Archive

Before they contact a prospect, smart salespeople check the CRM system to see what the customer record says. That's what CRM is there for, from a sales perspective: to give sales the background information it needs to have the best chance at closing a sale. However, the picture of the prospect paint...

Zozi, which connects customers to activity-related adventures or trips -- say sailing lessons or rock-climbing tours -- rolled out a CRM system earlier this year that is an offshoot of an acquisition the startup made at the end of 2012. The name of the CRM system is "Zozi Advance," and it is a build...

I've been having so much fun lately that I may have missed something, but let me ask -- have we already reached the end of the customer experience trend? I think CX still has a lot of life in it, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment. "CX" is a nebulous term and idea, and its discussion lead...

Mobile marketers beware: A new ad format is poised to become very popular -- and there are questions whether the mobile ecosystem will be ready to handle it. That format is online ads. Of course, it is a channel that has been around for a while, and mobile sites have adapted to it. However, "it's re...

After several months in beta, SugarCRM and Colosa have made generally available a new Sugar module that lets users design business process workflows inside SugarCRM. The application, Colosa's flagship BPM and Workflow Suite called ProcessMaker, was launched into beta back in April, but the companies...

If you want glamour, status and prestige within your company, go out and get new customers. If you want to stay in business, specialize in keeping the ones you have happy and loyal. Customer retention isn't flashy, and it doesn't earn extra pats on the back from executives or big promotions -- which...

Apple's iPhone may frequently be viewed as the leader in the smartphone category, but it's actually two Samsung devices that got the highest scores in a recent smartphone customer satisfaction study from American Customer Satisfaction Index. Specifically, Samsung's Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II ti...

CBS viewers who get their broadcast TV service via Time Warner may have felt a little bit like the characters in summertime drama Under the Dome in the last 24 hours or so. Specifically, as part of a battle over retransmission fees, the cable giant on Monday briefly pulled CBS from its lineup in sev...

Social customer service has now become a key point of contact between brands and their customers. Consumers, particularly within the Millennial demographic, take to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks when they have a problem with a company. Sixty percent of 18-24 year olds go to social medi...

A subtext to the marketing automation explosion is analytics. Having a CRM system might make you wonder why marketing automation is needed at all, but the reasons boil down to analysis and improved data collection. Let me share some information from a new marketing study. First, the data: We asked m...

Businesses depend on their customers, and it would make sense that good customer service would translate into loyalty and sales, but high-tech vendors don't seem to have gotten the message. The average customer experience rating for tech vendors fell from 58 percent to 52 percent since last year, in...

It can be difficult enough to market to consumers through one channel, but trying to work across channels compounds that difficulty considerably. Enter Experian Marketing Services, which recently upgraded its cross-channel marketing platform with several new features. Experian regularly updates its ...

The case for SMS marketing is easy to make. It's cheap and it's easy. It can be far-reaching, given how many people carry cellphones now -- and did I mention that it's cheap? Still, there is a downside to SMS marketing. For starters, it can be very annoying to consumers, especially if the text isn't...

Sage Summit, held in Washington, D.C., this week, was a more upbeat event than it has been over the last two years. During that interval, the company has had the thankless task of telling its customers and partners that it was making big changes and that things would be better. The news was not alwa...

Zenmonics has announced mobileBanker, a tablet solution that lets bank staff interact with customers on the move by tapping into a bank's back end servers. Among its benefits: customer identification and authentication; the ability to serve customers outside the teller line; paperless processing; an...