Archive

Contact centers have been challenged the past year, most notably from labor shortages that have forced the industry into changing how it operates, how it staffs, and how it improves customer satisfaction and experience. In response, many in the industry are turning to different methods that help aut...

It's time -- past time, really -- to reevaluate sales force automation and maybe consider a new path. That's not as dire as it sounds though. We did a study recently in which we asked over 500 experienced sellers about everything from lead quality to support in the form of resources and even their m...

One bad consumer experience can cause a customer to stop using a product, which is why the customer journey revolution is taking center stage at smart businesses. While customer experience analytics can rescue businesses struggling to effectively manage their customer journey, real-time insights are...

Back in the day, never mind which one, software development was both easier and harder than it is now. The code you wrote was compiled and it ran. If you were a good programmer, you might have left comments in the code so that later developers could understand how the system was intended to work if ...

Today, we all need to be on platform-based CRM, and we need to become ninjas at platform-based application development and deployment. This especially goes for the newest tools on the platforms which include an array of analytics, machine learning, and voice assistants.

Many vendors are missing a goldmine in personalizing customer experience because they are not thinking "inside" the box. A proprietary combination of software and on-demand printers from marketing automation firm UnDigital personalizes the unboxing experience. This relatively new technology is turni...

CRM has become big enough to generate a significant shadow. When an idea like putting customers in the center of our universe takes hold, we see ripple effects everywhere in the culture. Nobody wants to be in favor of something else. But other times, CRM gets blowback from new trends. Such is the ca...

Salesforce held its Dreamforce NYC on schedule in early December, which you might have missed because of other news like Omicron and the looming chaos of the holidays. What was so interesting was how un-CRM-like it was.

It's okay to give ourselves kudos for CRM's resiliency over the course of the pandemic. We did a heck of a job keeping most of the balls in the air. Oracle, Salesforce, and many other CRM vendors continued innovating for the pandemic, but they also began innovating systems for what happens afterward...

The new scalable CRM bundle helps startups personalize marketing to generate pipelines, deliver omnichannel service, and grow faster at a price point that is easy to deploy and manage.

Sales managers and their managers have had to make peace with the reality that they might not be able to get reps to use technology. But methodology alone or with technology is a more-or-less lost cause. Fortunately, the technology has improved consistently over the last two decades. Even more fortu...

A new Forrester survey commissioned by Capgemini, Salesforce, and MuleSoft reveals companies face the same recurring customer experience (CX) struggles. They lack an integrated single source of truth for customer data and are strapped with subpar personalization capabilities.

Surround strategy is the antithesis of rip and replace. Rather than replacement, a business can move parts of its workload from some workhorse system, say ERP, to Zoho -- where things like pre-built reports and Zia, an AI-based digital assistant, can help business users interrogate data stored on th...

This is not good. A new report commissioned by Replicant tells a story of customers frustrated when service fails or is way too slow. That's not new -- and Replicant is not the only vendor to ring the alarm. For many years Oracle has reminded vendors that one bad service encounter is enough to make ...

When a complex need arises, customers expect to be connected to a well-prepared agent who can quickly resolve the situation. That fix must be applied in a way that leaves both the customer and agent feeling great about the outcome. Fortunately, the technologies now exist that allow contact centers t...