback machine last week when I attended DataWeek at the invitation of Dun & Bradstreet. As you might recall, D&B is a data company that collects copious amounts of information about individuals and firms and then sells it for use in filling out profiles for business pu...

With so much riding on the holiday season for retailers, marketers pull out all the stops. This year, the latest ad technologies are being put to the test in the mobile realm. Retailers need to have a landing page optimized for mobile, and they need to prepare for an onslaught of visitors, suggested...

Microsoft has topped the Reputation Institute's Global CSR RepTrak 100 Study for the second year in a row. The institute surveyed 55,000 consumers worldwide about their attitudes toward the reputations of companies in terms of corporate social responsibility. Google, which was No. 2 last year, fell ...

The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld's third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I'd been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle's C...

There are many reasons marketers today are gearing up their mobile strategies for the holiday season, and not all of them are as obvious as one might think. Yes, revenue and competition are of course key factors, but in this Internet era, so is a third: Namely, a proactive, aggressive mobile CRM and...

Imagine you're walking down a city street heading for a vegan restaurant that you've heard good things about. You get to the address only to discover it has gone out of business. Hungry and disappointed, you pull out your smartphone and wail to the Twitterverse, "Veggie Delight is closed! I'm starvi...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

Oracle has upgraded its Customer Experience cloud-based application with enhancements throughout the platform, including the sales, marketing and service modules, the company announced on Wednesday at its Oracle OpenWorld event. "Organizations need to be able to easily establish the operational syst...

Like any major trade show, OpenWorld has been in planning for a long time. However, this OpenWorld might be the most planned show of its kind ever, because in addition to the extravaganza taking place in the Moscone Center, many of the hotels in the area and even in closed-off streets, an important ...

The holiday season is upon us; even those uninitiated in the ways and means of retail can see it in the Halloween decorations and candy that are now so plentiful on store shelves. For the initiated -- that is, anyone who expects to make a buck off of the holiday shoppers this year -- not only is the...

Commence earlier this month debuted version 5.5 of its CRM application with key enhancements including a new internal chat system, new Microsoft Word and calendar integrations, and a click-to-dial feature on mobile phones. Commence provides an array of CRM tools, including salesforce features and, f...